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Two Stories about the Body:

On a Photograph by George Steinmetz

Looking at the Milan street scene, circa 1992, the eye leaps first to the figure of a woman, topless, her hands covering her breasts, head tipped back, eyes closed, lips parted in apparent high arousal. The figure looms from a billboard in the upper left corner of the photograph, set off against the ad's white background. To its immediate right, high on the end of a wide pillar, a painted crucifix stands in a tall glass case. The gray, elongated Christ is naked but for a cloth tied at his hips, and beneath the impaled feet a skull sits at the base of the cross, staring directly out from the painting. Behind the pillar four Roman columns recede to the right, defining a traffic island between two narrow streets. In the foreground seven teens—mostly girls—in backpacks, jeans, and sneakers walk away to the right, apparently on their way to school. But

 

several of them look back and toward the left at another girl running, caught mid-stride beneath the crucifix and the billboard. The photograph presents an image rich both in content and in formal arrangement. To gaze at it is to be led into a meditation upon history and moder­nity, innocence and experience, Eros and Thanatos, and—most of all, I think—upon two competing stories about the body.

I first came upon this remarkable photograph by George Steinmetz as a two-­page spread within a National Geographic article about Milan. In that context, as a documentary photo, it depicts a multi-layered culture where cars stand by classi­cal columns and a still-potent Christian symbol competes for attention with a commercial nude that is undeniably potent in its own way. (A caption explained that the billboard advertised a bra as "soft as skin") Certainly, the Milan scene has something to say about its specific locale, about the contemporary situation of Italian Catholicism, for instance. (Looking carefully one can see that the glass over the crucifix is cracked; someone has thrown a rock, perhaps.) But the pic­ture's significance reaches beyond its Italian setting. The urban scene it holds up for contemplation contains dramatic juxtapositions that might have seemed merely staged and obvious, but the composition's formal necessity—the way it leads the eye through a series of associations—allows the image to speak with the subtlety of an essay. There are at least three meaningful ways to read the photo­—moving horizontally, vertically, and from foreground to background—and each prompts its own set of reflections. To map these three readings upon one another is to enter a field rich for contemplation.

Read from right to left, the photo registers three historical periods: the classi­cal, the Christian, and the commercial postmodern. The four fluted columns establish a rhythm of vertical forms leading to the central rectangular pillar and its crucifix, a rhythm that is arrested on the photo's left side by the horizontal lines of the billboard's top and bottom frame, by the ad's strong white back­ground, and by the striking image of its model. The photo, therefore, addresses the grand sweep of time and change, the matter of legacies, and the way legacies jostle in the here and now.

This matter of history and legacies is complicated by the image's layered depths. In the immediate foreground, at the bottom of the photo, the image presents the dailiness of students walking to school. Behind them the billboard starts forward out of the background, its model striking a pose that suggests sexual ecstasy. And between the photo's two contemporary elements—the kids and the billboard—a gray, mid-ground screen rises: the columns and the painting of Christ. These intervening elements summarize the medieval synthesis of classi­cal and Christian thought that was eclipsed by modernism, and which is now utterly overwhelmed in a postmodern wilderness of signs, where only the ironies of detached images in witty juxtaposition survive. Or so one may think. To attend persistently to these juxtapositions is to be led not merely into a field of open play, but to a region where contrast is meaningful.

Read a third way the photo divides itself into top and bottom, with a realm of images looming above the realm of the living. The picture divides along a broken line formed by the base of the billboard, the bottom of the painted crucifix, and the seams between segments of the columns. Below this line the teens on the pavement stride or run in their rumpled jeans, heads turning, hair swinging in the flux of time. Four of them, in fact, have turned their heads to the left, and two follow the motion of the lone girl who runs. Their looks direct the viewer's gaze to the most kinetic figure, the only one in the left half of the photo. Both the attention of the others and the rhythm of the vertical columns descending from the right concentrate the viewer's attention on the left half of the photo, where the running girl and the two images above her form a clear triangle. The crucifix and the nude hover like thought bubbles above the girl—like contrasting alternatives, the terms of a choice. But she does not look at them. She stares forward as she runs, shopping bags in one hand, seemingly unaware of the sphere of images above. The billboard model and hanging Christ are not—in this moment, anyway—the contents of conscious thought. Positioned as they are they suggest abiding forces, cultural and psychological strata so constant we hardly know they are present. But there they hover in a realm of forms: potent images, arrested and timeless, eternal in the way of art.

