The Photographic Pretext
(A Comment on Dennis Witnauer's Paintings and Drawings)

Dennis Witnauer's recent paintings and drawings simultaneously re-member a family and inscribe loss and separation. Based on photographs he took as a child of his family, each series within this body of work is marked by a rigorous visual operation enacted on the photograph that materializes the act of painting as a form of memory work.
In the course of a conversation with Dennis, he made two comments that seemed to me to go to the heart of this project. When I asked why he was not pictured in these images, he said that it had never really occurred to him to paint himself. "I never felt myself to be part of my family." To not be a part, and yet to still recognize these people as "my" family: this is to point to alienation and distance within the "embrace" of the nuclear family. It is also to put oneself in the ambiguous role of witness, the one whose role it is to see and document, to be both present and absent, both implicated in and discharged from the scene.
The second comment that struck me was Dennis's statement that, for him, the photograph itself, the trace from which these images are derived, is unimportant. The photographs were never arranged lovingly in an album, he explained, but reclaimed in a visit home several years ago; he does not hold these images with reverence. They are not tokens of lost innocence or fragments of a lost past to be recovered through painting. Rather, he explained, the photograph is for him a tool not unlike a paintbrush. Only through the work that one does with it does it become an extension of oneself that allows one to act-or in this case, to see-beyond one's normal faculties. It is less the photograph in itself than the work he does with it that brings Dennis into a dialogue with his family and his past through these paintings.
Photography, more than any particular photograph, is a subject of this work. The paintings and drawings inevitably comment on the integral role of the photographic ritual in family life in late twentieth century America-in which the family itself seems brought into being by the act of photographing. Just as, in the large "White Paintings," for example, the girl becomes a woman by learning to form her body into a sexy pin-up pose, or the man insists on his masculinity by holding a beer can low to his hip and gazing with smoldering, intense eyes into the camera, so the family recognizes and affirms its existence through the ratifying evidence of the photograph. What Marianne Hirsch has called "the familial gaze" is reconstituted and re-examined in these paintings that show the interpenetrations of ideological constructs and icons of family, gender, and class with the most personal of 'looks' among individual, particular family members.1 As the photographer and now the painter, Dennis positions himself as the observer of his family who confirms its existence even as he bears witness to its artifice and questions its integrity.
It is also for the reconstructive work that the photographic trace invites that it serves as an instrument of recollection, a pre-text, for Dennis. The photograph has been described as a "clue" left behind at the scene of a crime. It is fragmentary and elusive in its documentary promise; it demands an imaginative act to render a past from its flimsy offering. For the painter/rememberer the photograph offers a rigorous set of constraints-a reduced, partial, inherently inadequate scene-which nevertheless provides a structure to guide the always unruly, sometimes terrifying, process of memory. In enacting a transformation from photograph to a new surface, Dennis's paintings and drawings seem to exploit and amplify this constraint, to channel it the way a hose both contains and intensifies the flow of water. In all of these paintings and drawings Dennis has left visible the pencil grid by which he transposed the photographic image into a new scale and onto a new surface. In leaving the grid visible in the painting Dennis lays bare his use of a technique that might be considered amateurish, demystifying the act of painting and especially the technical feat of photo-realism. This form of transcription mimics the amateur quality of the photographs themselves. More importantly, it seems to me that the grid takes the place of the camera lens, or rather inserts the camera lens into the painted image, for it insists on a mechanical operation that is foundational to the image itself. More than the portrayed scene, it is the grid that indexes the "original" photograph as the painting's referent-the photograph not so much as recorded scene but as a technology of seeing and remembering. The grid, like the camera lens, is an apparatus that both makes vision possible and at the same time stands between seer and seen. It is thus a metaphor for the mediated work of memory-and the work of painting.
In the "Sisters Paintings," the first set of images in the series made up of paired paintings of photographs Dennis took of his two sisters Laura and Denise, the viewer is brought back to a scene of adolescence in a semi-urban landscape of the 1970s. The paintings are saturated by a sense of limitation countered by an urge to transcendence. The monochromatic almost black and white painting suggests a deprivation of the senses and the monotonous landscape of a housing development and parking lot or the confinement of an interior in which a painting of a tropical scene-perhaps a cheap tourist souvenir-offers a highly conventionalized promise of an exotic elsewhere. The camera itself is shoddy, second-rate: the figure placed centrally in the viewfinder ends up shifted to the left of the frame and out of focus, while the cars in the "background" are clearly delineated. Yet the bikini-clad sisters-assuming sexy poses against a backdrop of cars in a parking lot-assert themselves, proudly facing the camera with their backs to the parking lot. Denise, with eyes closed, looks as if she's in a sublime state, we guess that she is somewhere else even as her body is physically rooted to the concrete.
