By JASON THURMAN
Fifteen years ago the art world was shocked by the sudden release of hundreds of previously concealed photographs by Edgar Rogers. Monumental images that detailed masochistic practices, most remained in private collections and were never seen by the public. Now these and others newly released by the photographer’s estate are displayed for the first time by the Museum of Modern Art.
Bitter protests over the planned retrospective threatened the safety of both the works and viewers, but the museum remained adamant in its support of Rogers’s work and freedom of expression. Added security forces and metal detectors at the entrance to the galleries were installed.
Such measures, together with media attention to the protests, raise the expectations for Edgar Evans Rogers, 1929–1978. Can the photographs live up to the controversy they have spawned? The answer is a resounding yes. The same question dogged the photographer even before his death, and before the release of those images he chose to hide.
Rogers’s career was always one in which notoriety eclipsed craft, and his refusal to grant interviews or make any clarifying statements about his work has forced curator Eric Elsin into a detective’s rather than enthusiast’s role.
Elsin’s rule of thumb seems to have been to exclude nothing, and the current show at the Modern suffers from the collective weight of its images in that the majority of the photographs are oppressive in content. Arranged chronologically, the show begins with eight ferrotypes taken by the photographer’s grandfather, elegant memorial portraits taken in Mexico in the last century. It then moves through the familiar early series of his wife Virginia and of his daughter Ann posed as if dead.
One regrets that Elsin’s desire for unedited revelation led him so far as to include the tasteless final self-portraits: color Polaroids of the photographer’s suicide at forty-seven. But only these are to be regretted. The newly released works make it clear that if Rogers understood anything as an artist, it is the profound and ironical effect of offensive subject matter exquisitely crafted. His photographs of his daughter, most enigmatically titled with only her name and a numeral, are technically unsurpassed; even the darkest is evoked in worshipful detail. The light in these life-size prints is elegiac, and the viewer finds himself shocked by the beauty of composition, of texture, especially when the subject is a graceful limb traced with blood.
It will be a surprise to many that it is the newly released photographs that offer relief, in that they are the most lighthearted of the works. A sort of peeping Tom’s record of adolescent sexual experimentation, they are nudes of Ann either alone or with a male companion: happy photographs, even though their bewitching lack of self-consciousness leads the viewer to wonder if they weren’t taken without the subjects’ awareness.
Scandal has unfortunately conspired to obscure the real seductiveness of Rogers’s photographs, a quality which derives from their mystery. Fifteen years after his death, all that remains clear is the intensity of Rogers’s feeling for his subject, Ann. One could not define that emotion as either love or hate, pride or pity. In view of the photographs’ power other questions recede, especially those seeking to define and thus limit art.
This is a show not to be missed. Sprawling, poorly organized, unedited, it offers a remarkable experience, a revelation not only of one artist’s work but of our culture which both reveres and rejects death and sexuality; which encourages exploitation even as it punishes those who chronicle it. Never before has the gallery goer been forced so emphatically into the position of voyeur, and for that experience alone, the current show at the Museum of Modern Art is worthy of support.