To those of you who may not have heard of her, Elena Dorfman is a "fine art" photographer who recently published a book of images of American cosplayers, Fandomania after having had a number of shows in the gallery circuit. I had pretty much forgot my complete frustration at her tremendously presumptive and thoughtless work, but she came up [negatively] at a small party I hosted recently and realized I had never formally presented an essay/rant that I had drafted upon first seeing the book (as well as having watched her in action at one convention I too was shooting at). Without further ado, my critique of a photo project that I believe represents most of the most troubling tendencies of the fine art photo world at the moment.

Before continuing, please check out the project, which can has been removed from her personal site and now is found at http://www.redeyereps.com/ by clicking "photographers" then "Elena Dorfman" then "Fandomania" at the bottom... On with the show!

"Elena Dorfman Wants to Control the World"

To my eye, Elena Dorfman's body of work on cosplayers at anime conventions in America, is at it's core proposition, merely trying to fufil all of the pedantic surface/genre requirements of art photography (i.e. good-epensive camera, losts of color, "interesting" subjects, dramatic lighting, control as godliness, similar compositions to a historical photographer, sharp focus, perfect exposure, no mistakes or accidents of any kindetc.) But none of these genre-cues are prerequisites for a good photograph, they are merely the stereotype of "contemporary art photography". She checked off what makes a photograph *look like* an "art photograph" but forgot to make complex satements. Her's is multipul choice test style photography. [Not to aim to broadly, but in an era with all of the ideological assumptions (such as that led us to the iraq war) we need less art that assumes and fills in their own preconceptions, and more work that is compasionate, complex and nuanced.] In fact, she claims to be objective and neutral, but by claiming that stance, she spends her artistic cache in the act denying that every decision is hers. I can't but read these images as being about anything else than the century long photographic tradition of aestheticizing of the abject. These images are basically the same as the "genre" of the amateur that photographs homeless people because that subject is supposed to signify "meaning" in a artistic situation, regardless of the contrivance of this so-called "meaning". That is, images whose primary message is retiring the proclamation of art as apart and above from reality.

But I also had issues with highly selective preconceptions embedded in her choice of cosplayers that seeks to close down meaning, rather than open it up, through the use of the abject. Examining her images, is there a clear, conscious explanation of her selection process, or does it attempt to hide itself as supposedly neutral? Because I see no self-critical acknowledgment of the relativity of her subject position, the dynamic she sets up is very manipulative, but also distinctly avoiding the tough issues. Yes, I'll admit that many cosplayers are not amazing, but there are plenty that are technically and artistically brilliant. But she doesn't make any attempt to shoot images of cosplayers that are her equal-- that, in other words, could confront or challenge her preconceptions...

As Mel pointed out, only about half of the images are actually of cosplayers by a fan's definition. The photographer has chosen to include about 50% of her subjects shown on her website as wearing what might only be described as "fan apparel" or "convention clothes"- that is gothy/geeky clothes with none or perhaps one accessory from their favorite show (i.e. just because someone wears a fuku skirt or a black goth dress coupled with Naruto headband or Chi ears doesn't make them a cosplayer to cosplayers). Their is even a brand-wearing Gothic Lolita girl in her selections, which is nothing but Japanese street fashion which both cosplayers and gothic lolitas abore being int he same category. Again, another demonstration of the fact that her credo is having the artist as the sole arbitor of reality... Much like someone who can't and won't make a distinction between "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" because they're "all the same" she misses many opportunities to, as a poet like William Carlos Williams might, craft from the specifics of her subject. Instead of "So much relies on a red wheelbarrow.." we have in her work "So much relies on [my] photograph..." And indeed, having seen her work for a number of hours (durring regular busines hours at a convention in Northern California) her selection criteria is to deliberately pick the geekiest and freakiest, or just those that don't particularly care. Many of the well know cosplayers that Mel and I are friends with have openly stated that she was so shady and controlling that they refused to pose for her (Mel included).

