Opening The Shutter

George Dureau’s photos expose a world of flawed beauty

by Douglas Maccash, The Times-Picayune

Tellingly, Dureau almost always titles his photos with the name of the model – in part his photos are a record of friends and acquaintances that pass in and out of his life. Dureau, who has always eschewed complicated camera technique, created the white negative area behind Terrell Hopkins, in this 1987 simply by positioning the model in front of a signal flag with a white square in the center.

The exhaustive, 186-piece retrospective of George Dureau’s photography at the Contemporary Arts Center may very well offend you. To begin with, the 69-year-old artist’s principle subject is the nude male, with no detail left unexposed. But that’s only the start. Dureau’s models are often exquisitely proportioned, muscular men (and occasionally women), who exemplify our ideals of beauty and grace, but just as often his subjects are dwarves, amputees or the morbidly obese. All of his photos are arresting; some are gut punches.

So why would you want to see them at all? Isn’t life ugly enough without seeking out grotesque, often disturbing images in art museums? A fair question, but Dureau doesn’t create or exhibit his photos for their shock value. In fact, he has a way of softening the imperfections of his subjects, lending the models a measure of human dignity that the fates have done their best to strip away. His photos are strangely beautiful and deeply meaningful, though it’s difficult at first to say why.

You probably already know one aspect of Dureau’s work, even if you’ve never set foot in an art gallery. At Café Sbisa in the French Quarter, his mural of glamorously dressed bon vivants glows in the spotlights above the bar. At city functions in Gallier House, his elegant depiction of a mythic Mardi Gras parade dominates an entire wall. His muscular cast-bronze nudes guard the side entrance to the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park; his seductive portrait of Professor Longhair appeared on last years’ Jazzfest poster; and, most recently, his enormous bust of Artemis began staring down on Canal Street from the pediment of Harrah’s casino. Dureau is hard to miss.

Over his 35-year career, his sinewy drawings, paintings and occasional sculptures have made him the perennial darling of the New Orleans art scene. More than any other artist in memory, he has enjoyed wide popular acclaim while continuing to be taken seriously by the critics, curators and collectors of the local art establishment.

But local may be the key word where his drawings and paintings are concerned. Dureau, a New Orleans native who has only rarely left the city, speaks in an artistic language that is best understood here. His subtly toned canvases of human figures, executed in a relatively traditional style respectful of classical artists from Caravaggio to Degas, jives perfectly with New Orleans’ self-image. Aesthetically speaking, we are a rearward-looking town. We cherish Mardi Gras traditions, Creole architecture and styles of décor that are anything but Modern.

If you travel to art locales such as nearby Houston or Atlanta, though, (cities whose self-images have more to do with the future than the past), his drawings and paintings are practically unknown. His reputation as a photographer, however, is worldwide.

Dureau’s camera work is frequently featured in books such as Melody Davis’ “The Nude Male in Photography” and photo journals such as “Aperture.” He has been given museum exhibits (most recently at the Glassell School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston), and has shown in galleries as far away as Paris. It is only his extremely challenging subject matter that keeps his photography from reaching an even wider audience.

Dureau’s photographs are so admired in art circles because they don’t mean any one thing; they mean a great many things. Are the pictures supposed to be erotic? Yes, many of Dureau’s photos are undeniably sexy. But that is only one aspect. They are also often affectionate portraits of the people who have drifted in and out of Dureau’s life over the decades — a photo album of the artist’s “family,” as he calls them. Do they relate to his paintings? Yes, Dureau poses certain of his amputee models so that they echo limbless Greco-Roman statues damaged by time, creating the same classical milieu as we often find in his non-photographic work. Are these photos in part a political commentary? Yes, almost all of Dureau’s models are, one way or another, outside of the mainstream of society. Most of this models are African American. Dureau’s work subtly suggests that just being black marginalizes a percentage of the population.

Born legless, B.J. Robinson could easily have been photographed as an object of pity; instead Dureau illuminates his indomitability and defiance.

But despite their poetic content, they are not for everyone. To enjoy – or at least

appreciate – Dureau’s photography, you must be open-minded. He is like Henry Miller, whose brilliant novels were written in authentic voice too course for popular publication. Or Lenny Bruce, whose sexually frank comedy routines illuminated truths of 1960’s America ; or Adrian Lyne, whose movies such as “9 ½ Weeks,” “Lolita,” and “Fatal Attraction” are sophisticated classics.

If Dureau’s photographs remind you of the work of another photographer, it may be the notorious Robert Mapplethorpe, whose posthumous exhibit of explicitly sexual photography in 1990 so enraged Congress that funding for the National Endowment for the Arts was substantially cut. But viewing Dureau as a follower of Mapplethrope would be putting the cart before the horse. Mapplethorpe, in fact, visited New Orleans several times between 1979 and ’81, in part to meet Dureau and to observe his technique.

But despite their poetic content, they are not for everyone. To enjoy — or at least appreciate — Dureau’s photography, you must be open-minded. He is like Henry Miller, whose brilliant novels were written in an authentic voice too coarse for popular publication. Or Lenny Bruce, whose sexually frank comedy routines illuminated truths of 1960s America; or Adrian Lyne, whose movies such as “9/2 Weeks,” “Lolita,” and “Fatal Attraction” are sophisticated classics.

