Photographers - Part 4

 John Dugdale

John Dugdale was born in 1960 and is still alive.  What is fascinating is that his best work was done after he went blind.  How is that possible?  Read on.

He embarked on a successful career in commercial photography, photographing things like cashmere and china and glassware, which was lucrative but not soul-satisfying.  In his few non-commercial photos, he often featured male nudes, like Joao II Sitting, 1991 (above).  For Dugdale, a revealing photo meant ridding the self of clothes.  “Life is transient,” he said.  "Once you leave this world, you fly into the universe without clothes. I want people to learn you cannot protect yourself by hiding behind clothes.”

He bought a house in rural update New York, which became his retreat.  His obsession was to restore it to its original 19th century state, a time period that he loves.   Maurice Sendak, the children's book author, became Dugdale's friend and a father-figure to him.  Sendak collected his photos, including this one from 1993, Kneeling male nude and seated woman, now in the Metropolitan Museum collection in New York.  It is one of a series featuring a naked man along with clothed men and women dressed in Victorian costumes – which of course would never have happened, so these photos are fantasies, but they are in tune with Dugdale's love of the 19th century.

Dugdale is gay.  Sometime in the 1980s he contracted HIV.  In 1993 he became completely blind in his right eye and lost 80% of the vision in his left eye due to an HIV-related disease.  He also suffered a series of strokes that left him paralyzed, and he was hospitalized for a year.  New AIDS drugs came out just in time, and he survived, but his life was changed.

He taught himself to walk again and decided to switch to art photography, exploring 19th century techniques and using an antique large-format camera.  He also switched his development process to cyanotype and platinum prints, particularly because he hated the toxic chemicals from his AIDS treatments, and cyanotype (the process used for blueprints) uses only non-toxic chemicals (iron salts).  

His vintage full-format camera has a huge 11x14-inch ground glass viewfinder at the back.  He was still able to see enough of the image to work, though he had to ask an assistant to focus the image to make sure it was sharp.  Later, as his remaining sight disappeared, he asked the assistant to move his (Dugdale’s) finger on the viewfinder screen to trace the outlines of the photo subjects, and in that way he could still “see” the subjects and tell them to move until the image was what he wanted. Above is a cyanotype called A Turbulent Dream, 1996.  More often than not, his subjects were male nudes, and often he  himself was the model.

I Could Not See to See, 1994 (above) is a platinum print, made using another vintage process.  The title comes from a poem I heard a Fly buzz by Emily Dickenson.  Dugdale told the story behind this photo:

So this fellow came over, beautiful, sculptural body, just what you would want for a photograph. … I took a number of pictures of him, and he was kind of blank and I was kind of blank, and I can tell these are just going to look like art porn pictures, which I never let go out of here…. I said, "Listen I don't even know you but I've got this long shutter release, could I come and sit in between your legs?”

So, we—he opened up his legs and I got in between, and put my back against his chest, and he put his arms around me. I put my head down, he put his head down on my neck, and I snapped the picture. That was the one piece of film that I had left, that I call I Could Not See to See.

And what I learned on that day, is that I had to rethink my idea about intimacy.

Sun God, 1997 (above) also has a fascinating story.  Dugdale was scheduled to speak at the University of Alabama.  He took this photo of his model Ivan and he thought "You know what, this is my David [referring to Michaelangelo's David], I'm going to put this in the slide carousel and bring it down to Alabama, and I'm going to show it during the talk where there was faculty and students.”  He went to Alabama to give his talk.  He described what happened:

Everything's pretty safe, then kaboom!, you know nine feet tall, this picture way in your face, but inarguably a beautiful classical figure study. There was nothing but silence and I thought, "Oh gosh, okay." There's mostly silence, I can really listen to the audience and hear murmurs, inhalations, exhalation. I can feel them leaning forward or leaning back. I can tell when they're getting restless, when they're feeling emotional. It's incredible, the energy that I can feel from people while we're experiencing the journey that I'm telling you about photographically.

And so it's all silence during Ivan's picture, and I was out in town the next day walking around and you know what? People kept approaching me, "Can I take you aside for a minute?" "Do you have any idea how grateful I am that you showed that picture yesterday?" "We don't get to see stuff like that, in that room very often; we're so thrilled." Teachers, women, men teachers, young men, young women, all races, and I thought, "Oh you know what, I did the right thing." You know, it was so nice to bring that to them. And I also thought I should get off the street in case anyone was going to take a pot shot at me with a gun. You know I felt very uncomfortable, but I guess it was all a bit of activism on my part.

This is In the shadow of his beloved, 2000.  Dugdale is a master of double exposures.  Here the standing figure is ghostly – you can see through him – but you can't see through the seated figure (who I think is Dugdale himself; many of his photos are self-portraits).

Finally, this is Smile, for your lover comes, 2000.  One is tempted to feel sorry for Dugdale because he's blind, but Dugdale is not sorry for himself.  Going blind forced him to give up an unsatisfying commercial career, and it made him concentrate on what he loves.  "The mind is the essence of your sight," he says.  "It's really the mind that sees."