Also, perhaps one of the more odd decisions is that she has worked so hard to isolate her subject matter, which is, to my eyes, a denial of the use value of cosplay in the HIGHLY social context of conventions. These images are so contrived to provide "isolation" that a local artist Greg DeStefano and I realized that the best critique may be simply pointing out that in these images are so stripped of context that it would be virtually impossible to tell if these are actual fans/cosplayers or just actors and models dressing randomly. And since her definition of cosplay is demonstrated as wildly inaccurate (by her inclusion of SO many non-cosplayers, but yet somehow still defining the project as about cosplay), there is no reason why we as viewers should even believe that these are anything other than total inventions/stagings for the sole benefit of the photographer. Indeed, what makes these so frustrating is that I've seen her working at conventions with a giant, expensive studio setup tucked into an out-of-the-way corner pulling fans aside. Even the tradition of photography she claims [please note that these are the photographers she has visually or textually cited] to come from denies photographic perfect and uses accidents to pull intriguing and allusive nuanced subject matter from very banal shots:


Atget, http://www.artmag.com/museums/a_greab/agblsps/atget3.GIF
Sander, http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/archives/sander.jpg
Arbus, http://www.usc.edu/schools......../comm544/library/images/528.jpg


While three of hers:


Edit: This project has been removed from her personal web site, and can now be found at http://www.redeyereps.com/ by clicking "photographers" then "Elena Dorfman" then "Fandomania" at the bottom... she's changed a few images in and out, but added a whole bunch of new rather abject images. Flip though a bit and you'll be able to make the connection easily.

This includes slight but judicious use of background and social circumstance, which is of paramount importance in subcultural situations. Each visual cue is acting in concordance with the environment and society around. Elena Dorfman goes so far as to show up on location and then obliterate the light, obliterate the background, obliterate the massive crowds, obliterate the fan's definition of cosplay, obliterates the fan's criteria of quality, obliterate the visual signs of her subjects, obliterates the frenetic energy, obliterates the social network, and on top of that chooses a body of photographs in which the fans are non-confrontational, or not acknowledging the photographic process!

Doorfman's images are so forceably decontextual that they have more in common with the conventions of an 18th century upper-class British butterfly collector than they do with the complex notions of sociological study leading out of Lacianian "mirrors states" and Guy Debord's "specticle." Especially dealing with a media-addicted, but highly media-savy subculture, such a ham-fisted aproach seems to serve no purpose but the conventional pigeon-holing forced upon subcultures by hegemony, which in my mind is a closing of possibiity that artists need to be opposed too. Too much in her work I see an attempt to seperate the aethetics and forms of "high" and "low" culture (ideas very much out of vogue - reference Murakami and Pop) in a misguided attempt to frame subculture below the status of the art world. If Miyazaki is having retrospectives at the film center of the Art Institue of Chicago, why do we need another anacronistic reification of formalist photography?

The elaborate nulification of context and self-critical process that I have noted is so fore-front yet inexplicable to my critique that I begin to ponder with the hyper-symetrical image of the quality cosplayer, which is the only just overtly and blatently formalized image, that her atraction to the casual or unskilled cosplayer is due to her own inadiquacy as a photographer to make interesting photographs of things that have the potential to be regarded as inherently aesthetically beautiful? That is, in a different way, that she is for some reason avoiding subjects that may challenge her status as abritor. There is very resiprocity in her images - that is to say that these images are reliant on the subject to be subservant to the judgement of the photographer, not equals, or collaborators. It flies in the face of logic for people that are deliberately, often joyously, putting themselves on display for their peers and friends only one out of 5 is looking at the camera at all - her control is the primary subject of the work. why do I not feel the fans had a choice where to look? Which would leave two options. First that she is controlling their poses, the second that the fans are far from comfortable with the context into which she is forcing them. Either would nullify any signifying power of the content and subject matter. She should just have taken photographs of rocks, honestly, if she didn't want to engage with the subject matter.

