This article was featured in Issue No. 17 — Enigma

by Lev Feigin

For each of us, our own back is a terra incognita. It lives an invisible, parallel life. Until it pains, or bestows pleasure, the back is an afterthought. A zone of sensations, not sights, the back must be guarded. Its exposure is a private affair. Vulnerable, the back is artless. It cannot be arranged like a face. It doesn’t pose, communicate, mask. It only betrays. An unreachable landscape, the back can only be discovered by others.

Photography offers many sightings of the back. Edward Weston’s back-turning nudes; Harry Callahan’s wife, Eleanor, is often pictured from behind as are Josef Koudelka’s metaphysical exiles who stand before bleak, postwar European landscapes; the backs of Jo Ann Callis’s fetishized models are drenched in bursts of light. The back abounds in photography. But before it was discovered by the camera, it took millennia for art to catch up with the backside.

The Renaissance painting sheds little light on the posterior. Expelled from the garden of Eden, Masaccio’s Adam and Eve recoil in anguish as they turn their backs on God. Judas is commonly depicted at the Last Supper in profile turning his back to Christ, and we can see his back in Giotto’s famous fresco when the betrayer kisses the Messiah in Gethsemane. Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son is on his knees before his father, the honeyed light of forgiveness caressing his back. In each painting, the face is still partly visible. Only the Bible’s bystanders and Roman soldiers were allowed by the Old Masters to turn their back completely to the viewer.

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, European portraiture rarely attempts to renounce the face for the back. Arguably, it was photography that fed the inversion. In early 1850s, Eugène Durieu, a collaborator of the painter Eugène Delacroix, trained the camera on his sitters from behind. Asking his models to turn away from him, Durieu rejected the longstanding primacy of the face and discovered a new genre – the back portrait.

To capture the face was to reveal the sitter’s essence, the soul according its inner light to the dark of the pupils. To portray the back was to do the opposite: to anonymize the sitter, strip the body of selfhood, universalize it into a statuary relief. In his studio, Durieu dissolved the sitter into an archetype, an eye-catching instance pointing to the species.

When bare, the back lures not toward the soul, but to the flesh. It invites us to stare with immunity, without the shock and repercussions of a gaze returned. But the allure of the back is also about projection. Photographed from behind, the head becomes a peg for the viewer’s fantasy. The face, which has been denied us, must now be summoned from the flesh.

Relegated to the backstage of everyday life, the back shares its unrehearsed simplicity with the inanimate. In this regard, it approaches a nature morte. Like a still life, the back is earnest. Its candor is genetic. Beckoning us to deduce the face, the back tells the story of a body enmeshed in time, aging faster than the persona that animates it. The skin, the hair, the back of the head – all of them have things to say.

Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of the painter Rebecca Salsbury Strand intrigues precisely because of the tension between the whole and the part. We see only the woman’s buttocks and thighs submerged in the water, but the work’s title – “Rebecca Salsbury Strand” – insists on her social identity (she is the wife of Paul Strand), struggling to reinstate the totality of her person that is denied to her by the image.

Above: Andrea Modica, Pueblo, Colorado. — Above: Andrea Modica, *Pueblo, Colorado.*

It was cinema that influenced how the back was used in the photographic image. Hollywood has long employed the subjective “over-the-shoulder” shot to allow the viewer to look at the world through the eyes of the actor. Viewing a scene from behind the hero’s back or shoulder, the moviegoer could step inside his sensorium, to trade places, and backbones, with fiction.

Photographers often depict prominent politicians from the back to achieve a similar effect. Garry Winogrand captured John F. Kennedy from behind the podium during the 1960 Democratic National Convention, lime lights enveloping the future President in a consecrated halo. No longer an emblem of nature, the clothed back represents the collective will of civilization weighing down on one set of shoulders.

To photograph the back of the head that looks out onto the landscape is to enact this first-person point of view. Everything before that gaze, which is hidden from us, transforms into an arena of activity, a manifestation of that person’s life-world. Even a plain studio backdrop – like the one used by John Edmonds in his images of African-American men in do-rags – can become a sounding board for the interiority of the model looking at it. An atmosphere of silence pervades such pictures, but we can feel the enigma of transference between us and the sitter. As Vladimir Nabokov had once advised about books, we read these photographs with our spines.