Joel-Peter Witkin - (1985) Forty Photographs

Forty Photographs is an almost comically restrained title for a book that behaves like a damaged cathedral, anatomical theater and traveling sideshow sharing the same electrical system.

The cover establishes the contradiction immediately. Above the image, Joel-Peter Witkin’s name appears in elegant, stretched lettering, followed by the cool institutional phrase FORTY PHOTOGRAPHS. Beneath it, a reclining body is entangled with cords, drapery and objects that refuse immediate identification. One foot presses toward the edge of the frame. A hand enters from the side. The figure seems suspended somewhere between medical treatment, religious martyrdom, erotic display and stage machinery.

The typography promises a museum catalog. The photograph promises that the museum has developed a fever.

Inside, the design becomes even calmer. Large white pages, small centered titles and generous margins surround the photographs. The book gives each image the visual treatment normally reserved for an acknowledged masterpiece. Nothing is crowded, apologized for or hidden behind sensational captions. The white space does not cleanse the pictures, but it forces them to stand alone. Each one becomes an object of prolonged inspection.

That formal dignity is important because Witkin’s subjects are bodies that conventional culture often either hides or displays cruelly: disabled bodies, fat bodies, intersex bodies, aging bodies, masked bodies, bodies altered by illness, bodies staged near the border between life and death. The photographs do not ask permission to enter polite visual culture. They arrive already wearing the lighting, composition and historical authority of museum art.

The resulting encounter is not comfortable.

Witkin does not photograph his subjects as ordinary people encountered in ordinary life. He converts them into saints, monsters, mythological figures, relics, allegories and actors inside elaborate private ceremonies. This can feel elevating and exploitative at the same time. The person is granted grandeur, but the grandeur belongs partly to the photographer’s theater.

The book never resolves that tension. It keeps tightening it.

“Mother and Child” opens the plate sequence with a corrupted devotional image. A large seated woman occupies the frame while holding a small masked figure. Her own face has been covered by an enormous artificial eye and another apparatus extending from her mouth. The arrangement recalls the countless paintings of the Madonna presenting the infant Christ, but every familiar element has been rerouted.

The mother does not offer a serene face for worship. She has become an optical machine. The child does not radiate innocence. Its mask resembles a small skull or theatrical prop. The surrounding surfaces are scratched, darkened and unstable, as though the photograph survived fire, handling and chemical contamination before entering the book.

The title invites tenderness. The image supplies uncertainty.

Is the child protected, displayed, transformed or consumed by the scene? Is the mother empowered by her fantastic equipment or concealed beneath it? The photograph will not settle into one moral arrangement. It has the structure of an icon without the theological instructions that normally tell the viewer what to feel.

This is one of Witkin’s central methods. He borrows the pose of reverence, then replaces its familiar subject with something respectable culture has refused to revere.

“Hermes” performs a similar disturbance through classical mythology. A nude male body stands in hard light beside a partially draped companion disappearing into shadow. The body is not placed in a natural landscape or clean studio. Darkness swallows the edges, making the figures seem excavated from an underground chamber.

The title offers a god, but the photograph does not present the perfected anatomy of classical sculpture. Flesh remains specific, vulnerable and mortal. The divine name and human body rub against each other until neither remains untouched. The person is raised into mythology, while mythology is dragged back into skin.

“Pygmalion” turns the myth of the artist creating an ideal lover into something closer to puppetry. A small figure sits upon a block, its head concealed inside a striped construction resembling a toy theater, birdhouse or mechanical crown. Strings extend outward. The pose is both playful and trapped.

The original Pygmalion story flatters artistic creation. A man makes an image so perfect that it becomes alive. Witkin’s version makes control impossible to ignore. The created figure is attached to lines. Its identity is covered by the apparatus designed around it. The artist’s dream of making life begins to resemble the collector’s dream of owning it.

Throughout the book, bodies are placed inside frames within frames. They appear beneath arches, inside boxes, before painted curtains, under canopies, within ovals and surrounded by the blackened borders of damaged negatives. These enclosures give the photographs the atmosphere of reliquaries. The subject is not merely pictured. The subject has been installed.

“The Wife of Cain” presents a large nude body in profile, surrounded by masks, ornaments and small figures emerging from darkness. The abdomen dominates the composition, suggesting pregnancy, fertility or abundance, while the surrounding faces turn the scene into a crowded mythological judgment.

The title assigns the woman a relationship before granting her a name. She belongs to Cain, the biblical murderer and exile. Yet the figure’s scale overwhelms the smaller presences surrounding her. She is not visually subordinate. Her body becomes the central landmass around which the rest of the mythology gathers.

Witkin’s photographs repeatedly perform this unstable exchange. A title may classify the subject as wife, mother, oddity, victim or mythological type, while the image gives the body an authority that resists the classification.

The book also places reproductions of older artworks beside Witkin’s photographs. Goya’s portrait of the child Manuel Osorio, Canova’s reclining Pauline Borghese, Rubens’s Helena Fourment and Grant Wood’s “Portrait of Nan” enter the sequence as ancestors, ingredients or evidence.

These comparisons reveal that Witkin is not operating outside art history, throwing filth at an innocent tradition. He is operating from inside it.

European painting is already crowded with exposed bodies, martyrs, executions, monsters, saints, anatomical suffering, mythological violence and eroticized death. Museums have simply placed enough varnish, distance and scholarly language around these images to make their disturbances feel civilized.

Witkin removes that protective distance.

His version of Canova’s reclining Venus retains the broad structure of the classical pose: a body stretched across a couch, head turned, one arm raised. But the living body is heavier, more visibly mortal and surrounded by stained fabric and scarred photographic space. The smooth marble fantasy acquires pores, weight and vulnerability.

