The Brooklyn Rail

Rebecca Bengal’s collection of essays and interviews, Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, asks readers to consider how a photograph will be understood in the unforeseen future, while also digging deeply into the past, locating the moment in which an artist felt compelled to pick up their camera and shoot.

Bengal’s prose encapsulates an alchemy of experience and circumstance that effortlessly mirrors the immersive styles of the artists she covers. Her collection brings us closer to pioneering photographers, curating her reader’s experience of an artist’s work by offering a short story for Justine Kurland’s photo series “Girl Pictures,” an essay on ambiguity and the veracity of truth in Yevgenia Belorusets’s work, and a meditation on Prince’s legacy via a trip taken with the icon’s one-time neighbor, photographer Alec Soth. Bengal writes about Nan Goldin’s photographs of the eighties, suggesting that an artist’s subjective experience has the power to connect, and furthermore, that the desire for connection is at the heart of artistic expression: “At the heart of the story is the photographer, who points the camera at herself from the same unflinching vantage.” Photography lives in the tension between intimacy and voyeurism, and Bengal brings readers to this nexus by familiarizing them with the artists themselves, pressing on photography’s unique power of storytelling.

As a fiction writer, Bengal understands how an image can transport a reader to a specific time and place. In her essay on Nancy Rexroth’s photo book IOWA (1977), Bengal focuses on the artist’s ability to transport a viewer not only to a specific place, but to a complex feeling: “The photographs she’d begun to take in her twenties do not represent a literal place, but a portal, a feeling: the subconscious pull of memory,” Bengal writes. The photos in Rexroth’s IOWA, only one of which is reproduced in this essay collection, thrum with a humidity palpable during an Iowa summer, which Rexroth had experienced many times during her childhood family vacations and had hoped to evoke in these photographs taken, despite the title, in Pomeroy, Ohio. The location mattered less than Rexroth’s desire to convey the profound feeling she characterized as Iowa.

The collection’s titular essay, “Strange Hours: William Eggleston in Memphis, William Eggleston in New York City,” takes Bengal to the Lamplighter Lounge, a bar in Memphis that Eggleston frequented until he was barred for life after drunkenly throwing a hamburger at the bartender. On the eve of his Whitney retrospective, she focuses on Eggleston as the consummate insider-outsider, unaware of the numerous worlds he’d come to inhabit over his career, living both in Warhol’s New York and with his wife and family in Memphis. “His startling compositions directed viewers to look as closely as his camera, to recognize the grace, violence, and humor implicit in the mundane,” Bengal notes. “In his hands, the camera becomes a palpable, itinerant presence; the scope feels restless, filmic. Nothing was off-limits, and nothing mattered more than anything else. The image of a child’s face—even the face of his own child—carried no more photographic weight than a rusted car door.” This focus on “banality,” brought forth by his democratic eye and use of color, along with his southernness, made him a novelty in the New York art scene alongside well-known names: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand.

But even in this essay, which positions Eggleston at times as the auteur of his work, recognizing both his mythology as well as the mythology of place, Bengal pays close attention to the rudimentary elements of Eggleston’s photos: “The Whitney retrospective demonstrates Eggleston’s mastery in depicting the place of a place. But it is equally possible to see the show as just the opposite: a career-long meditation on how the particular can reveal the abstract—the composition of light and its reflection.” During her time spent with Eggleston, she notes that he keeps strange hours, sometimes staying up all night playing music. He strikes Bengal as someone that belongs as equally to the night as he does the day, something that is apparent in his photographs, which reveal a surreal awareness of how light changes.

In an interview with Nan Goldin, Bengal transports us to Goldin’s New York—to queer nightlife, long shifts at the neighborhood bar, drugs and sex, to the height of the AIDS crisis, and perhaps Goldin’s most well-known work: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a collection of photographs she’s described as a visual diary. In the interview, which feels in some ways like its own retrospective, Goldin discusses different iterations Ballad has taken over the years and how the selection and arrangement of photos has changed between exhibitions, making each iteration like a performance. Bengal suggests that the reshuffling of images in Goldin’s slideshows creates a new narrative arc, each with a different experience for viewers. Goldin emphasizes that for her, the pleasure and artistry of photography is in the exhibition building, a score of stills akin to film: anticipatory and anchored in adventure. Similarly, Strange Hours is composed of stand-alone essays, not written at first to appear side by side, but taken as a whole, curated after the fact of their making—they create their own story.

Photography is inherently retrospective, dedicated to preservation and memory, yet it has the power to offer something more expansive and fluid. “A photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the time of its subsequent rediscovery,” Bengal explains in her essay “And the Clock Waits So Patiently,” on time and an image’s mutable context. She explores this concept again in “Picturing the Past-Present: A Visit with Dawoud Bey in Brooklyn,” which remarks on Bey’s ability to speak to the current moment while “imaginatively questioning the past and its place in our experience of the now.” A photographer is a time traveler, yet must live firmly in the present moment, documenting, without knowledge of a future context, what is most remarkable about the right now, imbuing it with a feeling that reverberates far into an unknown future. In her interview, Goldin emphasizes the necessity of remaining present: “It’s important to understand when I took the pictures I was not thinking of their later use of preserving memory because I was in the moment—I didn’t know what would be lost.”

Bengal is fascinated with a photograph’s unique ability to exist both in a moment and to evolve infinitely over time. Through her immersive storytelling and her curation of Strange Hours, Bengal connects us to the very place of a photograph’s conception, not as an act of capturing the moment, but in service of showing us the photo’s evolution.