Man Woman (Unfinished)

Hynek Alt and Aleksandra Vajd, are not solely a Czech-Slovenian collaborative artistic team within the medium of photography, they are aswell a couple in life. They were in charge of the workshop course titled Photographic Author's Book in 2002 /2003 at Famu, Prague, where they completed their master's degrees in photography as well. From September 2004 they are ready to spend a yearlong research and studying period in the USA, being recipients of the prestigious Fullbright scholarship. Alt and Vajd display in their CV's an impressive number of solos' shows and group projects with a remarkable list of awards, recognition and collaborations, and they are just in their thirties.

In their new series titled Man Woman (Unfinished) some precise conceptual "takes" persist throughout all the photographs. Man Woman (Unfinished) - what is about? Although being photographers and therefore standing mostly behind the camera, Alt and Vajd are now taking also the place in front of it. They are entering the space until now reserved to all sorts of models and objects (from their body parts to a proper father and re-photographed image, etc.), responding in such a way to urban life's demands of being simultaneously voyeurs and exhibitionists. They are providing challenging views on what kind of implications is subjected the medium of photography when caught within such schizoid contrapuntal relation as being simultaneously the photographer and the model (being a master behind the camera and/or a slave of it, adjusting, adorning a proper body for it). When this schizoid contrapuntal relation is subsumed only in one person that is moreover the photographer itself, then we witness to a process profoundly rethought by another photographer as well, Michael Ashkin. In Untitled /Experience of Place/ (2003), edited by Gregor Neurer, Ashkin stated: "Photography provokes the suspicion that it merely reproduces the world. Roland Barthes once called photography a 'language without a code.' While photographing, I become aware of the opposite problem: rather than a world, I reproduces the codes of my perception, habitual and more vast that I can imagine."

Victor Burgin, in his essay entitled "Newton's Gravity" which appeared in the anthology The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography (1990) edited by Carol Squires, stated that by entering the model's space in photography, the photographer (Helmut Newton) in a sense took the model's space and identified with it. It is why, as Susan Sontag argued in her classic book On Photography (1979), the camera "intrudes, trespasses, distorts, exploits" and etc. what is photographed. She referred to several aspects of processes of photographic appropriation and distortion, which are actual in this context again: "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed, as the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of ... encouraging what is going on to keep on happening." A situation where, quoting Sontag again, "all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment."

And what is going on /here/ to keep on happening? We witness to Alt and Vajd displaying of their intimacy as a thoroughly artificial performative gesture in front of the camera that leads to estrangements of their bodies, transforming them in spectral "others." To this is of crucial importance the systematic construction (or better to say vanishing) of (a located) space within photography, also being the result of a constant exposure of the big divide between sight and the gaze.

Alt and Vajd subject freely and consciously themselves to a process of detachment, or better to say estrangement in their photographs. They want to be strangers to each other and to ourselves, mediated in their intimacy, seeing themselves as being something, somebody completely artificial and constructed, or as Ashkin would say, they are perfectly in harmony with a proper self only when posing for the camera, while reproducing the codes of their perception of proper selves to us, that are habitual and more vast that we can imagine.

In 1975 Christian Metz argued that through identifying with the gaze of the camera, the viewer, that it is in the case of Man Woman (Unfinished) also the photographer itself (looking at himself or herself in the photographs), re-enacts what the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan called "the mirror stage," a stage at which looking into the mirror allows the infant to see itself for the first time as other, providing therefore a significant step in ego formation. Each photograph by Alt and Vajd creates a double of the self, a situation that Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins define as "a second figure that can be examined more closely than the original - a double that can also be alienated from the self - taken away, as a photograph can be, to another place." And what else is photography than precisely this double that is alienated from the self, anyway. Timothy Druckrey stated that Slavoj Zizek, while working on the interpretation of the film The Matrix, made a considerable contribution to rethink the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality, developing a conclusion that this network is ultimately the Thing in-itself that is nothing else than the gaze. Indeed, Druckrey argued: "the camera frequently enables us to look at people whom we would never otherwise see at all. In a very literal sense, the camera turns the depicted person into an object, distancing viewer and viewed." With Man Woman (Unfinished) we find ourselves in a vertiginous circularity and transposition of relations toward photography, the viewed is already the viewer itself that poses for the camera eye and trigger it at the same time.

The things are even more complicated as the double position emphasized here is not only between the photographer and (it)self, as mediated through its proper photographs, but the double of relations, of connections and intimacy, lead us toward those that persist in-between the love couple as well. The story of the gaze that was developed in the 1970s, to describe the big divide between the eye and the gaze, was the result of analysis of women bodies in front of the camera, bodies that turn almost always into objects of desire and control. In most of the cases the process is done through viewpoints of male viewers. The woman is a great body and the object of desire, therefore caught in the process of constant reification. In Man Woman (Unfinished) all is re-inverted and re-intensified, as it is possible to say: the man is "the body" and the object of desire as well. In such a way striving for desire toward the other, the possession or better to say the control of a proper body and of the one near me within the medium of photography is put on move here radically differently.

I stated up that these doubles take the self to another place. What is this (an)other place here? In Alt's and Vajd's photographs those are places that are not possible to be identified at all, something in-between intimate locations and general nature situation or just a sky, or a fragment of an outdoor place. Even more the image of the body is defined in most of the cases by a wired correspondence of two unities in the space, for example as in one of the Alt's photographs when his body is defined by a point-by-point correspondence with the tree. Jacques Lacan reminds us that an image is anything but something that is defined precisely by a point-by-point correspondence of two unities in space. To obtain an image of something we do not have to rely on light or to operate in the domain of the visible. All that is required is, as re-formulated by Lev Manovich, the correspondence between the points of the object being imaged and the points on the image. This is why we can think about Alt's and Vajd's photographs as persistently developing spaces that can be solely imagined, and not seen, and where the bodies of Alt and Vajd acquire almost spectral intensities. Their bodies are as spectral units, floating in-between spaces, not in space, nor out of it. Their bodies are suspended, precisely as it is in one of the photographs, where Aleksadra Vajd's body is just caught on the tree, in-between the branches, as a puppet, without flesh and bones, frozen in the air.

Such intensities of spectrally depicted bodies within photographs thus evoke Deleuze and Guattari's "body without organs," through which "only intensities pass and circulate." The body without organs, according to Deleuze and Guattari, "is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass; but on the contrary, it causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatial that is intensive, lacking extension."

Similarly I will state about Man Woman (Unfinished) we cannot get a clue about spaces here, the extension of spaces around the exposed bodies is minimal, instead we get intensities of looking, gazing, blurring, decomposing and vanishing. Man Woman (Unfinished) uses theories of the 1970s and display them intelligently and profoundly here, retrieving, re-composing and challenging them.

Marina Grzinic