The comparison does not merely parody classical beauty. It reveals how narrow the classical ideal has become in the modern imagination. The old sculpture is accepted as timeless beauty partly because stone cannot sweat, age, scar or answer back. Witkin places an actual body into the pose and lets mortality interrupt perfection.

“La Brasserie de Joan Miró” presents another nude figure beneath an arched metallic-looking enclosure. Dark hair covers the eyes. Long forms hang from the chest like exaggerated vessels, instruments or pendulous sculptures. A small object floats above the figure like an escaped organ or punctuation mark.

The image combines Surrealism with the atmosphere of a medical display. Miró’s playful shapes have entered a room where play is no longer innocent. The body becomes both person and arrangement, while the surrounding scratched surface makes the photograph resemble an artifact found at the bottom of a laboratory drawer.

The physical damage is crucial across the entire book.

Witkin scratches, stains and abrades the negative or print surface. The photographs have irregular black borders, streaks, chemical fog and fine lines traveling across bodies. This prevents the camera from pretending to be a transparent witness. Every image announces that it has been handled and altered.

The photograph is not a window.

It is a wounded surface.

That damage creates age instantly. Although the pictures were recent when the catalog appeared, many resemble nineteenth-century plates recovered from an archive of forbidden medical or religious experiments. Time seems to have attacked them before they were born.

This artificial aging can be theatrical, but it also suits the book’s deeper concerns. The bodies are not offered as clean contemporary information. They arrive already entangled with old myths, old prejudices, old categories of beauty and centuries of looking.

“Helena Fourment” makes this art-historical confrontation especially direct. Rubens’s painted figure stands modestly wrapped in fur, one leg exposed, body arranged for aristocratic admiration. Witkin’s Helena occupies a similarly frontal pose but appears against a corroded, cave-like background, wearing a mask and holding fur around her body.

The photograph does not attempt to reproduce Rubens exactly. It behaves like a memory of the painting after passing through a carnival, a hospital and a darkroom.

The masked face is important. In the original portrait, identity and beauty are joined. In Witkin’s version, identity is partially blocked while the body remains exposed. The face becomes costume and defense at once. The viewer is allowed to inspect the flesh but denied ordinary access to the person.

Masks appear constantly throughout the book. Some are theatrical, some medical, some animal-like, some little more than dark coverings over the eyes. They interrupt the expectation that photography reveals identity. The body may be fully exposed while the self remains unavailable.

This reverses the ordinary portrait bargain. Clothing is removed, but intimacy is not guaranteed.

“Choice of Outfits for the Agonies of Mary” pushes the arrangement toward diagram and inventory. A standing nude figure is placed against a surface surrounded by belts, garments, restraints, tools and shapes attached or taped around the body. The title turns suffering into wardrobe selection.

The image resembles a saint’s martyrdom prepared by a costume department.

Religious language and fetish equipment become difficult to separate. Agony is both sacred and staged. The figure’s body is marked, displayed and surrounded by possible instruments, while the composition maintains the rigid frontal order of an instructional chart.

This may be one of the book’s clearest statements about the relationship between ritual and cruelty. Suffering becomes culturally acceptable when given the correct frame. A saint pierced by arrows can hang in a museum. A contemporary body surrounded by restraints produces alarm. The physical facts may be related, but history distributes dignity unevenly.

“Bird of Quevada” encloses a winged, heavy body inside a luminous rectangular border. The wings do not create graceful flight. They appear attached to a body that remains firmly earthbound. Small hanging forms descend beneath the torso, turning the figure into a hybrid of angel, bird, fertility idol and carnival costume.

The image could be comic if it were not so solemnly presented. That uncertainty is another important part of Witkin’s work. The photographs are grotesque, but they are not humorless. Their elaborate props, artificial wings, theatrical breasts and impossible masks frequently approach absurdity.

A winged body that cannot fly contains tragedy and a visual joke at the same time.

The danger is that the viewer’s laughter may repeat the cruelty of the sideshow. The possibility is that laughter breaks the demand that unusual bodies be treated only with solemn pity. The photographs leave both routes open, and the viewer must decide what kind of attention is being brought into the room.

“Melvin Burkhart, Human Oddity” presents a man in profile holding a small hammer near his face. One eye is covered by a dark circular device. The exposed skin, strong arm and deliberate pose give him the authority of someone demonstrating a practiced skill rather than someone passively displayed.

The title uses the historical language of sideshow classification, but the person pictured appears active, concentrated and self-possessed. The tool belongs to him. The performance is his.

This is one of the places where the photograph’s ethics feel more reciprocal. The subject is not simply arranged as an emblem inside Witkin’s fantasy. He brings an existing public persona and physical practice into the image. The photographer still controls the frame, but the performer has not vanished inside it.

Other images are more troubling.

Some bodies appear so thoroughly converted into symbols that their individual presence becomes difficult to recover. Witkin may intend to elevate people who have been excluded from conventional beauty, but elevation can become another form of possession. A person denied ordinary visibility may enter the museum only after being transformed into an angel, monster, saint or erotic apparatus.

The book’s greatness and discomfort occupy the same location.

It sees beauty where many viewers have been trained not to see it. It also seems unable to leave that beauty alone.

Every body must become theater.

The final portrait of Witkin offers a quiet key to the entire collection. He appears wearing a dark mask across his eyes. A small white crucified figure has been attached to the center of the mask, stretching vertically down his forehead and nose. One of his eyes looks outward from beside the tiny body of Christ.

The photographer places himself inside the same symbolic machinery imposed upon his subjects. He does not appear as a neutral observer standing outside the world he constructed. He becomes another masked figure, another face interrupted by religion, another body carrying an emblem.

Yet he remains the one who gets the final portrait.

The book ends with the maker looking back.