A sense of the play of imagination pushing against constrained resources pervades another pair of images from this "Sisters Paintings." The sisters are each posed in front of some kind of a cabinet with family pictures and knick-knacks on it. Laura, holding a tray with a drink on it, enacts the role of the waitress, while Denise awkwardly holds out two trophies to the camera like bizarre prosthetic limbs. Although the paintings at first glance appear to have identical backdrops, a different arrangement of objects appears on each further eroding a sense that these are "documents' in any naïve way and injecting a sense of mystery into this otherwise familiar family snapshot. Much more than the later paintings, these "Sister Paintings" bring us back to the place of the past - to the feel of hot summer asphalt and stuffy living rooms-and to iconic scenes of middle America rendered in that quintessential form of popular imagery, the snapshot. But the paintings become more than nostalgic records or a comment on the kitschy-ness of snapshot photography because of the way they register an intense feeling of confinement and, at the same time, a striving beyond the limits of the frame and the moment. It is this interplay in personal photographs between what is and what might be (or, retrospectively, what might have been), between the documentary and the theatrical, that Dennis seems to be exploring.
If the "Sister Paintings" address the act of taking a photograph, the small-scale set of drawings-we could call them the "Excision Drawings"-engage the act of looking at a photograph. In these drawings Dennis has cut a single figure out from the context of a photograph, leaving the negative space to suggest the absent figures and objects that once populated the photograph. One's eye immediately wants to reconstruct the absent family dog, the small child on the man's lap, to put them back in the picture. This act of excision exaggerates the partial, fragmentary nature of the photograph itself, exposing the false "completeness" of the family photograph. In its play of absence and presence, it both frustrates and incites the viewer's desire to reconstitute the past through these inadequate traces. There is violence in this act of excision, in the denial to the man of the child's hand on his knee, and in the butchering of the body that results from the surgical removal of the figures around, on top, and next to it. This remembering as dismemberment speaks to loss and alienation, insistently refusing the interconnectedness between people that family photographs as insistently portray. Is Dennis saying that these relationships never existed, that they were fictions of the conventions of snapshot photography? Or is he reflecting on relationships that have now been severed, attesting not to the family that never was but to the family that no longer is? In these exquisitely delicate drawings, as in all of Dennis's work, I am not sure if the beauty of the rendering works against the rupture suggested by the image itself, redeeming it in some way. Or does the rigorous care with which the image is drawn actually make the violence more acute, like a cut made with a perfectly sharpened knife?
The most recent series of paintings in this body of work, the "White Paintings," takes the decontextualization of the figure to a different degree as well as a different scale. The sense of a surrounding context remains-we know from the poses and asymmetrical placement that these are figures torn from a more densely- filled image-but we can no longer imaginatively reconstruct that surround; everything, even the body of the single figure pictured in each painting, is under erasure. To me, the paintings suggest memory's disregard for scale and context, its distorting projections. A fleeting scene expands and assumes monstrous proportions, a particular photograph recording an off-guard expression retrospectively takes on iconic status. While the "Excision Drawings" retain the intimate and fragile scale of the snapshot, these paintings blow the figure up to larger-than-life size. The members of this family seem both monumental and as if they are about to be wiped away. While the "Sisters Paintings" play on the photograph's ability to enact a kind of travel, bringing us back to the past's longing for a future, these paintings exaggerate the temporal and physical mobility of the photograph in the other direction. They uproot figures from the past so that we can or must face them here and now. Have they been rescued? Or are we witnessing a moment in their disappearance? Each one looks at us and seems just about to say.

1 Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

-Karen Strassler, New York

Karen Strassler is an anthropologist whose research explores popular photographic practices in Java, Indonesia. She is interested in questions of photography, technological mediation, and memory. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and is currently the Hardy Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.