Where just about everyone else sees bodies, Annie Appel sees volatile territories, borderlines, contours. Her photography is boundless, not a bad quality for modernity where man and his extensions have become close to limitless. Welcome to Portraiture for the 21st. Century. Above: Nude #20 (16"x36")

Photographers Have It Tough -- Part One

Photographers have it tough. Theirs is a nearly saturated medium –like mostly anything in our overly competitive marketplace- where simple technique just won’t do. All compounded by the fact we live in an Image-driven society. This implies that the commercial Image will pervade so blatantly –to the point of retinal pornography- that the Fine Art Image will suffer a devaluation in perception too.

Our retinas are tired and after special effects, we believe we’ve seen it all. What can a photograph show us after all?

And then of course, we can be proven wrong so easily.

Case in point: the mesmerizing –if somewhat over stylized- exhibit Ashes & Snow. If you’d asked me a few months ago if there was a feasible business plan to turn a primarily photo exhibit into a multi-million, multi-city traveling show, I would’ve replied: this photographer better be into some truly inimitable concept or otherwise is going to tank.

Of course Ashes and Snow isn’t tanking. Of course Gregory Colbert is into something grand.

I’m bringing up the issue of Gregory Colbert’s magnificent vision about the ancient relationship between men and animals as a pretext to discuss the work of another photographer of similar proportions. Here, I’m speaking of photographers with some kind of incisive vision where it becomes obvious the camera isn’t used to take pictures but to vomit obscure voyeuristic angles. In the case of photographers like these, the camera almost gets in their way and therefore is used unconventionally.

Annie Appel, a highly regarded Fine Art Photographer based here in San Pedro, California, achieves similarly ambitious ends with her massive kaleidoscopic photography. Her animals are all human but thru her work, they turn into esoteric body frottage.

With Annie’s work you don’t see bodies; you perceive territories, their subtle borderlines, their explosive dark jungles where contours become highly charged by their mere suggestion. As in Colbert’s case you understand that you’re not watching a photograph but witnessing a moment stolen from time for your and my gratification.

Top: Self-Portrait (8"X80"), conceptually and artistically, one of the most eloquent works in Annie's Oeuvre. Bottom: Nude # 5 (8"X60") just one more impeccable use of the mesmerizing photo technique made famous by David Hockney.

 

Photographers are in the craft against time, they freeze images to rob them for eternity. Time without them is mercilessly linear.

Yet, the geography of our own bodies is mostly uncharted, mostly un-visited. The territory that makes US has very few accurate maps. Desires reside in our bodies. Our thoughts reside in our bodies. Our being resides in our bodies.  And mostly they all go un-pictured, un-charted, un-shot.

The problem is that not many people have that kind of eye. Annie does.

Her Triptic-Photo-Story-Frottages are truly open machines. The Image interprets the viewer as much as the other way around. The viewer is simultaneously viewed –and from even more angles than the ones afforded by his or her two eyes.

In this sense, Annie is dangerous, because she’s more into the soul/body I.D. business. Photography is merely a disguise for her real preoccupation: the territories, the identities, the flags, the wars, the borders, the fences, the languages, the nuances, the territorializing and de-territorializing that takes place simultaneously inside a human body… and the stories they all subtly hint of.

For it’s obvious someone forgot a rather important issue: isn’t the identity of the body as pivotal as the identity of the psyche that resides within it?

Not to mention that the problem of body identity is compounded exponentially for the post-modern man. If we are paying attention to the implications of cybernetic technology and MacLuhan is to remain gospel, we, with our bodily extensions, now possess close to boundless bodies. To capture these nearly boundless bodies, old portraiture techniques just won’t do.

Photographer Annie Appel specializes in capturing these post-modern, boundless bodies… hers included. Her subjects are truly multi-dimensional beings. You see in her work the oblique angles only a master photographer can concoct.

