Rory Mulligan

Contact Sheet 182: Light Work Annual

There is a spectrum in Rory Mulligan’s work between photography’s ability to authenticate the facts of the world (the house was here, the vandal sprayed graffiti here, the crime scene looked like this), and its ability to elicit pleasure (turn to the left and raise your knee, that’s good).  It ranges from the objective function of the camera to describe what’s in front of it, to a subjective impulse to give shape to the way things feel; from mechanical recording to the Romantic sublime.  The strength of this work is Rory’s ability to animate the former while restraining the latter.  Without elaborate stage sets or props, fantasy rises from household objects or a walk in the park; scenes skew towards a dark libidinal imagination that resides within everyday, described with the clarity of a medium format silver gelatin print.   

The photographs presented here are one chapter of a larger series called Sam I Am, which portray men who are either surrogates for Rory, or who serve as objects of sexual longing or repulsion.  Two characters reappear in various languid positions in sorted rooms.  Other pictures look to the side of human drama, and find allegorical clues in the landscape.  Some pictures take place in a park in Yonkers where David Berkowitz, the serial murderer known as the “Son of Sam” performed satanic rituals.  Another section follows a college student named Sam whose extreme awkwardness is calcified through the photographs into a certain kind of dandyism.  In this dream-like world of hallucinations, hard-edged figures are tattooed by the bright light of day.

We see a white picket fence spanning the length of a picture, silhouetted into jagged teeth Halloween black.  In the next photograph a curtain blown inside a vinyl-clad house rises like a white sail  from the black aperture of a window.  A veil of shadow falls against the window and a contrail vector in the sky points towards its opening. Inside we see a naked man, back arched kneeling at the (same?) window.  He flaunts his body though he is no longer young.  He looks back to us rapaciously as if to show how the aging body never loses its ability to express and solicit desire.

Waking from the chimera of pornographic daydreams, the narrator of Genet’s Our Lady of Flowers writes, “The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot – the sail he has seen.”(1)

When we see the man again, he is rigged with ropes around his head and neck, attaching him to some unseen point beyond the picture’s margin.  These ropes seem to tether him to an artificial support, bearing the current of his own electrical charge.  The rope extends into the next frame, implicitly tying the man into the tangle of gnarled roots tenuously clinging to an impossibly steep incline.  We come to understand that time and place are mutable as each picture becomes a doorway to the next.  The penultimate photograph shows the man basking in the sun, transfixed by the high-key light against his skin — the nose, erection and toe each tautly pointed towards heaven or earth forming a perfect Trinity. We have the sense that he has laid himself bare, willingly, happily for our contemplation and delight.  And then—as though the precariously balanced, brittle arch of his posture is about to collapse—the final picture shows a caved-in burial vault.  A half-buried drain, an open grave.  Or is it the rabbit hole, leading back home?

One of the first photographs I ever saw by Rory was a self-portrait with an egg held in his open mouth, a joke that only a black-and-white photographer would make, inverting the black hole of a scream to the white of a cartooned tooth.  Or it could be an inverted ball-gag, revealing rather than concealing the face, which labors to hold the egg—forcing a double chin, the eyes beginning to tear up.  And while it’s clear the egg will not suffocate Rory, I can palpably feel his vulnerability in this subtle act of abnegation.  If I think of this earlier picture next to the portrait of the man in the sun, it is clear to see these new pictures as great acts of empathy, registering both how things feel and how they are.  Sam I Am steps through the whiteness of the egg and describes a world beyond the self.

1. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Bantam Modern Classics, 1968) 122.