If Dureau’s photographs remind you of the work of another photographer, it may be the notorious Robert Mapplethorpe, whose posthumous exhibit of explicitly sexual photography in 1990 so enraged Congress that funding for the National Endowment for the Arts was substantially cut. But viewing Dureau as a follower of Mapplethorpe would be putting the cart before the horse. Mapplethorpe, in fact, visited New Orleans several times between 1979 and ’81, in part to meet Dureau and to observe his technique.

But in spite of their similar interest in figural photography, the two men found little common ground in their working methods. Mapplethorpe was impatient with Dureau, who spent countless hours conversing with his models, dining, drinking and strolling the French Quarter before he began a photo session. Then he cajoled his models into poses that were partially of his design, but also partially of their making. Why, Mapplethorpe wanted to know, didn’t he just pay them and tell them what to do?

Dureau was taken aback by the younger man’s abruptness and in difference to the people he photographed. Dureau did pay his models outright, but he also befriended them in a way Mapplethorpe could not understand. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the major differences between their work is that Dureau’s has a certain sense of intimacy that Mapplethorpe’s lacks. Mapplethorpe’s “Black Book” of 1986, a portfolio of photos of African Americans, is a tribute to Dureau’s influence.

A more interesting parallel is with the Storyville photographer Ernest Bellocq (1873-1949), who documented prostitutes in the legal brothels of pre-World War I New Orleans. Bellocq’s photos typically contain a nude or semi-nude woman in a bleak, sparsely furnished room. The photos are haunting. They’re erotic, but they are also pathetic, and utterly, utterly humane. Bellocq had an unerring gift for finding the human being in what were supposed to be sex objects.

Bellocq’s pictures are all the more magnetic because we do not know their purpose. The glass negatives had gone unseen for decades when they resurfaced in the mid 1950s. By that time, Bellocq was dead and the history of the photographs was lost. Had Bellocq, an unremarkable commercial photographer, been commissioned to illustrate a catalog of girls-for-hire, to be distributed to gentlemen passing through town? Or were the pictures more personal? From scant written records, it seems likely that one of the young ladies was his lover. But what about the rest? It’s possible that Bellocq, who seems to have been rather shy and retiring, took photos as a substitute for physical sex. Or was he having sex with more than one of these women?

The same questions have been asked about Dureau. Are his photos a record of a stream of lovers? Actual lovers, or is the camera an avenue for lust? Dureau is quick to point out that the great majority were photo subjects and nothing more, ordinary heterosexual men, many with wives and families, who interested him visually.

But it is not just the sexual intrigue that bonds Dureau with Bellocq; it is the starkness of the compositions as well. The absence of many props or decor psychically links the model and photographer in a way that might be lost if the model seemed more at home. In both men’s photos, there seems to be no one else in the universe, only the artist and his subject. Each would be terribly lonely without the other.

Artists rarely model themselves on only one other artist. Ordinarily, an artist’s style is an amalgam of influences. Dureau traces his taste in photography to the romantic black and white movies he saw as a child, featuring the striking visages of Paul Muni, Joan Crawford and Edward G. Robinson, and occasional photographs of African subjects in Life magazine. But the link with Bellocq may actually be more direct.

In a way, Dureau’s career as a photographer began with a bad review. In 1971, he had an exhibit of drawings and paintings at the Orleans Gallery in the French Quarter. His previous shows had included street scenes and figure studies executed in a broad sketchy style reminiscent of Richard Diebenkom. But the subject matter of his new works was primarily nude males in classical settings, drawn with more precision than in the past. There were rumors that the show was in jeopardy of being shut down by the police because of the erotic content, and the fact that African-American and Caucasian nudes were featured on the same canvases. That never happened, but the show was no doubt quite radical for the South at the time.

Alberta Collier, art critic for the Times-Picayune, didn’t like the exhibit, but she did not criticize Dureau’s ability to draw, compose or choose harmonious colors. Her negativity centered at first on the repetitiveness of Dureau’s theme, but then expanded to condemn the content. “The whole thing is something like a broken record repeating a groove over and over again. And I’m not sure this particular groove was worth playing in the first place,” she wrote. She also encouraged Dureau to abandon his “Michaelangelo binge.” The mention of Michaelangelo might simply have been a reference to Dureau’s concentration on the nude figure, but since there is evidence that the great Baroque master was homosexual, it could also be read as a veiled reaction to her assumptions about Dureau’s life style. Dureau says that people have often drawn simplistic conclusions about his private life from his works.

Still he took the rebuke hard. It was more than a negative reaction to his work: He felt it was an assault on his character. He is quick to point out that there was no sexual activity in those works. As a matter of fact, unlike Mapplethorpe and others, there are no sex acts in any of Dureau’s art. Like an inmate examining a court record, he read Collier’s review again and again, searching for a loophole in her opinion (30 years later he can still recite her offensive words almost verbatim). The public rejection provoked in him a period of self-reflection, even depression. He declined to exhibit again for six years, and spent most of his time privately honing the most personal aspect of his art, his charcoal drawing. It was in this period of artistic hibernation that he discovered photography, an even more intimate, more realistic art form.

