The Brooklyn Rail

In Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play Salomé, there is a repeated refrain wherein goodness and beauty are allegorically white, while evil and decay are allegorically black. Unsurprisingly, this is generally focused on the “purity” of Princess Salome’s white skin. She is like a white “rose, dove, butterfly,” etc. At the climax of the play an otherwise unmentioned character named Naaman, an enslaved executioner, is forced to deliver the severed head of Saint John the Baptist. The stage notes describe simply a “huge black arm” as the physical undoing of godliness. In my larger body of work, “One Should Not Look At Anything,” I have explored the written word of Wilde’s poetry through highly constructed portraits and still lives made in my studio. While undertaking that work I have not been able to shake off the text’s obsession with black and white, this clear race-focused system of valuation dispersed amid so much language. In the dizzy space of poetry, I began to think through this division by using my Mamiya rangefinder and black-and-white film. The pictures featured here were made out in the world—Greek ruins, strip clubs, museums—where I seek the specific, moralistic poetics of black and white presented in Wilde’s allegories in order to etch them in the silver of my film and present them in visual grayscale. They are representations of the ideas of morality found within the story of Salomé, specifically around queerness, desire, good and evil, race and gender, black and white. I came to this text with my heart utterly broken; broken by the apocalyptic status of the world, by unrequited objects of my desire, by the inevitable disappointments of life, by all of its exquisite and unfathomably chaotic beauty. In my heartbreak I am drawn to Wilde’s play because it is able to give poetic form to the problems of gender and love, power and race, sex and death, autonomy and duty, all of this stuff of life, and describe it, organize it, and display it through beauty. How brilliant and cruel to order all of these things so beautifully, to make it tenable to gaze upon them and in doing so to force their consideration. My pictures are my way of offering this same opportunity for pain, the ability to look at something because it is beautiful even while you know it will break your heart.