J.B. about men floating in the ait, 2015 © Julia Borissova
Mark Alice Durant’s latest book, Running, Falling, Flying, Floating, Crawling, published by his imprint Saint Lucy Books aggregates more than 50 contemporary, historical and vernacular photographers who use representations of the body as symbols of uncertainty, distress, humor, and dissonance. In Tabitha Soren's Dave, it’s terror – a man runs across a New York City street looking up in fear. For those who were alive at the time, we might conjure 9/11 imagery. A nation at war in constant panic.
In William Lamson’s Sublunar No. 23, it’s fun, conceptual, and performative. A group of white-suited maybe-astronauts, maybe-daredevils bounce a helmeted body off a makeshift trampoline into a deep black sky beckoning viewers to maybe laugh, maybe smile, and maybe scratch our heads. In Rania Matar’s Alae, Khiyam Lebanon, a Lebanese Muslim woman sits in a stream, almost cradling it, almost sleeping.
Yet it's clear she is collaborating with the photographer to convey calm and vulnerability.
Durant invited some of photography's most prominent curators, poets, and critics to respond to these images and offer context and meaning apart from the series to which they belong. It’s a book you’ll want to sit with for a while, one that will continue to evolve as we understand these images as stand-ins for an increasingly confusing and uncertain world.
I spoke with Durant to learn more about his thinking on this thoughtfully existential project.
Jon Feinstein in conversation with Mark Alice Durant
Kristen in Lake Megunticook, 2014 © Cig Harvey
Jon Feinstein: This book is an expanded version of an exhibition concept that included work from Tabitha Soren, William Lamson, Lilly McElroy, and John Divola:
How did you come up with the original idea and why those artists specifically?
Mark Alice Durant: I don’t consider myself a curator by any means, but I have had the opportunity to curate a handful of exhibitions over the years including ‘Some Assembly Required: Collage in Post-War American Culture,’ ‘Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal,’ and ‘Notes on Monumentality.’ All of which assembled historical, modern, and contemporary artworks to explore/illuminate ideas that I was interested in. Exhibitions can be immersive experiences that communicate ideas sensually; being in the same room as an image or object is a fundamentally different, and for me, potentially more profound, experience from looking at things on a screen.
A few years ago, I was asked to guest curate a show at a small museum and I came up with a couple of proposals that included artists whose work I supported. One of the ideas had to do with photographs and videos of bodies running and floating. I have an interest in performance and performance imagery, specifically how photography and performance have informed one another over the last fifty years or so. The works I was going to include of Divola, Soren, McElroy, and Lamson, are influenced by and are a part of the history of performance. I also liked that group of works because they are funny, playful, inventive, but also convey a deeper, philosophical resonance about the vulnerability and absurdity of the human body.
Leap from Panchganga, 2015. © Atul Bhalla
Dave 000329, 2011 © Tabitha Soren
Feinstein: This makes so much sense in its expanded book form. Can you talk a bit about your decision to move in that direction instead of the exhibition?
Durant: When the show did not pan out, I could not stop thinking about how they echoed off one another, that it was a shame that these works did not have the opportunity to share the same space. Images call to other images and soon there were dozens of other historical images and works from contemporary artists that were almost adding themselves to the list in my mind.
I started Saint Lucy Books in 2017, had published four titles up to that point and it became obvious that it should be a book; it was the only way to evict the squatters crowding my brain. I did not want to make a book that took a singular position, was a survey or theoretical treatise. And I was not interested in writing an overarching essay that attempted to connect all the disparate imagery, so I decided to take a similar approach to the texts–to have a polyphony of voices, inviting art historians, critics, curators, poets, fiction writers to compose short texts in response to particular imagery or the idea of bodies running, falling, flying, floating, and crawling.
Hype #2, 2007- 2009 © Denis Darzacq
Sublunar No 23, 2006 © William Lamson
Feinstein: As I look at all of the wonderful work in the book, my mind also wanders to photographic/ conceptual art memes of the mid-2000s, like "planking" for example. These feel like a mass/pop culture conversation with, or extension of Sophie Calle or William Lamson's performance-driven work. Does that era of meme culture play into your reference points?
Durant: Not sure I can answer this satisfactorily. I will say that there has long been a connection between art, popular culture, and jokes or pranks. The Surrealists loved Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin for example. Many of Yves Klein’s works in the 50s and 60s made fun of self-serious Abstract Expressionism; his photo ‘Leap into the Void,’ which is a visual and conceptual anchor for much of the work in Running Falling Flying Floating Crawling, mocks the very idea of the romantic artist willing to risk all for art. The early 2000’s had TV shows like ‘Jackass’ and ‘Punk’d’ which certainly took some inspiration from artists like Chris Burden.
