Work Text:
Missing from the Picture
Reviews - November 19, 2023
By Victoria M. Chase
It’s been years since I was last asked to review Max Caulfield’s work. I’d always said no, and after I explained, professors and editors generally didn’t ask a second time. The explanation was this: Max and I were classmates together in the last class taught by the late Mark Jefferson. The Photographer. Kidnapper. Murderer. Any article I wrote about her would inevitably be about that. Some things you can’t ignore or work around. And to make a review of her work about him… the thought sickened me. Frankly, her work surpassed his when we were still teenagers, and I felt that it ought to be appreciated on its own merits.
So it was a surprise to me when Jamelia Khoury specifically reached out to me for a review of WInDOWS. “Go, see it first, before you tell me no,” she said. I went. I saw. I came back and wrote a lot of words, most of which are unfit for publication or polite company. But Jamelia was right. This set of Caulfield’s work was something I should review, because I have the angle for it. Sometimes, you need to take the shot.
On a technical level, WInDOWS is full of Caulfield’s usual brilliant intuition for angles, the positioning of the viewpoint to naturally frame the subject not only within the bounds of the shot but to bracket it with surrounding details that highlight it. I didn’t agree with how she balanced light and shadow back in school, and I still don’t, but it’s undeniable that her way works. It expresses emotion, gives an almost palpable sense of not just the subject of the image, but how the photographer who took it felt. The shots were beautiful, and I hated every last one.
As one might have guessed, it comes back to Jefferson. He was a monster in human skin, an unrepentant murderer. But whatever you think of his photos and how he took them, he was good at teaching. He influenced my own work, and as much as that makes me want to peel off my own skin, I can’t escape that fact. Caulfield has avoided taking portraits professionally, in all likelihood because she’s dealing with that same tainted legacy. But in WInDOWS, the style and composition we learned from the monster are on full display. Going from photo to photo felt to me like drowning.
Image: Through a hole torn through a wall by great violence, a table with several place settings can be seen. Detritus and splinters about, but the remains of what had clearly been a meal are still present, illuminated by light through a window on the far side of the room. The shot is angled so that only part of the window is visible, and the bare outline of a door out of the dining area can be made out. In the dim light, it is not clear if various stains are from spilled food or blood.
© Max Caulfield, 2023
I had a lot of thoughts about why she did this—it was all too clearly deliberate—most of which were unkind. But I knew the kind of person Max was and she wouldn’t dig up her own pain this way without good reason. So I went looking. At her blog, her known travel itinerary, clues that I could call on without talking to her (I didn’t trust myself not to start a fight). The answer, in the end, was simple, once I assembled the clues. Two trips to Ukraine. Three to Xinjiang. Five to Myanmar. A blog post about how no one in the states seemed to actually care about human rights violations a continent away despite lots of bluster in media soundbites.
WInDOWS hurt me because it was meant to. It was Max taking the worst, most awful thing she knew and infusing it into every painstaking shot of haunting beauty. And she does, somehow, manage to make desolation beautiful. This series was never about what she saw through the lens. The sorrow, the suffering, the sheer brokenness of the world—none of that is the actual subject. It’s about the negative space, so carefully framed in each shot. It’s about what isn’t there: Us in the first world, living our materially comfortable existences, free to not look if we don’t want to.
Image: A black and white photo taken in a room devoid of identifiable features A young woman sits leaning against a corner, her hands and feet bound by duct tape. She is undressed but posed in such a way as to obscure certain body parts that US sensibilities prefer covered. Her eyes are unfocused, staring off center from the photograph’s angle.
Photography by Mark Jefferson, 2013. Used with permission of the subject.
Jefferson’s photos were never about his victims or their supposed “innocence” (I’m allowed to say that—my name was on one of those red binders and innocence was years behind me at 18). Their framing, both in each shot and thematically as collections were about who wasn’t in the shot. Those photos were about him. Perhaps that’s why she was his favorite student. Her fondness for selfies wasn’t anything like his work, but perhaps he thought she was like him, a narcissist. If so, he was wrong. Caulfield puts herself in all her work, but primarily by trying to make other people feel what she felt. She gives of her own heart to draw the eye; he tore away from others to put so-called “innocence” on print.
And yet, in WInDOWS, Caulfield pointedly draws on Jefferson’s composition, his preferred palette. Seeing that style reproduced in her work was visceral and revolting. But that ugliness of spirit carries the intended meta-message behind WInDOWS. Jefferson’s victims were never people to him, only subjects. Those who suffer sectarian and nationalist violence in the third world aren’t people to us, just the subjects of photographs we might see in a magazine article or even admire in the gallery. Is it any less cruel that we put the work of war journalists on display this way than how Jefferson’s victims were made a media spectacle?
Every picture in the WInDOWS series mimics the empty callousness of Jefferson’s compositions by leaving an overt negative space—not as an expression of ego, but as an accusation. Just as Jefferson’s shots always had a hole shaped like the ugliness that was him, every shot of WInDOWS has an emptiness that points right back at the viewer. The accusation is this: We, as a society, had the power to stop this, if we really cared.
Image: Photograph taken from outside the door of what is clearly a classroom. The interior of the classroom is partially visible, but to a large degree obscured by the desks, chairs, books and at least on chalkboard hastily assembled into a barricade across the doorway. Bullet holes are visible along part of the opposite wall, stitched in a wavy line above a row of low cabinets.
© Max Caulfield, 2023
But we don’t. We, collectively, didn’t care about any of those girls whose names went on the red binders for years before Jefferson was caught. We don’t care that thousands starve to death in Myanmar or wilt in concentration camps in Xinjiang. We might look at pictures of the devastation in Ukraine and mouth platitudes but 90% of us won’t do a thing to help.
I’m sure someone out there is writing a piece asking why there are no widows, and indeed no pictures with people in them, in WInDOWS. That person is of course an idiot. WInDOWS is Caulfield’s perfect inversion of Jefferson’s oeuvre: he foregrounds people while stripping away their human dignity; she foregrounds absence in places where people belong with painful sharpness, all the better to remind us of the humanity that should be there. We, the viewers, are the widows. We see the empty space that should be full of life and we ache for something we may not be able to articulate but know has been lost. We are bereft, not of what is in the frame but of our own humanity that longs for connection.
The whole series is brilliant and thematic on multiple levels, and worth experience for that. It makes a cutting display of Caulfield’s technical skill; so sharp it makes me bleed. I feel that jagged edge, and I wonder how many scars she bears. In high school, I mocked her relentlessly for being a “hipster selfie-ho.” But those selfies were full of life and wonder. Today, I miss them dearly.
The artistic value can go die in fire. I just want to see joy in her shots again.
WInDOWS: Captured Scenes from Collateral Damage Zones was on view at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, from June 7 to October 24, 2023.
Victoria M. Chase is a columnist, photographer, and curator from Seattle. She is managing director of the Chase Space gallery.