Carved by camera

Paul Weideman | The New Mexican

3/20/2008 - 3/21/08

Siegfried Halus' photographs of naked figures in mysterious settings are definitely provocative. While some may possess an erotic tinge, that is offset by an unsettling, enigmatic quality.

His photography, which encompasses both the documentary and figurative realms, is featured in Reading the Body Across Time at the Santa Fe Community College Visual Arts Gallery. The show includes recent photographs and others culled from a portfolio that spans 40 years.

The human body is central to his current work, but the photographs also reflect Halus' feelings about war. "Because of what's been happening in Iraq with the torture of prisoners, some of it hinges on the observation that we are willing to accept unbelievable injustices in order to achieve what we would call a safe homeland," Halus said.

In some of the pictures we see people draped or enclosed by paint-spattered cloth; fabric is an element that Halus has incorporated throughout his career. His naked figures' postures, facial expressions, and placements within dusky tableaux seem to tell stories of brutality, fear, and situations where people are trapped or muffled. The lighting is not simply dramatic but dramatically staged, as are the friends who serve as Halus' models.

"These are long exposures, up to 10 minutes, and illuminated with a flashlight," Halus explained. "I've spent years and years working with this process, which is utterly against the grain of how we traditionally think of photography. One thing we've relied on is technology — developing faster films and faster shutter speeds in order to capture the moment — and I'm totally disinterested in that. I'm more interested in how we move across time."

Halus shows a particular interest in dealing with models who, like him, are over 60 — not the ideal body, not the overvaunted emphasis on youthful appearance and celebrity, which he deems a tragedy of our society. "We have done everything we can to give ourselves the illusion that we're safe, but it's also a way of avoiding the real world," said Halus. "One of the things that happens when I go off with my models at night is that we encounter cactus and sharp rocks. We're walking barefoot and naked at night. We're illuminated by firelight. You can hear coyotes. So there is a vulnerability and a feeling that the senses are coming alive again."

Halus' singular approach to the techniques and subjects of photography is a matter of long experimentation, but this field was not his original focus as an artist. Born in Salzburg, Austria, to a father who worked as a liturgical sculptor and woodworker, Siegfried grew up carving statues of the saints. It is noteworthy that he would make his home in Santa Fe, where saints have been fashioned from wood for centuries.

"This remarkable history is really what made me feel at home here, and when I visited the santeros, I sometimes taught them how to sharpen their tools," the photographer said. "No other place in the United States has this tradition. Many view it as having something to do with the tourist trade, but in fact it is a deep, deep belief system." He honored the local art heritage and his father's vocation in the 1998 book Living Shrines: Home Altars of New Mexico.

Halus immigrated with his family to the United States in 1951 and studied sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the University of Hartford in Connecticut. While he was a student in Philadelphia, Halus began photographing his sculptures. His interest in the camera as an art-making tool was stimulated when the Hungarian photojournalist Francis Laping, with whom he was sharing a house, invited him to observe him at work in his darkroom. "I learned the basics of developing and printing, as well as a great appreciation for documentary photography, from him," Halus said.

The new fascination was not well received by the deans at Hartford, where Halus was doing graduate work. "The last year there, I began to focus on photography as well, but photography was not part of the art curriculum," he said. "They were really disturbed by it and asked me to stop teaching it. This was 1968, a time when Andy Warhol was doing very innovative things, and there was a big shift away from specialized art and toward the multispecialist.

"The artist desperately needs every conceivable kind of process. That's what it's about, not constantly being at the edge of new technology, and the storehouse of potential exploitation of materials is now being utilized by nonphotographers." To prove this last point during our visit, Halus found a page in a magazine showing a daguerreotype created by painter Chuck Close.

Halus got another nudge in his swing from sculpture to photography when he met Minor White. The influential photographer, who is known for his intuitive approach to the art, was excited about the work Halus was doing and included pieces by Halus in the 1972 exhibition Octave of Prayer, curated by White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Hayden Gallery. In 1979, three years after White died, Halus had a 20-page photo feature in the quarterly journal Aperture. White was a co-founder of the magazine and served as editor for its first 23 years (1952-1975).

Between 1979 and 1993, Halus was head of the photography program at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, a program jointly run with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. During this time, he received grants from the Polaroid Corporation to use its big camera housed at the Boston museum school. Several of those dramatic, 20-by-24-inch Polaroids are in the current show at Santa Fe Community College. "I've never shown these Polaroids," the photographer said. "It's amazing what you keep in your archives and never get to."

The newest works in the show are 20-by-24-inch enlargements of pictures Halus shot on Polaroid Type 55 film in his 4x5 view camera. In a discussion about these cryptic images, he mentioned a sense of "the other" that is embodied, for instance, in the head scarves worn by some Muslim women.

"We have this abhorrence, this fear that's been acculturated by our political situations, of 'the other,'" Halus said. "We no longer have the traditional foe. We now have this non-Western attire that becomes symbolic of the person who can't be revealed. The cultural resistance to that kind of ambiguity is extraordinary, and it causes profound fear."

Halus made another reference to the cloth he so often employs in his theatrical-looking photographs. He is dealing with issues of fear and repression and also with an aspect of nobility. "If you know Michelangelo's Moses statue, there's a wonderful sense of how he carved the cloth, and with my own background as a sculptor, there's an echo that's impossible to ignore."

Details

Reading the Body Across Time, Siegfried Halus photographs

Opening reception 5-7 p.m. Thursday, March 27; exhibit through April

Santa Fe Community College Visual Arts Gallery, 6401 Richards Ave.
No charge, 428-1501

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Siegfried Halus' exhibit Reading the Body Across Time hangs through April 30 at Santa Fe Community College. That's also the last day of final exams for the spring semester and Halus' last day as the school's director of fine arts.

His tenure at SFCC began with a position in the photography faculty in 1990. He became head of the division of visual and performing arts in 1995, chairman of the department of fine arts in 2000, and fine-arts director in 2004. "I've done everything I can possibly do there," Halus said.

Two achievements Halus highlighted are the bachelor of fine arts degree that students can earn at SFCC because of his three years of work with The University of New Mexico and the $10 million fine-arts facility he helped create. He still regrets that the budget for that project did not allow for a structure that would also house the school's music, dance, and theater facilities. "That was a real tragedy, in my opinion, and it has not been resolved. They have not seen the wisdom of perhaps really focusing on building a performing-arts facility at the school. There are so many institutions that could help make that happen, and the whole town could benefit."

Halus said his departure from the college is more of a "joint understanding" between himself and the school than a career retirement. "I hate to call it retirement," he said. "I do all sorts of other projects."

Halus has applied for the position of curator of photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art. The longtime curator, Steve Yates, retired in September 2007, according to museum director Marsha Bol. Yates and Halus co-curated the exhibit IDEA Photographic: After Modernism at the New Mexico Museum of Art (then called the Museum of Fine Arts) in 2002-2003.

Halus recently wrote about 19th-century photographer Charles Lummis for a book about the 400th anniversary of Santa Fe, which he said will be published by the Museum of New Mexico Press next year. He is exploring publishing books of photographs from his Vodou Rituals of Haiti series and from his 1980s large-format Polaroid series, as well as a volume offering a retrospective of his photography during the past four decades.

Photographs by Halus are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many other institutions. He was presented with the Mayor's Recognition Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2005.