Forty Photographs is not simply a collection of shocking pictures from the past. Its real subject is the process by which bodies become images and images acquire authority. A mask can conceal a face while making the body more visible. A classical pose can grant dignity while importing centuries of judgment. A damaged negative can suggest authenticity while announcing manipulation. A museum page can turn discomfort into contemplation.

The pictures repeatedly ask whether beauty is discovered or manufactured, and what happens to the person while that manufacturing takes place.

Witkin’s world is Catholic, theatrical, erotic, medical and carnivalesque. Flesh is never merely flesh. It becomes evidence of sin, grace, mortality, desire, punishment and transformation. Even when a body is still, the photograph surrounds it with too many possible meanings to permit rest.

The most striking thing about the book is not its grotesqueness.

It is its devotion.

These photographs have been planned, staged, printed, damaged and sequenced with obsessive care. Nothing feels casual. The bodies conventional society might dismiss or hide are given elaborate sets, historical references and the dark radiance of religious icons.

But devotion is not innocence.

The same intensity that creates grandeur can turn another person into material. The same art history that grants dignity can bury individuality beneath symbolism. The same camera that reveals a forbidden beauty can control how that beauty is understood.

Forty Photographs remains powerful because it does not allow those contradictions to separate cleanly.

The pictures are compassionate and controlling, reverent and predatory, humorous and severe. They oppose conventional beauty while constructing another demanding aesthetic in its place. They invite the viewer to look at bodies normally excluded from museums, then make the act of looking impossible to regard as neutral.

The book does not ask whether these bodies are beautiful.

It asks what beauty has been doing to bodies all along.

Al Columbia - (1992) Johnny 23

Johnny 23 begins with a mouth that appears to have misplaced the rest of its face.

A hooded animal lowers a long, soft-looking snout toward the ground, sniffing at a tiny creature. The opening widens into a circular arrangement of folds, something between a flower, an organ and a tunnel made from flesh. It extends, seizes, crushes and eats. Another small body is pulled apart between fingers. A segmented morsel is lowered into the opening. The creature chews, sweats and releases a wet “BHILUCH.”

Nine panels have passed before the comic offers anything resembling an explanation.

This first page is not merely a grotesque introduction. It teaches the reader how the story will operate. Appetite comes before reflection. Bodies are mouths, containers, prey and raw material. The sound effects, “sniff,” “munch,” “belch,” supply the only language. Whatever social rules might exist in this world have not yet entered the frame.

The page itself is controlled with extraordinary strictness. Nine nearly equal panels form a clean three-by-three grid, while everything inside them appears moist, unstable and biologically indecent. The structure behaves. The creatures do not.

That tension continues through all four pages. Al Columbia never lets the story spill into a chaotic layout. The horror remains boxed, measured and paced. Every deformation receives its own allotted rectangle.

The second page introduces Johnny outside a cemetery or fenced institutional landscape, dressed in a dark suit, patterned vest and oversized necktie. His appearance is nearly formal. He smokes with the composure of someone preparing to offer a reasonable account of himself, although his face already refuses reason. The nose pushes outward like a pale root. His small lips seem permanently puckered around complaint. One eye droops while the other watches for insult.

“Normally,” he explains, “I’d have beaten this animal to a bloody pulp for that there.”

The phrase is important. Johnny does not object to violence. Violence is his normal solution. What prevents him from using it now is not compassion, discipline or recognition that the animal is behaving according to its nature. His restraint comes from embarrassment.

The last time something similar occurred, Johnny swung an umbrella at the offending creature. The umbrella opened in mid-swing.

The comic devotes three panels to this failure. First Johnny describes the plan. Then the umbrella explodes open against the animal. Finally he stands in the street holding the fully expanded umbrella while the creature remains near his feet. Johnny says, “Shit.”

The sequence has the timing of vaudeville. A furious man attempts to punish an animal, his prop betrays him, and the violent gesture collapses into slapstick. Yet Johnny does not experience the incident as comedy. He experiences it as social annihilation.

“I was absolutely MORTIFIED!” he declares on the next page. “I became a social leper! My home life took on a downward spiral.”

The scale of the response is ludicrous. An umbrella opened unexpectedly, so Johnny imagines himself expelled from human society. His home life disintegrates. Shame becomes destiny.

This is where the comic’s cruelty becomes especially intelligent. Johnny is monstrous, but his monstrosity is not presented as limitless confidence or demonic power. It grows from wounded self-importance. He believes that a ridiculous public moment has injured him so profoundly that everything following it becomes understandable.

The attempted beating disappears from his moral account. Only his humiliation remains.

A dense panel interrupts his narration with scratched words, distorted faces and a crouched figure surrounded by visual noise. “SHIT,” “FUCK,” “DIE” and other fragments collide until language becomes a swarm. It is the first panel that breaks the comic’s otherwise clean visual atmosphere, not by altering the grid but by filling one compartment with psychic graffiti.

Johnny’s interior life is louder than the world around him.

Then he finds treatment.

“I’ve since found singing a sweet and pretty song can be very therapeutic.”

The transformation occurs across three panels. Johnny begins nearly naked in front of a mirror, one hand held delicately before him. In the next panel, his hair has risen into an immaculate black wave, a tuxedo and bow tie have appeared, and he holds a thin microphone terminating in another organic little body. By the bottom row he stands beneath a spotlight before applauding hands.

The wounded gentleman has become a crooner.

The fantasy is both pathetic and magnificent. Johnny does not imagine himself healed through conversation, accountability or renewed contact with other people. He imagines himself aesthetically perfected. His body becomes elegant, his deformity theatrical, his voice adored. The humiliation of the umbrella is replaced by applause.

Columbia draws the transformation without announcing where reality ends. Johnny’s bathroom performance, tuxedo persona and stage appearance occupy identical panels. No dream border separates them. The fantasy does not arrive as a temporary departure from the story. It occupies the same visual status as the street and cemetery.

