LYNNE TILLMAN: One of the first things that seems obvious about these photographs is their forthright concern with nature. Particularly in the earlier work, nature, with reference to landscape, is presented in detail. There's a very dark cast to the work, a gothic quality. So it's not an optimistic nature. SYLVERE LOTRINGER: No, it's human nature. LT: For the purpose of this discussion, what is nature? SL: Nature pricks. Nature creeps into bodies; nature is something that in some way bodies are coming out of but not quite. Nature hides. Nature bleeds onto the bodies. It is presented as brambles and hits onto the body. LT: Nature pricks bodies. SL: If you push the idea of nature in these photographs, it's really mythological. Humans emerging from the earth, it's like Oedipus coming out of the earth and stumbling. There is the famous Claude Levi-Struss analysis of Laius, Oedipus' father, when he still doesn't walk straight. He's still part of the earth. It references the old idea, the difference between culture and nature, that you can attempt to extract yourself from nature, but nature still sticks to you, it sticks to your feet, it sticks to your tongue and you're never quite extracted from it. On one hand the work is very conceptual, on the other side it's totally mythological, even pagan, with passages from Judeo-Christian iconography, Saint Christopher holding this little Jesus on his shoulders or the "Aliyah," the attempt to go toward some kind of light. The span of this work is enormous. LT: There's the notion of nature as a mythological construct, as a sort of primal place that we human beings construct in order to give ourselves an origin. We construct it because obviously nature doesn't care. In a funny way the body also doesn't care. SL: You have to bruise it for the body to react in some way, otherwise it's inert. Here in this photograph there appears to be a body coming out of primeval waters, dark waters; the body is like a piece of meat or a rock or something, and it's slightly bruised. It's not very attractive, in fact it's repulsive. LT: It's interesting to think of this as religious work, then you mix up the sacred and the profane. SL: The interesting aspect here is the in-betweens, there is a process of metamorphosis, a change from stone or brambles to the body. You can't really tell which is which, there is a deliberate attempt to hide the parts of the body so you don't even know which part of the body you are seeing. For example, here you have limbs; limbs appear coming out from another body, twisted and they don't fit. The body is never there as a total image, it is there as a part dissociated from nature, but at the same time the body is nature. I like the in-between, even in a single picture there are elements that are very focused and elements that are blurred. There is often movement seen as a blur. I like the points of transition because, when it is very successful, there is a feeling you just don't know exactly where you are: you are in a transition. LT: Do you mean one image to another in one series, that kind of transition, or from one whole series to another series? SL: Each series has a definition, each has a name, and they reflect each other within the series and with the other series. It is very organized. I keep thinking of Freud because I know you think of Freud. Some of these photographs make me think of that magazine Freud use to read. He used to look for all these puzzles in a German magazine, he was excited by it because it was something to decipher. And part of Eldon's work is that it's also conceptually defensive, as if the picture weren't quite enough by itself, so he has to twist things around. It's always a puzzle: where's the head? where's the leg? Everything is distorted, hidden and you have to do real work in relation to these pictures. LT: Yesterday I read a piece in the New Yorker about Gertrude Stein, and one of the author's premises was that part of Modernism's style,its leaving out or difficulty was, as seen in Gertrude Stein's work, manifested in her desire to avoid certain issues in her life. I have trouble with this one-to-one view, the idea that one makes a style that allows one to obscure something so as not to talk about, say, one's sexuality. Yet you have to make allowances for the consideration that the psychological is always in the aesthetic, that we are always also making choices aesthetically in tandem with psychological as well as social determinants. SL: In this series, "Promise", you have a woman's chest with breasts that are partially hidden; it's one of the most subtly erotic of all the pictures. It's possible that the body can be recognized for what it is, but it's hidden, it's buried, it's blurred, if you don't look very carefully a chunk of skin could very well be a stone; it's hardly human. Here the body is fragmented, it could be a piece of meat that has been bruised or barbecued, but it's another body. And you have a hard time because sometimes someone else's hand is inserted and hidden. Basically it is all textures. For example in this image, it is probably a torso, probably a heart that has been opened up, the impression is conveyed through a scar in the place where it has been opened up. The body is charcoaled or covered with dirt: it looks like pigskin rather than skin. LT: It's funny to think about promise, that concept, in relation to something that has the quality of so much sludge and murk. Why is it promise? SL: Because promise is a movement, the movement towards something. And then the promise doesn't quite make it. You have some possibility for some grace at the beginning then it all gets messed up by the brambles and the body really doesn't quite take off. When there are two bodies together in a sexual embrace, it is all very dark and indistinct. They are all bodies that are coming out of, or coming down; they could be dead. LT: So, is that the fruit of all this? SL: Yes. The bitter fruit: the promise. LT: Drying on the vine. One of the things that seems to run throughout all the work is an attention to detail, to a part of something. With rare exceptions is a whole depicted. There's a part, a fragment, a detail, and sometimes as with human skin, it usually is seen very close. It's one of the things which I think photography can do. Remember in Blowup that moment when the photographer keeps getting closer and closer and finally sees this blurry thing, evidence of something. Sometimes when you are looking at a picture, you go closer and closer, and of course the image is opaque and on the surface. There is something about all of his work: none of it has depth. It's about remaining on the surface. We don't need to look back, we are not looking into the image. SL: Because we look from extremely close. When you use a telephoto-lens and get very close to an object then you have a very short range, things which are very close to what you are focused on are immediately blurred. The sharpness is very relative and transient because you immediately get into the blurring. LT: Even when it's not blurred and we're very close-up, as with the skin, it's a sort of pun, because it is the skin of the photograph as well. It's pure surface. And maybe there are little holes, like the skin is in fact punctured, but it's a kind of visual tease. The flatness of these photographs resists our desire to enter into them. It is something which photography can do probably better than almost any other medium. SL: But even when it is as precise as the skin, and it's relatively precise here, it gets blurred there. You can't sustain the focus and then the skin gets so close it begins to look artificial, like something that is reflective. It's hardly skin, it's dead, like plastic. LT: Do you think god is in that detail? NEXT PAGE