Finding What Exists: The Fraternity Work of Andrew Moisey by Dalia Ratnikas
Who are these people? I'm hardly qualified to say. I spent my years as an undergraduate at Berkeley doing my best to avoid them. I considered it unfortunate when I ended up in a class filled with them. When I lived in the dorms, I watched otherwise decent floor-mates do absurd things to be accepted by them. I've never been to a frat party, even though I lived on Piedmont Avenue (or frat row), with my window facing directly into a fraternity brother's window, for two years. People usually don't believe me when I say that I've never been to a frat party, but it's true: it just isn't my scene. Which is why I was horrified (and yes, I mean that without exaggeration) when my friend Andrew told me he was taking pictures of a fraternity. I didn't know him too well yet, but I knew that it wasn't his scene either; it couldn't be. He was a photographer. Photographers do not belong inside frat houses. Photographers like museums and books; fraternity brothers like beer.
Andrew showed me some of the first pictures and I thought that they were really bad. I insisted that he go back to the Laundromat, where he'd been shooting before, and pick up where he left off. He, of course, did the right thing and ignored me. It turns out that I'm the one who likes museums and books, and although Andrew likes those things too, he also likes beer. More importantly, as a photographer, he likes to get good, interesting pictures of people. And you can get better, more interesting pictures of people in a fraternity house than you can at the museum (as the quite famous Thomas Struth may have found out; he took some pictures of people in museums, and they are cold and inert.)
I recognize some of the people in these pictures from classes I had with them. I knew them to be loud, lazy, and far from intellectual. But photography is a funny thing. It has a way of showing things the way they are, but in a way one wouldn't necessarily see them at first. It's an image of pure surfaces, but somehow has the potential to give a less superficial view than what one might see looking at the real thing. This is a paradox. In its very early days, photography recorded faraway lands and their curious inhabitants. Dark, inscrutable daguerreotypes and stereoscopic images of mountains, islands, and naked natives piqued the curiosity of bourgeois families in their Parisian apartments. Today, Andrew's photographs are gritty, legible descriptions of a place as foreign to me as Africa, India, or even the American West was to those 19th century homebodies. But couldn't I have seen these things had I walked out my front door, across the street, and into a fraternity house? No.
One might suggest that this is because Andrew is a guy and I am not. However, I doubt the plausibility of that interpretation. The answer to this question arises from the fact that Andrew's camera can see more than I can, and this is for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, because Andrew is willing to see more than I am. In working on this project, he has become an honorary brother (conveniently facilitated by his own brother's brotherhood), spending hours doing what the brothers do (he has assured me, however, that he does not partake in an excess of alcohol or other mind-altering substances when working: this is still work, and that which may be detrimental to the practice is avoided). Another reason that these pictures tell me more than my own eyes would is that they are specific moments, selected, in particular, for their elucidative powers. They are the chosen of the chosen: the photographer first chooses the moments worth photographing, and then, of the hundreds of pictures (and Andrew, I believe, easily took over a thousand for this project), the set of good, descriptive, formally interesting pictures are chosen, so that in seeing these, I get a higher concentration of information. The hours spent with the brothers are matched by hours in the darkroom, where wastepaper baskets fill with failed prints that don't contain a sufficient amount of visual data. It's not that the quotidian has been weeded out; on the contrary, Andrew photographs the quotidian with flair. The potency of these images is in the framing: the photographer standing in the right location, the right light, the right distance from his subject. That's not as easy to do as it seems.
What does the photographic process do to the brothers, and their female companions, that makes one look at them so differently? The answer, strangely enough, changes for different people, and yet still remains the same. We look at pictures differently than we look at people. I, for example, did not look at these people at all: they passed through my vision repeatedly every day, but I did not examine them with my eyes, and muse upon their appearance and its phenomenological consequences. We generally don't look at people that way, although that's the exact way we look at documentary photographs. As for the brothers, do they see themselves differently within these images? I am sure that they must, that these photographs, unlike an album of snapshots, elicits more than the "Oh, there I am! There's one of you! Ooh look at that face you're making!" general commentary exchanged when our friends' film comes back from the one-hour drug store processor.
Which brings me to the nature of the documentary photography project, as opposed to the snapshot, or the art photograph. I will not expound on the history of documentary work, because this is not that sort of essay. Instead, I will touch upon on the way Andrew manipulates the long tradition of which he is very well aware. Certain images - some portraits and many of the still lives - do border on art photography, in which formal qualities present themselves strongly enough to outweigh the importance of content, but the content, when sought, is always present in this work. Other pictures, which capture social interactions and funny faces, recollect the snapshot (I am thinking of the picture of two boys and two girls, seated along a bar with plastic cups, each of which looks in a different direction). To get one shot like this, however, on your color 24 roll from last night's party, is usually a matter of good luck. Luck this good doesn't happen again and again, although pictures like this reoccur in Andrew's work. Good snapshots are happy accidents; a photographer worth his salt needs more than luck.
Andrew works in a tenacious black and white, which brings with it all the necessary associations with documentation. And yet, one should consider the subject: Andrew's choice to do a documentary project on fraternity life. This is a significant deviation from documentary photography's standard. At the risk of sounding crude, it must be said that this genre most often concerns itself with the downtrodden, and thus, the other. Documentary photography is generally a way of aesthetically presenting people or a situation that demands social attention; thus, a canon has accumulated of the poor, the hungry, the unemployed, the toothless. That Andrew has chosen to photograph the "political and economic leaders of tomorrow" already breaks from tradition. (Photographs of their living quarters and diet, then - I am thinking in particular of James eating Hershey's syrup in the kitchen - take on a great deal of irony.) That this work is being taken seriously as a documentary project revitalizes my confidence, and my interest, in the genre. Finally, what most strikes me about this work is something quite different than Andrew's implicit revision of the documentary genre. While impressed by the photographer's ability to command a structural change in his field, like many people who look at pictures, I am a sucker for emotional content. When advising Andrew to quit the Fraternity Project and to go back to the Laundromat, I also made another suggestion. I asked him to take more pictures of Christine, his girlfriend. I'd only seen two or three, but in them, I recognized a quality missing from photography in general: intimacy. To take an intimate photograph, one that isn't stilted by the mediating force of the camera's physical presence, seems theoretically impossible, though the best photographs flaunt their maker's ability to achieve even this impossibility. When one considers the spatial arrangement of picture-taking (two people, for example, separated by a camera), one realizes what a divisive instrument the glassy, reflective lens can be. The photographer becomes a cyclops, and eye contact for an instant is broken. The subject may look into the round, surrogate eye of the camera, but he or she will not feel the emotional presence of the photographer until after the camera is removed from between the two faces, and Andrew locks eyes with his subject, saying "thanks." The instant the camera records is the instant of rupture, distinction, and intimidation.
The intimacy between photographer and subject in Andrew's pictures of Christine, in which she is present to us as she appears to him, pure of the affectations one instantly assumes before a camera lens, I believe comes from her relationship with Andrew and his camera. Andrew doesn't go anywhere without his camera. Even when he's not going anywhere - sitting at home - his camera is either in his hands or at least an arm's reach away. It's like another limb. Further, he is always taking pictures. He takes pictures when watching TV. He takes pictures even while driving (I do believe this is dangerous). My point here is that, even as a mere friend, I've come to understand that the camera is part of Andrew, rather than an alien device. Thus, a person even closer to him, Christine, would have to quickly come to terms with this extension of his sight, and integrate the foreign object, in her conception of it, into his body. Christine would have to naturalize the lens, be able to feel Andrew's presence through the camera, if only to prevent herself from constant discomfort.
Ultimately, what amazes me most about the fraternity work is what Andrew has perhaps stumbled upon, or perhaps intently dug out. He has located something within the fraternity which I never expected could exist there, and that is intimacy. Whether pulpy, romantic, or meditative, these images show both an intimacy between brothers and an intimacy between the photographer and his subject. Does this mean that the brothers have come to naturalize the lens as well? After the first hundred pictures were made, and the photographer became an ordinary presence in the house, the brothers stopped performing for the camera and began existing for it. This would explain why the pictures steadily improved month after month. The degree of intimacy with his subject Andrew demonstrates in these images can only be the product of his adroit bedside manner. As for the surprising intimacy captured between the brothers and their female companions, it's not something I had assumed existed, but I've already demonstrated my ignorance on the subject.
Here, these people are more than I knew them to be, and I'm still shaken by the fact that a two-dimensional image gives me a more three-dimensional understanding of them then our three-dimensional encounters. I still don't know who they are, but I do know something about what they're like. And I don't regret never having gone to a frat party, but that's just because I never was all that fond of beer. |