For Johnny, it may be the more important reality.

His imagined audience initially appears only as hands reaching upward from the darkness. In the next panel, the listeners become screaming, distorted faces. Their mouths open into black cavities. Eyes bulge. Teeth and tongues multiply. Admiration and horror share the same expression.

Johnny calls himself “Saint Sinatra,” delivering a “pretty, pretty song” to chase away “them sexy horrors” and “fucken bad dreams.”

The title Saint Sinatra is perfect for him. It joins sainthood, popular romance and nightclub glamour inside one private religion. Johnny does not merely want to sing. He wants the performance to absolve him. The voice becomes a ritual through which suffering can be converted into importance.

The singer of love songs is also the judge of everyone who has failed to love him correctly.

Columbia repeatedly draws attention to the mouth throughout the story. The feeding animal begins as a circular mouth surrounded by cloth. Smaller creatures are crushed and swallowed. Johnny’s ordinary mouth is tiny and compressed, as though speech has been pushed through an opening too narrow for it. When he becomes the singer, the mouth widens into rows of tiny teeth and trailing saliva.

Singing does not humanize him. It gives the appetite lyrics.

The microphone also refuses to remain a neutral piece of equipment. It resembles a dangling creature, organ or captive thing held between Johnny’s fingers. Performance and consumption belong to the same biological world. Every elegant device threatens to become flesh when examined closely.

The final page opens with three nearly identical close-ups of Johnny singing. The repetition makes his face feel like a film strip stalled on one expression. Rectangular scraps of text have been pasted across the drawings:

“She’s everywhere.”

“She’s getting fucked ha.”

“She’s getting fucked hard by someone I don’t know…”

“Therapeutic.”

“You’re getting better.”

“No.”

“Sick.”

His sweet song is not banishing the nightmare. It is giving the nightmare rhythm.

The jealousy becomes increasingly physical. Johnny’s mouth opens while the captions cross his face like labels attached during an examination. He tells himself that singing is treatment, but the treatment contains the illness. “Sickness is therapy,” another caption announces above a malformed body surrounded by reaching hands and tiny electrical plugs.

This is not recovery. It is a feedback loop.

Johnny turns obsession into music, then uses the existence of the music as proof that he is managing the obsession. The more beautifully he imagines himself performing, the less attention he must give to what he is actually doing.

At the center of the final page, Columbia abruptly inserts a grainy photographic face. It is the only image in the story that does not belong completely to the drawn world. The woman’s features are partially consumed by reproduction, emerging from dots and black fog.

“She did this to me.”

“She’s responsible.”

“That fucken bitch…”

“She was beautiful.”

The photograph functions like an idol, evidence and damaged memory at once. Johnny’s world is extravagantly drawn, but the woman he calls Mary appears as a degraded photograph, an image already separated from bodily presence.

Johnny does not remember her as a person. He remembers the effect of her appearance.

“She adhered to the eye,” the next panel explains.

A woman’s silhouette stands inside an enormous eye, carrying a small bag while the surrounding folds ripple outward like tissue. The phrase is more disturbing than a conventional declaration of love. Mary did not enter his life, alter his thinking or become known to him. She adhered to the organ through which he saw her.

Love becomes visual adhesion.

The image also reveals the governing principle of Johnny’s desire. He does not encounter another consciousness. He sees something beautiful, and the act of seeing becomes ownership. The woman remains stuck inside the eye long after any actual relationship has disappeared.

The next panel shows Johnny’s gloved hand presenting flowers.

“I loved her,” he says.

He recalls promising travel. He could travel to France. He could travel around the world. “Is that what you want? for me to travel around the world? Is that what you want?”

The speech initially resembles romantic pleading, but its repetition makes it coercive. Johnny asks what Mary wants while supplying the answer himself. His fantasy of devotion has no empty space in which another person could answer.

Travel becomes another performance. Johnny offers the whole world without offering the smaller and more difficult gift of listening.

The penultimate panel finally reveals the present reality beneath the monologue. A woman lies bound on the pavement. Her ankles have been strapped together, her wrists tied above her head. Johnny appears to be pulling or restraining her while she cries:

“I… I just w-want y-you to… l-leave me… alone…”

The crooner, lover, wounded gentleman and social outcast collapse into one figure. Johnny has not been singing to a lost romantic partner. He has abducted someone and forced her into the role his fantasy requires.

Even here, his internal story continues. The flowers, promises, jealousy and therapeutic singing all present him as the injured party. The bound woman’s statement is the first language in the comic that does not originate inside Johnny’s appetite.

She asks for nothing elaborate. She asks to be left alone.

The final panel pulls far away. Johnny becomes a small dark figure beside a fence and a large industrial or institutional building. The bound body remains near his feet. Smoke drifts from distant chimneys. The intimate horror has become one minor incident inside a city large enough not to notice.

“My… my n-name’s not… Mary…” the woman says.

“She said,” Johnny adds.

Those two words are a perfect ending.

“She said” sounds almost neutral, as though Johnny were merely recording an unexpected contribution to the conversation. He does not respond to the meaning. He does not release her or reconsider the story. Her identity enters his narrative as an inconvenient line of dialogue.

The revelation changes everything preceding it without requiring an additional explanation. The remembered Mary, the beautiful photograph and the woman on the pavement may have no connection beyond Johnny’s insistence. He has seized a stranger and placed her inside the eye-shaped theater where every woman can be made to repeat the same role.

The final denial also explains why Johnny needs fantasy so desperately. Reality keeps speaking in voices he cannot control.

The animal eats because it is hungry. The umbrella opens because it is an umbrella. The woman is not Mary because she is herself. Johnny experiences each independent fact as an assault upon his authority.

His solution is narration.