There is has always been a spectrum of gestures between the art world and popular culture, which I love, and meme culture is an extension of that.
Leap into the Void, 1960 © Yves Klein
John Divola’s photograph with text by David Campany
Feinstein: I also think about vernacular photography as a reference point to many of these images. I know that a few images in the book are, in fact, vernacular, but I wonder if you also see the collection of images as a whole, in some way, referencing patterns in vernacular photography?
Durant: Well, one of the things I love about photography is its ubiquity and accessibility, that it has a role in almost all aspects of human culture, from art, science, surveillance, voyeurism, commodities, and the everyday. Vernacular photography has a huge role, not only in the ever-growing archive of human imagery, but also in terms how people visualize their worlds, privately and publically. Vernacular photographs are time capsules in the purest sense, usually they have no artistic pretense, they are expressions of preserving a moment for the future. Many vernacular photographs also have a performative element, that interests me.
Performance and conceptual photography in the 1960s and 70s adapted an ‘affectless’ quality, in other words, images did not look like ‘art’ – they were simply utilitarian documents, without ‘authorship,’ and had a vernacular feel. Paradoxically, many contemporary artists have used that ‘affectless-ness’ as part of their affect, for example, John Divola’s ‘As Far as I Could Get’ or Lilly McElroy’s ‘I Throw Myself at Men;’ those pictures are not about being ‘good’ photographs, in the conventional sense, they downplay the authorship of the image in favor of the idea that is being enacted.
Vernacular photograph / photographer unknown
I throw Myself at Men #1, © Lily McElroy
Feinstein: Two widely infamous and controversial images that don't appear in this book are Robert Capa's "Falling Soldier" and Richard Drew’s 9/11 "Falling Man" image. In my mind, their inclusion might be too obvious, too charged, but I'm curious: did they come up in your curatorial thought process? Was there a conscious reason not to include them?
Durant: Those two images came up but I never considered them. There is an argument about whether the Capa image is staged for the camera, and while that is an interesting issue, I felt that question would undermine other images in the book.
As for the ‘Falling Man’ image, yes, it seemed too obvious, too brutal, too voyeuristic. One might raise the same concerns with Sarah Charlesworth’s ‘Stills’ of appropriated images of bodies leaping or falling from buildings, but for me, Charlesworth’s images differ from the spectacle of an individual death. She monumentalizes those images clipped from newspapers by blowing them up to huge proportions. And by showing them as a series, she further distances the specificity of bodies. When you stand in a room with them towering over you, it is you who feels the vertigo, the horror; it is almost an assault on your passivity as a viewer.
It is in this regard that the texts play an important role, Jennifer Blessing’s text on Charlesworth’s images, and Marvin Heiferman’s essay on Tabitha Soren’s Running images, for example, do a great job of not only contextualizing the images in relation to history but also anchoring them in the personal.
Vivienne Revere, New York, 1980 © Sarah Charlesworth
Photo © Gideon Mandel with text by Jane D. Marsching
Feinstein: The photographs included in this book straddle centuries of photo history. It's a collection that feels uniquely evergreen and can (and probably will) speak to an era, but now, feels uniquely suited and responsive to our current era. The United States and the world at large are increasingly divided. We're in a global plague state. Your book feels like an apt parallel to that feeling of uncertainty, of literally and metaphorically drowning, fleeing, hovering in between.
Durant: The idea for the book really came into focus in the Spring of 2019 when I actively sought out artists, writers, and permissions from the estates of historical or canonical images from Andre Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson, Aaron Siskind, and Francesca Woodman, for example.
I wanted the images in the book to represent not only the variety of genres in photography, fine art, documentary, conceptual, vernacular, etc., but temporal diversity as well, to represent almost the entire history of the medium. Early on, someone asked me if I would be including images of people dancing, which I thought about for a minute, but for me, dance is ornamental, I wanted only images that imaged the body in various states of abandon, helplessness, fear, subjugation, serenity, and transcendence — a full range of primal embodied experience.
I was planning to release the book in the Spring of 2020, it was delayed not only because of Covid but also by my own health crisis in early 2020, unrelated to Covid, when I was hospitalized for two months. This crazy, challenging, desperate, and dispiriting year has only amplified not only the vulnerability of our bodies but the vertigo of history.
