Photomontages by Corinne Diop
November 17, 2023-December 31, 2023
Beverly Street Studio School Gallery
22 West Beverly Street, Staunton, Virginia
by Alexandria Searls
Photography allows us to time travel, not only from the present to the past, but also to possible futures. Artist Corinne Diop explores time, loss, and collective memory in her new series, “Unidentified Woman,” works anchored in 19th Century photographs of Mathew Brady (c. 1822-24-1896), archived at the Library of Congress. Mathew Brady, now best known for his Civil War photographs, operated portrait studios in New York and Washington, D.C.
Who were these women? How much do we keep of them through our archives, how much of the women have we lost? We have lost their names, and knowledge of their families and homes. We can, however, possess what we discern from their expressions, their postures, and their clothing. How much more will we lose, if our archives fail?
We see the faces of the past, and the women look like we do, if not for their bodies dressed in long gowns, if not for the dated furniture of the studio. Faces have not changed; the times have. Past is present, and present could be past, if fate had given us other birthdays. Those women could be us, and we could be them, and collective memory allows us to stand in both realms. Meanwhile, the future is uncertain, because images can die even more easily than people. In Diop’s work, we detect a future of expanded, lasting archives, or a future of decay and loss, or a combination of the two.
The title of the show comes from notes attached to daguerreotypes and to copies of daguerreotypes in the Mathew Brady collection of the Library of Congress, accessible to the public through the internet. In her artist’s statement, Diop writes, “The remnants of the aged archival pigment prints reference the photographic media of three centuries, from metal to film to digital files, serving as evidence of our emergent yet wavering existence.” Along the way, archivists have left their marks: “Brady between 1851 and 1860,” and “Unidentified Woman,” are some examples that Diop gives us in her own handwriting. We see these notes as faint inscriptions in her works.
Now Diop creates her part of the record, the Brady photographs montaged with her own photographs and then collaged with actual fabric, string, buttons, plant remains…and mold and dirt and rust. The mold, dirt, and rust come from her choice to weather certain of her works, placing the photographic paper outside underneath metal household objects and other instruments of distress, the damage amplified by rain and sun and humidity. Sometimes what covered the image protected it, leaving what was uncovered to molder or fade.
Diop, in our interview, made the point that without names, we do not know the men in these women’s lives, and that men defined a woman’s social status in Brady’s time. The women are unidentified, partially erased, their lives invisible except for the photographs, and yet the photographs give them the space to exist alone, without men, visible as individuals. There are paradoxes in Diop’s work that make for fascinating viewing.
Though it could be said that gender was part of the women’s erasure, there were also men who were erased after the making of the daguerreotypes—the camera operators whom Brady employed to take many of his studios’ photographs. He called them “operators” himself, and he even sent them out to the Civil War battlefields to capture the tableaux of the living and the dead. While it is possible that Brady took the photographs we are seeing in “Unidentified Woman,” or some of them, we cannot be sure. And the names of many of the operators are lost. Even when we know names, we cannot assign them to the portraits of these unidentified women.
The subjects show their clothes and accessories, not their diaries or their letters, not their words. We will never know the sound of their voices, or what they might have said. The words and numbers attached to them come from other people. The women are represented only by their appearance, though appearance can hold clues. There are facial similarities between Unidentified Woman #9 and #13 that suggest that they might be sisters. A family could be assembled from nameless photographs.
How much can we know about the women based on their appearance? An expression reveals emotions and intelligence; on the other hand, taken too far, judging the interior person through appearance becomes phrenology, the study of the human head popular in the early to mid-1800s. a few decades before the Brady photographs were taken. Clothing can also be the choice of society, rather than your own choice. Within those confines, is there any evidence of the personal choice of these women? Diop adds floral fabric to the pieces, equating the female with the floral, though few of the women chose floral attire. Instead, the fabric questions the way that women are encouraged to be decorative. Diop also adds metal bars to one portrait, to emphasize constriction.
Asked the question, “Of all these women, whom do you think you would be friends with?” Diop’s answer was a woman with a pleasant, yet analytic, gaze. It is possible to choose a friend within the daguerreotypes, even though images made from the same daguerreotype sometimes give off different impressions. For example, Diop uses Unidentified Woman #10 in four different pieces. In “Unidentified Woman 10 in Three Parts,” we see a feminine woman with flowers around her bonnet. In the next work, “Unidentified Woman 10 in Two Parts,” the bonnet has been reduced by half, and so has the woman’s face. The right-side of the face, the face that remains, appears masculine. Our perception of gender has been modified by visual disruption.
Diop sees her work as an acknowledgement of grief in her life, grief within her family. “Unidentified Woman” also expresses grief over people none of us will ever know, women long dead. We want them to have left a permanent mark on the world, because we want to leave a permanent mark. In our era, we post photos by the millions; we assert our identity for the present and the future, as long as the electricity runs. Erasure threatens the art and the records of us all. Weather, poverty, malice, negligence, or war—they come to destroy, and they seem to be on the increase.
“Pandemic Harvest II (Invisible)” is particularly powerful in its impact, the red distressed dress standing in for life and passion, even as it suggests the missing.
The enigma of these photomontages is the enigma of the heart registering an image, wishing to know those depicted even as it is impossible to know them, wishing to secure permanence as that permanence is undermined. And yet, the same images can be resurrected again, by Diop, or you, or any members of the public, as long as the Library of Congress archive exists for public use. We don’t know how long that will be, but for now we can enjoy the pieces of our collective memory.