Alyson Belcher’s haunting photographs arise though planning and happenstance, utilizing the technological purity of the pinhole camera, which acts as an open shutter. Every nuanced movement is layered in a delicate black-and-white palimpsest (including seated or standing figures), yet these improvisational documents are infused with primal, if not mythological, textures. Belcher achieves this with her Spartan compositions, replete with neutral grey-black backgrounds and nubile youths who appear to have sprung from the temenos of antiquity. By limiting her palette to the pinhole camera, images in motion are diffuse and the subject’s features reside in perpetual chiaroscuro; this suggests these figures are ciphers, ghosts, or gods (or in the very least, inscrutable personas).
Ceding a percentage of the choreography to chance has been the metier of such artists as John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Boccioni, and Robert Altman, with alternately mixed and transcendent results. Chance operations often lead to more choices in the editing process, as there is a tendency for the work to move toward abstraction; however, the images that succeed from this process have a vitality unlike anything in the more stage-managed, static world. Belcher is searching for that elusive time-lapse trouvaille (”lucky find”) through assiduous looking and trial-and-error. Ironically, the first image on this page is not an overt action portrait, but that of a somber trio of women, staring impassively at us through the ether like a mythological trinity, vis a vis the Graiae, the Gorgons, or the Fates. Are the figures in black antipodal to the trio in white in picture six (who call to mind the Hesperides)? Religious and mythological archetypes pervade Belcher’s work, whether by design or sublimation, particularly those of Adam and Eve (pictures two, three, and five). Image four hints at the reenactment of some Christ-like story: Is the woman on the right acknowledging the stigmata on the other woman’s arm? Is the woman on the left being healed? Is she being admonished by the risen Christ (ala “Noli Me Tangere!”)? Going back to a classical analysis, image seven conjures the specter of Hades taking hold of a mortified Persephone; and image eight, the last of the larger thumbnails, references Orestes besieged by the Furies (and more particularly, Munch’s “Scream”). One could even perceive Hindu archetypes in the repititious silhouettes: a four-faced Brahma, the multifarious arms of Durga, and so on.
Belcher’s aesthetic “stems from the idea that everything we experience is stored somewhere in our bodies. Movement is one way to access and give visual form to what lies beneath the surface of the skin. Often the body remembers what the mind has forgotten.” Her figures are charged with these kinetic memories and recursive emotions, at once anticipating and releasing them, simultaneously turning away and moving toward one another (or the viewer). In the second image, the figure in profile could be turning away from the woman’s touch, or turning to acknowledge it. In the third image, the figures’ hands are either falling away or surreptitiously reaching behind to connect. What results is an emotional mystery, fueled by the ambiguity of suggested movement. The element of time creates a mutability in the form, as the alternating opacity and translucence defining the path of action leaves one final image, a meta-silhouette (one could hazard to call it the actual figure over time). There is also a mutability in the transference of energy: a fast motion equates to more transparent and variegated images, a slow motion guarantees more homogenous, opaque forms. Belcher has captured the duende of the dance through the invisible dynamism of overlapping timings (and therefore, the dualism of each participant). Here’s Belcher’s take on the technical aspects of her craft:
The pinhole camera is low tech; it is the most basic tool for making a photographic image. There is no lens to interfere with the light as it travels from the subject to the film. Because there is no viewfinder through which to preview the image, it’s a relatively blind process. The element of time in pinhole photography allows something to arise that might never be revealed by modern photographic technology. The long exposure times give me an opportunity to explore the space in front of the camera. I may have the impulse to move, or I may chose to remain still—although the body is never completely still, and even the smallest movements leave traces on the film.
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