Self-portrait with my daughter and a presence of a hanging man, Guerrrero Mexico © Yael Martinez
Running Falling Flying Floating Crawling. Cover image by Julia Borissova.
Still life photo of these fine books © Jill Fannon
Feinstein: How did you select Julia Borissova's photograph as the cover image?
Durant: I am a big fan of Julia’s work, she is an amazing photo book artist living in Saint Petersburg, Russia. I have collected a few of her handmade photo books; my favorite, J.B. about men floating in the air includes a series of images of a man attempting to fly by leaping in the air. I toyed around with a couple of different covers but kept coming back to Julia’s images. I love their mid-20th century feeling, the soft, melancholic monochrome, of the images, and the open sky above the figure on which I could float the title of the book.
On the cover we (the designer Guenet Abraham and I) placed the man with his arms open, almost in supplication, as if he were pleading, “Take me up!.” To create a sequential feel, we did a sort of wrap-around, keeping the same horizon line and put a slightly different posture on the back.
The Great White Way, 22 Miles 1 Street, 2000-2009 © Pope L.
Feinstein: How did you go about selecting the writers for the corresponding essays?
Durant: I just made a list of writers who I admire and asked them if they were interested. Almost everyone said yes without hesitation, which I am so grateful for. It was important to have diversity of approaches, so I asked poets, critics, curators, art historians, and fiction writers. I sent a crude PDF of the book to the writers and allowed them to choose what imagery, if any, they wanted to write about. Some chose not to write about particular images but instead the idea of the body in any of those states of being.
I didn’t want a one-to-one relationship between text and images, so some images exist independently, which also allowed space to create a flow among the images without interruption. Once I got all the responses from the writers, there were a couple of series that were not chosen that called to have an essay or text accompanied, so I asked a few writers if they would address them specifically.
City Lights, 2019 © Oliver Wasow
Feinstein: did any writer have a response that got you to think about the images (or larger concept) with new eyes? Any responses that caught you off guard?
Durant: Well, pretty much all of them. That’s what good writers do; they surprise you by taking you into intellectual or emotional territory you were not expecting. Although it’s a bit unfair to choose just a few, I will. I discovered the work of Diane Seuss pretty late in the process, basically the book was done, when I read one her poems and was knocked out. I got a couple of her books and just felt a strong connection. I emailed her and asked her if she wanted to contribute, but if she did, she would have to get something to me almost immediately. She said yes and composed a trinity of paragraphs, Float / Fall / Crawl which made me weep in gratitude.
Her text includes these lines which I excerpted and used at the beginning of the book, “Why speak of one’s particular suffering? Everyone falls. Babies, trees, and empires. We are tossed outside the gates of paradise, and with rusty shovels, on dry ground, begin our long careers of grave-digging.”
Again, there are so many others, but to list a few; David Campany’s essay on John Divola talks about Brecht and Buster Keaton in a brilliant way, Cig Harvey is the only photographer who also contributed a text and the combo of her images and words is so moving and concise.
Roula Seikaly’s text surprised me in how she raises the issue of ethics and complicity in the reception of images. Susan Bright not only suggested the work of Gabby Laurent, which I was not familiar with, she came up with a novel structure for her text, 21 Thoughts on Falling with Gabby Laurent. The book ends with Kim Beil’s essay on Raymond Meeks because her words, in so many ways, distill what I hope is the poetic trajectory of the book.
© Gabby Laurent from the series Falling
Cig Harvey’s spread
Feinstein: I want to push a little bit if you don't mind: where are you in all of this? Beyond your eye and interest in the subject matter, does this work reflect your own narrative?
Durant: As someone who could never choose between being an artist or a writer, it certainly reflects my embrace of both. I am interested in how images and texts interact, and see a potential collaboration between them beyond the expected image / caption relationship, or the critical review in which the writer over-contextualizes what we are looking at. For this book, I wanted images and texts to interact in an open-ended manner without being co-dependent.
I think as artists we should be making things we want or need to see, to bring our own enthusiasms into the world. In every project whether it is making art, writing, curating, or publishing, I want to be engulfed, immersed in the material, I want to forget myself and be part of something bigger. It sounds trite or romantic, but I wanted the book to be full of moments in which the reader would pause in recognition, that a particular phrase, image, idea would create an experience of contemplation, delight, or even a shiver of anxiety. For me, that communication, between art / language and the viewer / reader, is what makes the world less lonely.