When you see Annie’s photo collages of human specimens you see an Image/Story. You see a triptic building with its totally conflicting and complementing stories. And I’m so delighted that here architecture, photography and literature, in one word, meet. Stories.

Annie’s into stories. She, like some merciless Columbo of the Fine Arts, reassembles the obliquest angles to make sense to a story that otherwise would go untold. Annie’s more a storyteller than a photographer. The picture is an accessory to her overall plot.

In her open pieces, all the most vital questions the artist asks in public about its own investigations are still up for grabs. Like the greatest film-maker or literary genius, all her insinuations linger, latent, unresolved, intact.

Angles and exquisite technique are just two minor ingredients in Appel's work. She's got what others having an abundance of technique lack: vision. Top: Rome Self Portrait (80"X110"). Bottom: Leila 5 (72"X24")

 

Photographers Have It Tough -- Part Two

Let me continue where I started: photographers have it incredibly tough.

Re-imagining the body –and the bodies of objects- has been a quest for those in the field of the visual arts. Picasso & Cubism, Dali & Surrealism, just two of the most glamorized examples. But the artist has no choice in a world pre-empted of meaning other than to develop his or her own dialect. These new words from the artist, these new mutterings yield new images… the re-assembly of these new images in turn, yields new bodies. In Annie Appel’s massive work, the end result approaches that of an ‘architectural body’, to paraphrase Madeline Gins and Arakawa.

But the re-assemblage of the material world isn’t just a whimsical pursuit, it obeys a fundamental need: man –the only creature known in the animal kingdom to have a proven God Complex- needs to re-invent creation. Or what else is eternity for?

In photography circles however, re-imagining the body sometimes simply meant changing the angle of the shot, altering the setting for this or that. In other words: ‘a fuzzy picture of a clear idea’.

Than Man Ray (and the surrealists) expanded the field of photography and turned it into an X-Ray Machine meant to scan the everyday… the elusive ‘ordinariness’ of life…

A backward trip on time might help:

Photography was first a science than a visual art. The mechanics of the camera amounted to the poetics of the print-result. Then, as decades went by and technology engulfed all things within reach, cameras evolved into their own species. The result? Something similar to that of the Pen & Teller shows for the world of magic. The magic in photography seemed gone. These-Modern-Cameras-Would-Self-Adjust-All-By-Themselves-And-You-And-I-Would-All-Be-Professional-Focus-Perfect-Photographers.

Except, photography isn’t taking photographs. Photography is re-inventing reality while you take photographs. It’s reassembling the everyday so deftly that the end result looks nearly divine, and both recognizable and foreign all at once. Some would argue that this divinity would destroy its ordinariness. I would argue that its ordinariness is what gives it the glow of the divine.

Argue with Jacques Lacan about it: humans are born prematurely and our only way to cope with the world at large is by allowing ourselves to be 'captured' by the Image. Left: Steve (74"X8"). Right: Mary Cecile (70"X56")

 

Photos are snapshots of reality. When penetrating enough, they take a bite out of the façade of life and show some of the raw and unsettling that lies behind. Perhaps now you are better able to understand why some native Indians were afraid to be photographed: they believed a picture could capture –and therefore subtract- a part of their souls.

This might as well be the case with Appel’s penetrating and almost Lacanian work: an art so intensely re-imaginative that borders not so much with the adventurous but with the dangerous. And dangerous here only applies to the misconceptions of the mind. But dislocation is Dangerous and Healthy all at once.