The girl appears to be thirteen or fourteen years old. As she runs she faces left, like the billboard's model. The color of her skin further associates her with the woman, whose ruddy complexion glows from the billboard. Like the maroon car parked beneath the ad, the fetishized woman and the living girl inhabit the contemporary, industrial, and commercial world. The girl carries shopping bags as she runs; she is a consumer, presumably under the sway of ads like the one above her.

But the crucified Christ hangs above her, too, and his eyes—if they are not entirely closed—look to the spot on the street where the girl passes. One of her bags, bright red, matches the two votive candles placed on a ledge beneath the painting. Shockingly, the logo on her other bag is a skull centered on a black cross. Is this image-rhyme with the crucifix an amazing case of serendipity, or was it staged, the girl and her bags planted by Steinmetz after he had staked out his shot? It hardly matters. Entirely found or partly composed, the image resides, like poetry, within the realm of the possible.

I was curious, nevertheless, and I spoke with Mr. Steinmetz on the phone after I had finished a draft of this essay. Nothing was staged, he said. He had noted the scene, chosen his perspective, and waited. He knew the best image would involve a girl on the street below the billboard, so he watched for such a moment, taking several exposures over a period of time. Only when he returned to his studio and looked closely at the shot of the running girl did he notice the logo on the shopping bag. It was a lucky shot. His intentions with the picture, he further explained, were to capture a sense of Italian Catholicism's simultaneous omni­presence and seeming cultural inconsequence. Catholicism was everywhere in Italy, he had thought, though it was oddly invisible to most Italians, especially in Milan. But when his photograph was published in National Geographic, the picture itself was far from invisible. Steinmetz told me that a number of readers cancelled their subscriptions. The legacy of American Puritanism, it seems, is not inconsequential. Or perhaps it was not solely the billboard nude that offended, but its juxtaposition with the crucifix.

So the girl runs beneath the billboard and the crucifix, and the photograph associates her formally with them both. But what do these images mean? As pure image the nude asserts the possibilities of the body. The model is young, beauti­ful, and sensual, captured (one is to believe) in a moment of intense pleasure, fixed by the ad for lingering contemplation. But it is not correct to speak of the model; the viewer does not encounter the woman who was hired for the ad campaign. The image functions purely as an icon of sexual arousal. Arrested in her moment of pleasure, she functions as sheer object, uncomplicated by person­ality or relationship. Fixed in time, she knows no before or after, no yesterday or tomorrow. She can be no one's daughter, wife, or mother—not even a lover. She can have no life apart from the pictured moment, among others or alone. Her ecstatic moment is a kind of resort, a fantastic retreat away from complication—a retreat ultimately from time and death. And the billboard's contrast with the street's bustle, the crucifix, and the ancient columns only intensifies its time­-defying effect.

The billboard image does, however, point to something "real" in the world. Sexual ecstasy does seem to tear one free from time and the self. But only for a moment. There is always the before and after, the social and historical world. We are, after all, only human. The billboard Venus recommends a moment where we cannot stay.

Situated above the young girl, the sexy nude contrasts experience with inno­cence, but it represents a kind of experience so narrowly defined that it seems oddly innocent. For the billboard image there is no experience of birth, growth, decay, or death. The story it tells about the body is naive. There is, in fact, no narrative in it—personal or public, implied or overt—and without narrative there are no consequences: no comedy, no tragedy, no moral experience at all. And in these absences the billboard contrasts most starkly with the painted crucifix beside it.

The crucifix, in its way, is as lurid as the nude. Though the painting is under­stated and sedate in comparison to other images—Mel Gibson's flayed and bloody Christ, for example—it nevertheless depicts an agonistic body, revealed in its suffering. A student in a college class on Art and Argument that I visited recently observed only half-facetiously that "both the model and Jesus are topless." Both images thrust an intensely personal moment into the public sphere with jarring effect. But the crucifixion, both as historical event and religious symbol, does have a longstanding public aspect. As a symbol it is part of a story in a way that the sexualized woman is not. It represents for many Christians the whole of salvation history, in which Christ is the "new Adam" whose sacrifice atones for humanity's fallenness, reconciling the sinful with their creator. The two beams of the cross itself are often read as time and eternity meeting at the still point where the incarnation joins God and flesh, where divinity, in an act of love, enters history to redeem it. Furthermore, in a story less theologically abstract, the crucifix implies Christ's passion, in which he submitted to the stages of the cross, with all its brutality and humiliation.

The story about the body told by the crucifix in the Milan street proclaims both mortality and resurrection. The skull at the base of the cross—a reference to Golgotha, "the place of the skull" where Jesus died—serves as memento mori challenging the billboard's assertion that the flesh can last in erotic luxury. At the same time it implies a wider narrative in which something does last. Easter follows Good Friday as spring follows winter. As in the accounts of other resur­rected gods, this story of the body does not end with death. Whitman, divining from his leaves of grass, put it this way: "All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier."