One definition of what makes a good photograph is "trying to explore the the intrinsic or prejudicial capacites of the medium" Szarkowski (New Documents) which I've always felt was too formal, given the almost inevitable social consideration that photography's complex relationship with social factualness entails. "In effect, all three [Friedlander, Arbus and Winogrand] demonstrated that photography could function like the other arts without having superficial respemblence with them" (Slemmons, "Like A One-Eyed Cat") which I think is important owing the the attempt to set up sophisticated lighting to obliterate any attempt at contextual lyrical factualness, and indeed, even going so far as to photoshop the velvet backgrounds to a "true" "pure" black (somewhat unsuccessfully, as a digital technician I know was instantly able to pick out the digital brush marks). In some ways, these have no remblance or interest in being metacritical explorations of the capacity of photography, but rather are far more interested in the superficial surface value of looking like what might be called art "portrature." And perhaps arbus is most accurate, for she too was an upper-class woman with an interest in "freaks" neither from her class nor her status. Yet instead choosing the saving grace of Arbus, which was a profound engagement with the power dynamic of the camera, in a way more critical of herself than of her subject, Dorfman has a contual facination with attempt to prod her sujects into the status of the abject, with bieing in any way willing to be abject herself.

Where as Freedlander is "like the dadists... breaking some of the rules of art and reforming others to suit his wit and intuition," (Slemmons) Dorfman is sublimating her "wit and intuition" to meet the rules of art [photography]. Freedlander himself said "You have to be responsible to the subject. A flower can't look like concrete" in which I 've always viewed the word "responsible" to have both it's normal characteristic definition, but also a conotation of "responsiveness" much like a jazz musician responds in group improvisation. Instead, these photographs have a static monolithic-ness which works to contrive and close meaning through cliched poses rooted in neo-Romantic tropes using the "gaze" and the "gesture" to signify the will of the photographer. Now this can be used for interesting effect, in fact August Saunders, who Dorfman cites as an influence, had his famous picture of the Baker with his zipper accidentally down. Yet, she has shown her hand in manipulating these accidents, with the photoshoped background, clearly deliberatly forced awkward exposure tricks (shooting before or after she had told the cosplayer to pose), with the lack of background and elaborate lighting. So these become a kind of tasteless visual joke without any of the honest intensity the happened upon the curiosities of daily life. In some ways, these images are like the bland Adam Sandler slap-stick comdey compaired to the Marx Brothers or Monty Python's sophisticated self awareness. In some ways this lack of self-reflectiveness by "high" culture is precisely what Bob Black is mocking when he says that "It's a sobering thought that the grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil." She attempts to prod these images to fit her preconceptions while forgetting about the curious use-value that such outfits have/had for those that are signifying. In many ways, I feel that successful art focuses on the process of communication, but these are focusing ONLY on the sign, to the exclusion of the signifier and the index.

Indeed, all art is "false" as a stand-in for reality, as I have hopefully made clear, but our ability as viewers to dicipher and investigate the meaning from art is based on our relationship to the concreteness of the artificiality of the image, not on any claim to "truth" that an image might make. In fact, Saunder's project of documenting all the various people of Germany was regarded as a deep failure by the literlists of the Bauhaus, but it's endering power was that it was so responsive and specific to the people he photographed that those "failures" (such as the zipper and the cluttered backgrounds that steemed from a deep integration and love of daily life) that they have far outlasted many more rigid preconceived proclamations or how the world *should* be ordered by the bauhaus.

"If we learn about how pictures work-- and keep our distance from them-- we are able to learn something about how extensively our eyes are controlled by pictoral conventions" says Slemmons, and I feel as though Dorfman merely replicates accepted pictorial and social conventions while ignoring the unique charactistics, both negative and possitive, that have made anime fandom (and cosplay more specifically) the vibrant and conflicted social group that so merits our interest and study.