“She had always loved me,” Dureau said of Collier. “She compared me to Edward Hopper and artists like that. Then I went back to the Renaissance for inspiration and started including more nudity in my work and suddenly she turned against me. She seemed so mad. It was like I was her son the doctor and she discovered I was an abortionist. That was right at the moment I decided to tighten up my art. I had always drawn, but never really intensely, so I concentrated on that. And I decided I’d start photographing my models, too. It was like I was concentrating on the accuracy of the drawings for the first time and I wanted the photographs to substantiate them. People sometimes thought I made my models up. The photographs proved that they were real,” Dureau said.

Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but on the same page as Collier’s review was an article about the first exhibition of Bellocq’s photography at the Delgado Museum of Art (now called NOMA). Is it possible that as Dureau returned again and again to Collier’s negative assessment of his work beside a positive assessment of Bellocq’s that the seed of intimate, nude, figural photography was planted? Dureau did not recall that the Bellocq review appeared beside his own, but he does acknowledge some interest in the Storyville photos. His attraction to Bellocq was renewed in 1977 when he was considered for a bit part in the movie “Pretty Baby,” loosely based on Bellocq’s career, which was being filmed in New Orleans He declined when he was asked to cut his long hair.

To be fair, Dureau’s earliest photos hardly recall Bellocq. Scattered amid the tens of thousands of small prints and contact sheets piled everywhere in Dureau’s studio/home are rather conventional 35 mm shots from 1971 and 1972 of people reclining in the grass at a festival in Armstrong Park, people waiting for a parade along the curb of Rampart Street and friends posing against a porch rail (unfortunately, none of these appear in the CAC show). Soon, though, those pictures gave way to square, large format shots made with an inexpensive Mamiyaflex camera. These outdoor compositions of 1972-74 typically feature neighborhood passers-by whom Dureau posed against the relatively blank stucco wall of his St. Anne Street Apartment. Several of these photos are included in the CAC retrospective.

At the middle of the decade, Dureau began bringing his models indoors, where he could compose the lighting and where he could ask them to remove their clothing. He has cast off the Mamiyaflex for a finer Hasselblad camera with a portrait lens, to reduce spatial distortions in his medium-distance shots, The next batch of photographs, taken a la Bellocq against the rough walls, chipped mantles and flaking window sills of Dureau’s apartment in the crumbing Dufour-Baldwin mansion on Esplanade Avenue, are the photos that propelled Dureau onto the world stage, and they are the shots that make up the bulk of the current exhibit.

Here is Earl Leavell, his arms twisted into fleshen pretzels by a congenital birth defect, posing like an African prince for Dureau’s camera. Here is Troy Brown, an unimposing young man transformed into a vision of a Nordic god. Here is B.J. Robinson, born without legs, striding across a draped table on his muscular arms and staring into the camera like a lion. Here is Terrell Hopkins, a slightly built man, raising a welder’s mask off of his face as if it were a bronze helmet and he were Agamemnon. And here is Wilbur Hines, who lost his left arm above the elbow in an accident, posed with the grace and dignity of Nureyev.

There’s no trickery involved in these arresting photos. Dureau remains willfully ignorant of the technical complexities of photography. He uses natural light as often as he can, augmented only with bright lights. He composes entirely through the lens. That is, he does not crop off extraneous areas in the darkroom. The thick black line around practically all of his shots demonstrates that the entire negative was used to make the print. Dureau, in fact, never enters the dark room. He leaves the printing to trusted assistants. The success of Dureau’s photography lies almost entirely with the simple manipulation of the model.

Later pieces such as his series of nude males posed on small sandstrewn stages from 1990-91 (his artistic acknowledgment of the Gulf War), his amputees posed with guns from 1996 (done for a group show of art made with fire arms), and his most recent tongue-in-cheek Roman Senator vignettes of last year, are somehow less interesting. Dureau has lost none of his photographic skill. In fact, technically many of these prints are superior to earlier work. But the feel of the work has changed. At his best, Dureau was lost in his own mystery: He no more knew the meaning of his photos than the next person. Now he has definite ideas about what his work represents— a self-styled neoclassicism— and he skews his art in that direction. His new work does not fail— it was just more compelling when he posed questions than when he began making assertions.

What does the phrase “important art” mean? Perhaps it means that the art has a poetic life beyond its content, that it is a metaphor for greater truths. If so, Dureau’s work is terribly important. Like a stone tossed into a pond, the ripples of meaning extend around his photography in all directions. Dureau’s theme, at its core, is flawed beauty. His photos imply the fate of homosexuals, normal human beings irreparably afflicted in society’s eyes. They bring to mind the South, a region of stunning beauty and bounty that remains tainted by the legacy of slavery. And they are glimpses of the collective soul of man, a creature created in the image of God, but scarred by vanity and avarice. Such is the importance of this work, and this once-in-a-lifetime exhibit.