Based in Hoboken, NJ, Mauro Altamura explores the loss of personal and political agency in our time, and the power of photographs to indiscriminately capture subjects, divesting them of their identity. In each of his photographs, Altamura isolates and enlarges the gritty, out-of-focus visages of the camera’s unintentional figures, recalling—among other genres of imagery—the tragic, fragmentary quality of causally shot portraits of victims mass reproduced for public consumption.

An ensemble of several hundred individual portraits installed in a tight, grid-like fashion, Anonymous (2000-2006) brings to mind diverse yet related private, institutional and governmental systems of photographic record-keeping and vernacular display. These visual systems—common cultural texts—range from photo collages found in the home, family albums, police files and morgue records, missing person notices, image data banks, the ongoing memory work of Holocaust museums and other commemorative sites, and the spontaneous posting of likenesses of the missing in the New York metropolitan area following 9/11.

Influenced, in part, by the electoral disenfranchisement of the controversial 2000 presidential election, Altamura taps into broad-based anxiety about the loss of influence and power. Of course, prior to 9/11, residual apprehension about the global balance of power and the vulnerability of the human condition had been manifest in Europe and the United States since the start of the post-Cold War era in 1989, and before that, during the Cold War, World War II and the Holocaust. The French artist, Christian Boltanski (b. 1944), whose parents and friends of the family were directly affected by the Holocaust, helped to pioneer this manner of working in the 1980s and 1990s.Boltanski recreated in many of his photographic installations the haunting, dank warehouse-like environment of concentration camp picture archives, and in others, reliquaries and shrines. In their cogent use of photography (and personal effects such as articles of clothing) to imply absence and death, Boltanski and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. established an important representational standard, influencing both contemporary art and the museum field.

Inasmuch as photographs are intended to convey human presence and the present, they connote the past from the moment of exposure. Roland Barthes has remarked that to be photographed is to become a specter, to experience a micro-version of death, to be embalmed. As photographs represent the past, we necessarily move back through tim in the process of examining them. Photographs of earlier generations of family and loved ones, especially those deceased, are retrieved and given a ritual place in the home. Susan Stewart has observed that photographs also denote absence in the way in which we physically separate these keepsakes from the present. We typically organize and store old family photographs—even those dating from recent years—removing them from daily currency to albums and boxes, eventually to be put away in the attic or cellar.

Altamura is attentive to the hermeneutics of images—their history, their derivation, the contexts in which they appear, the habits of their usage, how we think about them, and how they are produced and reproduced by the media. Importantly, artists who appropriate popular imagery and artifacts encountered on a day-to-day basis, recognize the transformational capacity and power of images when they are re-presented. Altamura works to interrogate our intuitive, emotional and intellectual responses to images. Among his concerns is the promiscuous nature of media and surveillance-generated images—their ubiquity and fleeting indeterminacy once they are broadcast or published, or they appear online.The unidentified subjects of Anonymous are secondary or tertiary figures re-photographed by the artist from group photographs appearing in the print media. This process of re-photographing images, resulting in the enhancement of image syntax (photographic grain and the halftone dot screen), tends to invest subject matter with poignancy and historical authority. Altamura is mindful of the elegiac, wistful quality of this imagery.

In his choice of peripheral and indistinct subject matter, and in the enlargement and variable manipulation of the density and focus of his prints, Altamura challenges the photograph’s status as a trusted record of likeness. In this way, Anonymous undermines common cultural assumptions about the veracity of photography. On a sliding scale, measures of distinction in this work may be observed between recognizable likeness, the mere suggestion of human form, and form that can dissolve into abstraction—at times disappearing into white light. Many of Altamura’s subjects, in fact, disintegrate into a kind of fetal, android form, composed of half-tone dot pattern. Paradoxically, the closer we are in proximity to individual photographs in this series, the more difficult it is to identify human anatomy, let alone likeness.

The disappearance of human form and Altamura’s project as a whole are, unavoidably, acute metaphors for this moment, a time in which it must be said there is an awareness of loss—loss of power, loss of identity, loss of privacy, loss of life.

-Dan Younger
Director
Olin Art Gallery

This essay is based, in part, on an interview with the artist, conducted in September 2006.