In the dialectic between the crucifix and the billboard, the billboard responds to the cross as well. As the classical columns may suggest, a memento mori can move a viewer either to contemplate the ultimate fate of the soul or to seize the day. The power of Andrew Marvell's seduction poem, "To His Coy Mistress," lies in its syllogistic necessity:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime....

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near....

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew....
Now let us sport us while we may....

As fleshly, temporal creatures, then, humans are locked in the struggle between Thanatos and Eros, and those two terms of experience are embedded within, permanent features of the biological and psychological self. As the myth of Perse­phone dramatizes, spring and winter make their contending claims, and so the billboard can be read as representing an abiding pole of human reality.

Maybe we do touch eternity, after a fashion, in the ecstasies of sex; it is an act, after all, of procreation. But before running too far with this notion, it serves to remember that the Milan billboard was not raised as a philosophical public service announcement. It is, finally, a commercial gesture calculated to sell bras. The billboard Venus captures the eye and makes her pitch. "Want to feel like this? Look like this? Buy the bra that's soft as skin." Or, more likely: "Want your girlfriend to be like this? Buy the product." Want, buy; want, buy. The sequence must be incited endlessly to sustain a consumer culture. As John Berger and others have made abundantly clear, advertising's job is to open a gap between a proffered image and daily reality, destabilizing the viewer into desire and anxiety, and offering its product to close that gap. The image of the woman, therefore, must present an unrealizable ideal. "Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances," writes the poet Robert Hass. The designers of the ad knew exactly what they were doing, trading in the old currency of sex and anxiety. It doesn't take a think tank to deploy a woman's image to attract and unsettle, to seduce and sell. A poem of mine, spoken by a man driving past the picture of a svelte model on a billboard ad for Black Velvet whiskey, ends with these lines:

I wince at the wrong,
The same old come on,

Women arranged by men and dollars
In poses drawn from early masters.

But sweeping around this curve in the dark—
­Her form suspended, a park

Erected among the buildings
That light the city, stacked and burning—
I always look, each nightly trip,
From shoulder to waist

To the dangerous swerve of the hip.

The girl running in the photograph by George Steinmetz will grow into her erotic life—the life evoked by the billboard nude—but I can't help feeling, with Laura Mulvey and other theorists of the "male gaze," that an aspect of her self has been stolen and used.

As the ad trades on female sexuality, it contributes to the wilderness of mirrors all must navigate. And given the ubiquity of screen culture—of television, film, and computers—it often feels as if the world-encompassing web of images is simultaneously more evanescent and more real than actual bodies. These images attract the gaze and pass their messages, a system of flashing signs. Do they refer beyond themselves to something actual, or is this a human-made field of associa­tive play, a structure of ironies and disjunctions that may entertain or dismay, but that is, in any event, invented and fleeting? Beset by such questions it is no wonder that the academy has hatched the emerging field of Body Studies. In the city, surrounded by images, the body may seem to be an island of nature in the midst of culture. Flesh and bone may seem belated assertions of an old regime, heart­beat and respiration reminders of forgotten rhythms, of seasons and migrations. If the body betrays us, Judas-like, to time and death, does it also whisper truths in our ear ?

The photograph of a Milan street scene—an image that looks at other images—­seizes a moment out of time. Floating above a running girl, two stories about the body contend. Both are true, but one is bigger. Next to the commercial nude extolling its erotic moment, the more complex and paradoxical symbol of the crucifix restores the dimension of time, the narrative of human life and death, history's sense of act and consequence, and the wider mysteries suggested by the cross. The symbol, especially as it is imbedded in the photo's rich context, retains the power to interrogate. "Is time crossed by eternity?" it asks. "Is immanence imbedded in history?" "In a culture unable to define the word soul, can incarna­tion be a useful term?" "In a commercial culture that prizes individual gratifica­tion, is there a place for sacrifice?"

The photograph by George Steinmetz, framed as it is with conscious art, emphasizes thought in the act of looking. Entering the photograph, with its layers and tensions, the viewer is carried through a complex meditation that proceeds in steps. And, when one backs out again to see the image whole, its very medium echoes the picture's themes. The photo as photo—as a wash of light captured and fixed—asserts again the paradox of art, the paradox, in fact, of the mortal self. Artist and audience are sunk in time but transcend time through awareness of it. As Robert Lowell wrote in "Epilogue;' his final poem:

We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

In the self-awareness of art, we have this in common with the haloed figure on the cross: We shine as we die.