He converts attempted violence into humiliation, humiliation into social persecution, persecution into artistic sensitivity, sensitivity into romantic suffering and romantic suffering into permission to imprison another person. Every stage preserves his innocence by making him the center.

The comic’s strict nine-panel pages intensify this process. Johnny’s thinking is trapped inside boxes that never widen, even during his grand stage fantasy. The audience, the nightmare, the photograph, the giant eye and the bound woman all receive equal rectangular space. No event is permitted to escape the mechanism.

The form becomes a cage built from sequence.

At the same time, the panel rhythm gives the story the speed of a gag comic. Page one presents the animal’s feeding routine. Page two delivers the umbrella joke. Page three transforms Johnny into an entertainer. Page four supplies the final reversal.

Horror and comedy use the same machinery: setup, repetition, timing and sudden recognition. Columbia allows the reader to laugh at the umbrella, then reveals that Johnny has used the same incident to justify an entire system of resentment.

The joke does not become less funny. It becomes evidence.

The drawing itself is astonishingly controlled. Cloth hangs in soft folds around impossible anatomy. Wrinkles travel across Johnny’s face with the detail of a topographical map. Black areas are placed heavily enough to make the white figures feel illuminated from within. Hands are elegant, swollen, nervous or predatory according to what the panel requires.

Columbia can make a face grotesque without making it visually careless. Every distortion feels selected.

That precision is especially apparent in the movement between Johnny’s ordinary appearance and his Saint Sinatra form. The singer is still recognizably the same being. The jaw lengthens, the hair rises and the suit sharpens, but the underlying face remains. Fantasy does not replace the monster. It styles him.

The handwritten lettering keeps the work physically close. Words vary in size and pressure. Speech balloons feel squeezed around the speaker’s agitation. The final page abandons normal balloons for pasted textual fragments, allowing Johnny’s mind to resemble a collage of accusations and self-instructions.

Even the first-page margins contribute to the object’s life. “johnny 23 by al columbia © 1992” is written across the top, followed by a handwritten dedication containing names from the surrounding comics world, with special thanks running vertically along the side. Before the grotesque little drama begins, the page quietly records a social network of artists, publishers and friends.

That community at the edge of the page stands in complete opposition to Johnny. The comic was made within relationships. Johnny’s tragedy is his refusal to recognize relationships as anything except mirrors.

A later miniature version condensed each page into tiny panels approximately two by three inches and circulated during the last A Minor Forest tour under the Wow Cool logo. That format must have intensified the comic’s peculiar pressure. Columbia had already compressed an entire psychology into four pages. Shrinking the work further would require the reader to bring the object close to the face, studying each fold, tooth and caption at the distance of a secret.

The minicomic could leave a loud performance in someone’s pocket and continue working after the amplifiers stopped.

That afterlife feels appropriate because Johnny 23 is itself a compact transmission. It does not require a large mythology or a long explanation. An animal eats. An umbrella opens. A man feels embarrassed. He begins singing. A woman says her name is not Mary.

Four pages are enough to expose the enormous distance between what Johnny believes he is doing and what another person is forced to endure.

The comic ends, but Johnny’s private performance does not. Somewhere behind the final panel, Saint Sinatra is probably still singing his pretty, pretty song.

Girl Germs #3 (1991)

Girl Germs #3 does not look like an artifact waiting to become legendary. It looks like something that had to get out of the room before the feeling cooled.

The cover resembles a joke torn from the wall of a truck stop. A voluptuous woman straddles a motorcycle beneath the words “The Glory on Highway 69.” Her bare feet hang near the pavement, her shirt is tied beneath her chest, and the motorcycle’s rear end has been decorated with the visual vocabulary of cheap rebellion: chrome, leather, curves, danger and a license plate that appears to promise some variety of evil.

Above her, GIRL GERMS has been painted in thick white letters against a field of black. The title does not behave like a respectable masthead. It looks infectious, something growing across an image that originally expected women to remain scenery.

That tension remains throughout the issue. Girl Germs repeatedly takes materials that have already assigned roles to women, then photocopies, crops, writes over and rearranges them until the roles begin malfunctioning. Pin-ups become covers for feminist correspondence. Fashion drawings become queer self-portraits. comic-book women strike men instead of waiting to be rescued. Photographs of musicians are surrounded by handwriting that refuses to let the image settle into ordinary rock-star worship.

The photocopier does not merely reproduce the world. It gives the editors a way to interfere with it.

The first spread places cheerful fortune-cookie predictions over photographs of police barricade tape. A bold adventure is promised. Happiness and peace are predicted. Good luck, pleasant surprises and the capacity to enjoy life are supposedly waiting just ahead.

Behind every promise is the word POLICE.

The page captures the entire emotional structure of the zine before anyone explains it. Girls are raised inside a language of possibility, told that life will open if they are pleasant, hardworking and patient. Then the actual world appears as restriction, harassment, violence, sexual danger, racism and adults using authority against them.

Girl Germs does not abandon the promises. It asks why the world keeps violating them.

On the opposite page, a personal account begins without a headline large enough to turn pain into spectacle. The writer describes an intense emotional bond between girls, the instability surrounding it and the sudden recognition that another person understands a private sickness or fear. The details remain tangled because the experience itself was tangled. Friendship, identification, dependence and survival cannot be separated into neat lessons.

This is one of the zine’s defining qualities. It allows writing to remain unfinished.

The contributors are not presented as experts who have escaped confusion. They write from within it. A thought may contradict the sentence before it. An assertion may end in a question. A declaration of strength can sit beside an admission of loneliness. The page does not correct these shifts because the instability is part of the evidence.

The zine becomes a place where uncertainty is permitted to speak before someone else names it.

Several pages are built from letters sent to Girl Germs. These do more than praise or criticize the previous issue. They convert the publication into correspondence among people who may never enter the same room.

One writer discusses being the child of Chinese immigrants and the exhausting expectation that she explain her family, language and culture to white classmates. She describes casual racist assumptions, the pressure to become a representative for an entire people and the loneliness of being visible mainly as a difference.

The accompanying drawings show young women in carefully rendered outfits, posed together or holding microphones. They appear friendly, fashionable and self-contained. The images refuse the grim visual language normally used to illustrate racism. The women are not reduced to suffering. They possess style, humor and a social world beyond the prejudice being described.

The piece also complicates the idea of a unified girl culture. Gender does not erase race, class or family history. A movement built around girls can still reproduce the exclusions its members have learned elsewhere. Solidarity is not treated as an automatic biological condition. It is something that must be practiced across differences.

Another letter describes the economic divide between women who clean offices and the professionals whose workplaces they clean. The writer recalls hearing someone complain that a janitor had left a name on a desk, as though the worker’s existence were an intrusion into a space she maintained.

The story is small, but its placement matters. Girl Germs does not limit oppression to dramatic confrontations with obviously monstrous men. It notices class contempt passing through ordinary remarks. It notices which women are expected to remain invisible so that other people can experience cleanliness and order.

The magazine continually pulls the political back toward the scale of daily behavior.

A schoolgirl describes being stopped by a teacher over abandoned lunch trays, then physically grabbed when she and her friend denied responsibility. The encounter escalates rapidly from accusation to intimidation. What begins as cafeteria discipline becomes a lesson in how easily adult authority can use a teenage girl’s supposed disrespect as permission to touch, corner and frighten her.

Her account concludes without a triumphant resolution. She reports the event because it happened and because somebody should know.

That simple act is central to the publication. Girl Germs is a witness made from staples.

The zine does not have the power to investigate the teacher, repair the school or guarantee that the writer will be believed. It can give the incident a destination outside the institution that produced it. The story can leave the hallway, enter the mail and appear before strangers who recognize its structure.

A later page addresses queer girls directly. Its artwork borrows a cosmetic advertisement in which one woman applies lipstick to another, then surrounds the image with repeated versions of the name Veronica. Beneath it, a young writer calls for a revolution that includes lesbians, poor girls, nonwhite girls and girls who do not recognize themselves in the narrow image of acceptable rebellion.

The commercial beauty image becomes intimate in a different direction. Makeup is no longer preparation for male approval. One girl is touching another girl’s face.

Elsewhere, a longer piece speaks to young lesbians who may believe they are the only one awake with these feelings. The writing is startlingly direct about crushes, masturbation, secrecy, school and the strange mixture of certainty and disbelief that can accompany recognizing one’s sexuality before there is a safe public language for it.

The page does not speak from the polished end of a coming-out story. The writer remains partly afraid, partly amused and still surprised by herself. She offers companionship rather than a formula.

That distinction gives the piece its power. It does not promise that everything will immediately improve. It says that another person has been in this room.

Throughout Girl Germs, the word “girl” stretches far beyond innocence. Girls desire, masturbate, fight, play instruments, experience racism, remember abuse, fall in love with one another, distrust adults and argue about politics. The word is not used to preserve youth as purity. It becomes a way of claiming the experiences that respectable culture dismisses as immature, hysterical or temporary.

The zine refuses to wait until these writers become women whose pain can be narrated with adult composure.

The central interview with 7 Year Bitch provides the issue’s largest block of conventional music journalism, but even this refuses to behave conventionally. Photographs are cut into irregular shapes. Interview responses are pasted over black backgrounds. Handwritten phrases crawl around the margins. The band’s name occupies an entire page in enormous type, turning an insult into architecture.

The group members discuss how they learned their instruments, how the band formed, their songs, touring, labels and the treatment of women inside punk. Their answers are funny, competitive and occasionally uncertain. They disagree without the interview trying to manufacture conflict.

This is not a finished legend speaking from a documentary. It is a young band figuring out what it is while somebody writes the answers down.

The musicians are asked about being described as a “girl band,” and the conversation exposes the trap hidden in the phrase. Attention can be useful, especially in a scene where women have been discouraged from playing. But praise framed around gender can also imply that the music belongs to a separate and lesser division.

A male band is permitted to be mediocre without becoming evidence about all men. A woman playing badly can be treated as proof that women should not play.

The interview returns repeatedly to survival. Women musicians must learn instruments while being watched for failure, endure sexual commentary, negotiate promoters and travel through scenes where aggression is treated as authenticity. They must also resist the pressure to become inspirational symbols with no room for ordinary weakness.

The photographs show the band members playing, laughing and leaning into microphones. They are not solemn representatives of a cause. They look like people having the thrilling and irritating experience of being in a band.

That ordinary pleasure matters. Girl Germs is not solely a catalogue of injury. Music remains one of the ways the pages breathe.

A poem about boys doing the pogo examines the dance floor as contested territory. Punk movement is supposedly free, but the freedom often belongs to bodies large or aggressive enough to occupy space without fear. Boys crash into one another and call it release. Girls calculate whether entering the same area will mean being knocked down, grabbed or blamed for not understanding the ritual.

The zine notices how quickly rebellion creates its own customs, and how those customs can reproduce the hierarchy outside the club.

That criticism reaches its clearest form in a handwritten page beginning with a deceptively simple question: what is punk?

The writer rejects the fantasy that punks are a chosen class of social outcasts automatically cleansed of mainstream prejudice. Punk institutions can still be racist, sexist, capitalist and heterosexist. A person’s haircut, records and distance from football players do not guarantee moral insight.

The handwriting makes the argument feel immediate, as though it was composed while frustration was still moving through the hand. There is no decorative image to make it more attractive. The page is almost entirely thought.

This may be one of the most important pieces in the issue because it turns the zine’s suspicion inward. Girl Germs does not simply divide the world into enlightened punk girls and stupid outsiders. It asks whether punk identity itself can become another form of self-congratulation.

The movement is being challenged before it has fully acquired a name.

Other pages become more visually fractured. One writer surrounds a drawn body with scattered memories of a mother, childhood fear and sexual trauma. The words multiply around the figure until the body seems trapped inside recollection. Sentences change size, direction and pressure. Some are boxed, others scratched or repeated.

The page does not illustrate memory. It behaves like memory.

There is no orderly beginning. A phrase returns because it has not finished happening. Family roles, fear and bodily sensation overlap. The handwriting becomes darker where explanation fails.

Beside it, a poem describes sexual violence through a black field, a partial face and fragments of text descending across the page. The white spaces between phrases become pauses in which the reader has to supply what the writer cannot or will not narrate continuously.

The issue never treats these accounts as tasteful educational content. Their forms retain panic, anger and confusion. They resist the smoothness through which institutions often make testimony easier to consume.

Even the pages about intimacy remain unstable. Photographs of girls kissing are arranged beside a homemade cassette track list. A personal summer becomes a sequence of songs, bodies, jokes and private names. The tape is simultaneously diary, gift and evidence of a small world that existed between larger events.

Another piece takes the form of a close conversation with someone who may be manipulative or emotionally dangerous. The writer’s voice moves between invitation and refusal, tenderness and self-protection. She recognizes that affection does not automatically make a situation safe.

This emotional literacy is one of the zine’s quiet achievements. It understands that harm does not always arrive from a stranger wearing the correct costume of evil. It can grow inside friendship, romance, admiration and scenes that describe themselves as liberating.

The contributors are trying to invent boundaries while already inside the relationships that require them.

The review pages reveal the physical network supporting all this writing. Demo tapes, seven-inches, zines and bands receive compact notices accompanied by postal addresses. Heavens to Betsy, Go Fish, Holy Titclamps, Riot Grrrl, Tantrum and numerous smaller objects appear together without a hierarchy separating professional releases from something duplicated in a bedroom.

A few dollars and stamps can open another route.

These pages are not peripheral filler. They are the zine’s transportation system. A reader who feels isolated can write to another city, order a tape, trade publications, discover a band and possibly become the next contributor. Each address is a door cut into the paper.

Near the end, a page announces an upcoming Riot Grrrl tour with a long column of dates crossing the country. Read now, the list resembles historical documentation. Inside the issue, it is simply a plan.

That difference is enormous.

The people arranging these shows do not know which names will become canonical, which clubs will disappear or which photocopied statements will later sit in university archives. They are trying to find floors to sleep on, venues willing to book the bands and enough people in each city to make the next drive possible.

The movement exists here as logistics before it becomes history.

This is why Girl Germs #3 feels legendary without behaving like a monument. It captures riot grrrl while it is still being made from mail, arguments, crushes, cheap copies, unsafe schools, band practices, conflicting politics and the discovery that another girl somewhere has felt the same impossible thing.

Its politics are not flawless or complete. The issue strains toward an inclusiveness that it cannot guarantee. Some pages speak more confidently than others. Certain images remain borrowed from the same mass culture the zine opposes. Contributors sometimes disagree about what liberation should look like.

But the publication leaves those tensions visible.

It does not offer a brand called empowerment. It offers a place where empowerment is being attempted, doubted, corrected and passed to someone else.

The photographed copy carries another layer of movement. Its rear cover contains the Girl Germs post-office-box address in Olympia and a later mailing label for a zine library in Allston, Massachusetts. The object has traveled farther than the private moments described inside it. What began as stapled communication among scattered young people became something saved, recirculated, scanned and read decades later.

The photocopy degradation is part of that journey. Faces collapse into black. Fine lines disappear. Tape edges become permanent borders. Some sentences require effort to recover. Each generation of copying sacrifices detail while allowing the issue to continue moving.

The object survives through damage.

Girl Germs #3 matters because it does not merely report that a feminist punk movement existed. It shows the social tissue forming around it. A girl writes about racism. Another reports an assault by a teacher. Another describes queer desire. A band answers questions. Someone challenges punk’s innocence. Someone reviews a cassette. Someone prints an address.

No single page contains the movement.

The movement is the current passing between them.

U R Worth It

The title arrives first as reassurance and then curdles.

YOU ARE WORTH IT is printed in large white letters across a murky photograph of something decomposing on the forest floor. Above it sits the proposed name for the aesthetic binding these pages together: ANTI-SOCIAL REALISM. The language resembles an affirmation from a therapist’s office, cosmetics advertisement or motivational poster, but the image beneath it appears to offer no comfort. Whatever once possessed a recognizable body has fallen into the ground and begun losing its distinction from leaves, dirt and surrounding decay.

The title does not rescue the image. It taunts it.

This is a small object, only a handful of photographed pages, but it behaves like an exhibition catalogue, manifesto and declaration of war compressed into one packet. Three artists are represented: Mikko Aspa, Markkula and Jukka Siikala. Each is given a short explanation of methods and intentions before a final statement defines their shared concept of Anti-Social Realism.

There is very little ambiguity about what they believe they are doing. The booklet rejects empathy, humanist politics, moral protest and the idea that depictions of suffering should awaken concern for the person suffering. It celebrates predation, objectification, degradation, hatred, lust, filth and violence. It does not ask whether a representation might damage, exploit or humiliate its subject. Its stated purpose is to remove that question from consideration.

The ugliness is therefore not an accidental byproduct of difficult subject matter. It is the program.

The first interior artwork is a grid attributed to Markkula. Dozens of cropped photographs have been placed together like tiles. Fragments of buttocks, mouths, genitals, hands, bruised skin, sexual acts, bound flesh and indistinct bodily openings share the same square compartments. Some images are so tightly cropped that the anatomy becomes difficult to identify. Others remain legible enough to direct the eye toward injury, penetration or exposure.

