The Brooklyn Rail

If thou hadst seen me thou wouldst have loved me.

It was this line from Oscar Wilde’s one-act tragedy, Salomé, that most resonated with Rachel Stern when she found herself ravaged by heartbreak. Within only the first few pages of the play, Wilde’s acutely queer take on the biblical story from which it takes its name, a refrain reveals itself: “You must not look at her. You look too much at her,” often followed by “Something terrible will happen.”¹ Spoken by The Page of Herodias in fear of the Young Syrian’s continued proclamations of Salomé’s beauty, the danger of looking, of desire, becomes evident as the central concern of the narrative. The play goes on to weave a complicated web of passionate wanting, ultimately spiraling toward a destructive end: the agonizing line that Stern paired with her first portrait created for the series currently on view at Baxter St was uttered by the Judean princess shortly before her own death. Impelled by a play that repeatedly warns against looking too much, One Should Not Look at Anything—curated by Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva as part of Baxter St’s Guest Curatorial Program—translates the frustration and havoc of unrequited desire from the pages of Salomé into lush, multivalent portraits and still lives.

Stern considers dialogue and translation to be central tenets of her work. This visual adaptation of Salomé, however, is more personal than mere translation between mediums—her sitters are family, friends, and lovers, and though she uses the play and its text as scaffolding, the expressions of kinship and desire invoked are not a performance of Wilde’s narrative. Rather, they are projections of Stern’s own connection to the text. Before each shoot, Stern would share a few lines from the play for her subject(s) to choose from. Once selected, she then cut the letters from hand-marbled paper (this, along with her walk to the Flower District for fresh flowers before each shoot, were her own acts of devotion to her subjects). Some letters were adhered to a sheet of plexiglass placed between the camera and the lavish set Stern’s subjects occupy, while others were integrated into the scene itself. When looking at the photographs, this manipulation of depth and space is disorienting—there is a sensation of collapse that further fictionalizes the space that the subject inhabits. Furthermore, the letters appear to swirl around the space of the image, complicating our ability to decipher what the line says. One must look closely and spend time with each photograph in order to read its phrase, and in this moment of confusion, our desire to understand language echoes both the complicated desire of Salomé and the private lives of Stern’s subjects, which in many cases once were or still are intimately interwoven.

Beyond the inclusion of language, the photographs are sumptuously layered with rich fabrics, flowers, and objects such as apples, candles, and skulls. These rich and painterly environments, however, are not precious—Stern deconstructs and reconstructs a new one for each shoot, rendering the resulting photographs a sort of monument to a specific moment of intimacy with her subject. The wallpaper, too, is a photograph: a flurry of ampersands appears on the walls of the exhibition, seeming to demand more, more, more. This underpins the fact that the space is one of desire, of wanting, and of excess. Appearing beyond and between the framed photographs, the ampersands of the wallpaper seem a constant reminder that there is always more: more desire, more heartbreak, more tragedy. Yet at the same time, perhaps they encourage us as well. Even when desires are left fractured or unfulfilled, there is always something, or someone, more that we can turn to.

When in the throes of unrequited love or heartbreak, oftentimes solace is found in the lyrics of a song. This is why it feels apt that Stern turned to Salomé, a play rife with its own refrains. In fact, in “De Profundis”—a letter Wilde composed while imprisoned for sodomy, the same year that Salomé was first performed in France—the playwright wrote that “the refrains whose recurring motifs make Salomé so like a piece of music … bind it together as a ballad.”² While one may first think of the ballad as a sentimental song, Stern’s richly layered photographs are better aligned with the word’s second definition: “a poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas.” Each photograph bears a line from Wilde’s tragic play and, if one looks closely as they walk through the gallery, the refrains reveal themselves. These lyrical echoes underline the interconnectedness of Stern’s sitters, tied both to the artist and to one another through various constellations of intimacy. Now, with them brought together in this space, they create a devastating harmony.

1. Oscar Wilde, Salomé, A Tragedy in One Act: Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde, with Sixteen Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane Company, MCMVII, 1907), 2, 3, 7.
2. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905. The Project Gutenberg eBook. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/921/921-h/921-h.htm