When God got bored in the corridors of eternity, he invented the camera. Is there a funner or prettier way to steal time from Time? This makes all photographers fallen angels –or is it fallen angles?- who infiltrated the technology down to us. -Here, fallen refers only to the condition of coming down.   One such loose angel goes by the name of Annie Appel.   She’s got lens machinery and mechanical scissors all embedded inside her natural angel eye. She sees through the story of your image like a palm reader after seeing the palm of your hand. Being honest makes her risky and therefore, you should have a bit of your soul captured by this one of a kind photo artisan.   There’s no other word, she’s no common Fine Art photographer… thousands of prints will be discarded before a half dozen or so are collaged into her final oversize photographs. She’ll show you in a collage of your-self, something of greater insight that no number of visits to the mirror could ever expose about you.   The reason you ask?   Angels are good with Angles. Angles are good with Angels. Chop-Chop. Cut and Paste. Humility, Elegance, Austerity, Discard, Discard, Discard, Open many Windows… -or is it: many Windows open?- Cut and Paste, and like the alchemist: re-arrange…   The Self depicted in the Image born at the end of this painstaking process is both a super-concrete entity and an expansive-being. Self portraits by Annie –for that matter, almost anything in her extensive oeuvre- are more like living biographies, something somewhat equivalent to Cubism for Fine Art Photography. Her pieces of Art -by their very aesthetic and arrangement,- lend eternally themselves to viewer re-interpretation –and therefore posterity.   In her photo/collages, You –the photographed subject- are at once witnessing yourself, witnessing the spectator, seeing your body parts and seeing what some parts of your body say about you. Annie’s photo work is language as rearrangement, image as re-location. She proves Lacan right: we are captured by the Image simply because in another level, the Image is a human extension into the world. A sort of prosthetic ‘3rd Eye’.   Photographers have allied themselves with Calculus, with a bit of Alchemy + Algebra. The angle makes the angel. The Angel insists on his or her heavenly angle. And we poor humans must comply.

 Visual And Oral Fixations
  

From where do you ask, comes our -almost oral- fixation with the Image? Humans are born prematurely, replies Jacques Lacan

As babies, you and I are born prematurely: we can’t move toward objects we want nor away from those we do not. We can’t communicate –we don’t understand language yet-, we have basically no motor skills for some time after our birth.

Besides the obvious maternal care, what allows fragile organisms like us not to collapse under the pressure of the experience of the first few weeks of our lives?

Lacan’s answer seems both too simple and too complex all at once: The Image.

The Image allows a mostly premature organism like you and I, to ‘recognize’ itself, therefore ‘to extend’ him or herself out into the world. From recognition, comes some dexterity, then some more, ad infinitum… Some motor skills he argues are in fact closely related to this ‘retinal capture’.

Are we captured by an Image, you and I?

Yes we are. But this image is not like TV images nor like billboard ads.

This Image is multiform, itself multi-image & multi-dimensional and nearly impossible to neither define or grasp. The Image, after capturing you, cannot itself be caught.

And I’m not digressing for nothing. Annie Appel’s Images can be defined fairly similarly, borrowing the exact same words: Multiform, multi-dimensional and nearly impossible to neither define nor fully grasp. Her work doesn’t just hang on the wall, it actually represents constant work for you: it extends you and pushes you into life.

Her photography is Lacanian, as stated above. She’s a no holds barred kind of gal.

Hers aren’t static photographs accumulating the non poetic kind of ‘ordinariness’. Hers isn’t an oversize photo of yourself simply created with some creative angles: instead, it’s a subtle narrative about hidden angles of you that only a foreign photographer can capture in the geography of your body which you’ve never traversed simply because about your own territory, you’re mostly blind. 



About the on-going exhibits:

Annie's work is currently being shown at three different galleries in the San Pedro area. They are:

Sacred Grounds (468 6th Street, San Pedro)

Papadakis Gallery (731 S. Pacific, San Pedro)

Annie's Studio (381 6th Street, San Pedro)

For further information about her work you can call 310.351.0289 or her studio 310.809.5082. You can also visit www.annieappel.com


About the Photographer:

Annie Appel received her Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the renowned Art Center College of Design followed by a Master's Degree from California State Fullerton.

Appel's award winning photographs can be found in private and corporate collections in the U.S., Europe and Mexico with work in the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)


About Papadakis Gallery: