Does death become her?
Deborah Samuel is a one-woman photographic industry, and one look at her much-loved dog pictures would explain why. Taken in close-up and at odd angles, Samuel’s canine subjects are often reduced to constituent parts — a lolling tongue, a glistening nose, the satisfying sensuality of a shoulder or haunch wrapped in fur — that, to the casual eye suggest something arty going on, if not exactly art.
Add Samuel’s masterful command of the camera — the pups are shot in exquisite silvery black and white, all contrast and seductive texture — and you can see the widespread appeal. How widespread? Samuel’s pictures are mass-produced for sale at IKEA, for heaven’s sake.
At a reasonable guess, that has made her a minor fortune, and a major photo-world celebrity.
So when Samuel steps outside her cuddly, brand-name image-making and into the realm of the unliving, it’s sure to raise eyebrows. Or so the Royal Ontario Museum hopes. This month, the ROM is presenting Elegy, Samuel’s photographic collaboration with the museum’s Schad Gallery of Biodiversity. In a small gallery on the second floor, Samuel presents a suite of photos for which the cuddle factor is distinctly zero.
The long, bleached spine of a cobra snakes over three frames. The pale, delicate skeleton of a frog sits poised, assembled, as though resting. The skulls of a barred owl, a soft-shelled turtle and a dolphin, among others, are arrayed in a tidy grid. Subtle clues indicate that, for all the black-and-whiteness of the images, Samuel is shooting in colour: The owl’s sharp beak is an incongruously jarring bright yellow.
This is the good part of the show. It’s hardly unique to cast animal bones in the realm of aesthetic object fetish — it’s a common oneliner, setting the seductive qualities of the materials against the glaring spectre of death — but when Samuel stands back and lets her photographer’s eye lead her to the simple satisfaction of the sharp, haunting forms, they’re not bad at all.
The problem is, when they are bad, they’re awful: An inexplicable series involving a kind of thrush called a solitaire unfolds in two chapters that become more gruesomely maudlin as she goes along.
In the first, the tiny, delicate solitaire skeleton, photographed in profile on a black sheet (I imagine) is shown in a series of four images as though pin-wheeling downward, falling into oblivion (the final image shows the bird’s spindly feet poking up from the bottom frame). Where this is merely gimmicky in its tastelessness, what happens next is needlessly twisted. Beside the “Solitaire series,” Samuel offers a three-part series of pictures called “Solitaire and Cardinal,” in which she casts the birds in a kind of grim death’s dance. Not everyone will agree with me, surely — one 16-ish Goth girl with black nail polish and lipstick wandered through the gallery while I was there and, looking at “Solitaire and Cardinal,” grinned in rapt ap- proval. “These are totally sick!” she effused to a friend. “I love them!” But to me, these delicate remains becoming the photographer’s playthings for macabre visual whims runs counter to Samuel’s intention. She writes that Elegy is “about life — its transience, its fragility and its persistence.” In the images where she resists the urge to manipulate her subjects, her lens and eye for detail — the pup pictures certainly showed that, however conceptually light they may have been — can transmute the formal qualities of her subjects into something both grim and holy; a pair of simple feet, an owl’s clenched talon and a Cana- da goose’s dangling, limp toes, are simple, haunting and arresting.
Just as often, though, the images are as lifeless as her subjects. Samuel is at the ROM most of this month, photographing more remains for the ongoing series. Here’s hoping she continues to work at the quiet remove she’s found intuitively in her best pictures here. With skeletal remains, the inference of something spiritual is encoded in their material reality, right there on the surface — a place where Samuel remains, for the most part, despite what lies beneath. Deborah Samuel, Elegy, continues at the ROM until July 2, 2012. www.rom.on.ca