I had not held a copy of Americans Seen until this new remastered edition, published by Nazraeli Press, landed on my doorstep a few weeks ago. I had previously come to Sage’s work through her book Animals, published in 2019 by British publishers Stanley/Barker. It was at that point that I became aware of Americans Seen, but I had not seen a copy in hand, which is my preferred viewing experience when trying to understand, articulate, and disseminate how I feel about work. The cover image (Boston, Massachusetts, 1980) on the new remastered image is one of Sohier’s most well-known photographs.

It depicts a typical dog day summer afternoon, and a young man’s torso, nearly hanging out of the windowsill, frames a pigeon and some men at work, spreading what looks like topsoil or asphalt a few stories below the young man’s perch. There are several competing uses of the man’s body, which are remarkable when added to the light and Renaissance perspective of the background frame. First, there is the nod to youth of the supple body, clearly enjoying the fruit of an audio experience in perfect hot light at midday. We are shown snippets of the room, including a stereo speaker and what might be the cover of a vinyl record. To the left, we see something that looks like a book that is hard to decipher but could easily read, such as “Funny Games” or an iteration thereof, “Funny Planes,” etc. What is essential is the bliss of a moment between work and slumber on a halcyon summer day. The second use of the body is erotic in nature. The photograph is the equivalent position of an up-skirt picture, usually taken by men in an attempt at voyeurism. Still, given the jeans here, the image is not outwardly abusive.

The photographer’s position stands slightly above, allowing the pigeon and workers below to be considered. It is erotic because of the features of youth and the position of the camera on the shirtless torso. The third use is the necrotic position of the body. It is a Christian cruciform pose, perhaps unintentional, and reminds one of the many images of Christ’s body being deposed from the cross. Andrea Mantegna’s Dead Christ from 1480 has a similar positioning. Further, Roger van der Weyden’s 1435 painting The Descent From the Cross exhibits the body, though frontally, in a similar limberness, that is repositioned would be similar to Sohier’s image of the young man and the correlation from the 33-year-old Christ to the young man in the photograph is likely less than a decade apart. I am dwelling on this image as it is, like many of Sohier’s images, it is powerful on the surface and its potential subtext.

Sohier’s portraits of Americans stem from her beginnings of producing portraits in her working-class Boston geography. Most of this book’s work stems from 1979-1986. Every bit of these photographs shows up as a youth during this same time frame, and many of Sohier’s indelible pictures of young people hit home. I am reminded of a type of nostalgia that is not necessarily saccharine but speaks to more straightforward motivations and an evident lack of technological insistence. I want to be careful not to call her work nostalgic. I do not think it is. Nostalgia, or my reading of it, suggests a willful optimism that undermines the reality of the time in which we eulogize. One does not understand nostalgia for those motivations of desperate times.

When reading Sohier’s topography, the canvas of America she has stretched and presented, I see strange fissures through the portraiture that hint at class and race. Still, it is not a political or sociological motivation that I sense in the work, but something else, a nuanced pageantry of strange America that shines just under the surface of Good Photographs. This reminds me of what Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus were so successful at capturing without giving into the morose or, at times, perverse readings of Americans that burdened Frank and later Friedlander (albeit humorously in his case). Sohier, Winogrand, and Arbus share an ability to get under the skin of America to varying degrees. With Arbus, the result is quite blatant and obvious, and she tries to hide nothing when painting her reflection on many of her subjects.

With Winogrand, there was a much more subtle suggestion about American life that he was able to produce, but in many ways, his pictures were emphatic, and his picture-making overly pronounced. I would not call him particularly subtle, but in comparison to Arbus, his images navigate a more nuanced study. With Sohier, her work functions first on the surface, but then the subtleties spring forward, sometimes creating doubt and catching the viewer unguarded. Many of her pictures in Americans Seen feature this slow burn that can only be achieved while mining and harvesting the frame’s potential with a slower reading. If you flip too fast, the nature of her portraits remains as a passing and passive interest. When you analyze the focal length, the many characters, and the elements in the background, the photographs become incredibly active, and optical games start to present themselves. They are not simple gestures.

I look at these pictures, these Americans, and think about the consciousness of Americans about their fellow countrymen, the diaspora of so many backgrounds, and I realize that we do not have a code or shared system despite being shelved under the experience of being American in the eyes of the outside world. We may speak about how great the experiment of America is, even with its grievous faults, but it is such a strange concept to dissect. When nothing holds a culture together, nothing is agreed upon or heartfelt (apart from moments of national tragedy); how can we understand geography as nationhood? There are questions about the schizoid framework of interpersonal America that Sohier, even if unintentional, declares in her work. Perhaps I have been away too long, and the veil of it all is loose and sliding, but the power of her photographs reminds me of the disparate and hidden type of people we might be.

For this reason, or set of reasons, I am particularly moved by Americans Seen. I find the book duplicitous in all the best ways. What I thought it was versus what I have drawn from it over time are different models of appreciation. Spending a prolonged view of the book is essential to unlocking its potential, and although, for all my rancorous remarks about American social and civil life, perhaps it does help to see these through the lens of a lapsed American, where doubt and constant questioning is ingrained in how I interpret things and people American—highly Recommended!

Sage Sohier

Americans Seen

Nazraeli Press