Just posted an introduction to master photographer William Mortensen and his dark, visionary world:
https://anartapart.substack.com/p/visionary-seduction
”Mortensen’s aesthetic philosophy emerged from a profound understanding of what we might call the “rhetoric of the image”—that photographs, far from being neutral documents, are elaborate texts encoded with cultural meanings, psychological projections, and ideological assumptions. His theatrical compositions, with their elaborate chiaroscuro effects and mythological subject matter, set designs and props, constituted a systematic critique of photography’s pretensions to objectivity. Where his contemporaries saw corruption of the medium’s essential nature, Mortensen perceived liberation from the tyranny of the literal.”
#williammortensen #americangrotesque #feralhouse #anartapart #carlabrahamsson