No complete person survives the arrangement.

The grid resembles a contact sheet, but a contact sheet normally allows a photographer to compare several views of an event and select an image. Here there is no larger event and nothing to select. The fragments are the finished structure. A body enters the page only after it has been cut into usable portions.

The regular geometry makes the content feel colder. Each square is allotted approximately equal importance, whether it contains a face, a wound, an anonymous curve of skin or an image of sexual contact. The arrangement performs the objectification described later in the text. Human beings are translated into units of visual information.

The page also forces a particular kind of looking. The eye travels from box to box attempting to identify what it sees. Recognition becomes a small reward. The viewer is placed in the position of sorting bodies, injuries and acts into categories, repeating the collector’s gaze that produced the page.

Its physical crudity does not lessen that control. The images are grainy, uneven and badly reproduced, but their placement is systematic. The work presents itself as anti-art while behaving with the rigid logic of an inventory.

Markkula’s accompanying statement names hatred, lust, filth and violence as the total content of the work. It praises low-quality photocopies, video stills, internet printouts and magazine clippings, then describes them as crudely glued, taped, stapled or plastered together with minimal attention to artistic process.

The rejection of polish is intended to prevent aesthetics from softening the subject. There will be no beautiful lighting, balanced composition or elegant surface through which the viewer can escape. Yet the rejection of aesthetic decision becomes an aesthetic decision of its own. Grain, torn paper, compression, crude cropping and damaged reproduction form a recognizable style.

Anti-art develops a house style almost immediately.

The next photograph, attributed to Siikala, abandons the safety of the grid. A single elderly figure fills nearly the entire page. The person’s face is pushed close to the camera while a large phallic form extends from the mouth. The body appears cramped into the frame, with little surrounding space through which the viewer might understand the situation or recover a sense of ordinary personhood.

The image is not erotic in any generous meaning of the word. It does not suggest reciprocity, pleasure, intimacy or play. Its force comes from collision: old age, nakedness, exaggeration, bodily vulnerability and the invasive position of the camera.

Age itself becomes part of the shock device.

That is an especially ugly maneuver because it depends upon an assumption the work never examines. The older body is treated as intrinsically disturbing when displayed sexually. Instead of challenging that prejudice by giving the person presence, desire or agency, the photograph intensifies it. The figure is made grotesque so that the viewer’s revulsion can be harvested as artistic material.

Siikala’s statement describes a search for “ecstatic nausea.” It refers to amateur pornography, medical illustrations, photorealistic painting and severe cuts through human figures. It praises mercilessness and identifies the artist as a kind of trash practitioner whose work resembles exploitation cinema and extreme noise.

“Ecstatic nausea” is a revealing phrase. Nausea is not merely expected. It is promoted into the desired climax of the encounter. The body exists to produce a sensation in the viewer, while the person represented by that body becomes secondary or disappears completely.

The third artwork, attributed to Aspa, returns to collage. Its center contains what resembles a snarling canine head, dog mask or animal-like human apparatus. Teeth open toward the viewer while hands, limbs, fragments of flesh and darkened photographic pieces accumulate around it. Scratches and creases run across the entire surface, making the page look physically damaged rather than merely printed.

This image is less immediately legible than Siikala’s photograph. Its uncertainty creates a different discomfort. The central creature appears caught somewhere between victim, attacker and costume. Hands reach into the composition from several directions. Bodies are present, but their relationships have been destroyed by cutting and overlap.

The page resembles a feeding scene assembled from photographs whose original events can no longer be recovered.

Aspa’s statement supplies the missing orientation. It explicitly describes the work as approaching art from a predatory and masculine angle. Degradation, abuse, decay, voyeurism and the destruction of an actual person’s ordinary identity are treated as desirable methods for converting a subject into “pure aesthetic value.”

That phrase may be the coldest sentence in the booklet.

Pure aesthetic value sounds elevated and almost philosophical until the process required to achieve it is stated plainly. The individual must be emptied. Ego, history, social existence, emotional reality and concern for well-being are removed so that the remains can function as an image.

The artist does not discover purity. He manufactures it by subtracting the person.

Aspa’s discussion of dead animals, industrial ruins, garbage, stained paper and decomposing nature contains the seed of a potentially wider meditation on decay. Rot can reveal time, biological process and the temporary nature of human structures. A discarded object can become strange after weather, microorganisms and neglect alter its surface.

But the manifesto refuses to allow decay to become contemplation. It places dead animals, abandoned sites and human sexual degradation inside the same flattened category. Everything is valued according to how effectively it can be stripped of ordinary meaning and converted into visual disturbance.

The final page gives this shared impulse its name.

Anti-Social Realism defines itself against social realism, transgressive art with political intentions and any depiction of suffering that attempts to awaken empathy. It objects to victims being given heroic roles, rejects concern for injustice as sentimental and condemns artists who enter disturbing territory while remaining committed to human rights.

Its repeated “No longer” has the rhythm of a decree.

No longer should transgressive art expose injustice. No longer should it awaken empathy. No longer should it place the victim in a meaningful position. No longer should rebellion become a route to empowerment.

The statement presents these prohibitions as liberation from cliché, but they create another orthodoxy. The old moral expectation is not replaced by openness. It is replaced by a demand that art view suffering from the position of power, appetite or indifference.

The booklet insists that it has escaped morality. It has only selected a morality that refuses to call itself one.

To treat empathy as sentimental is a judgment. To prefer the viewpoint of the abuser is a judgment. To celebrate objectification while mocking concern for emotional harm is a judgment. A refusal to protest injustice does not place an artwork outside politics. It allows the existing imbalance of power to occupy the frame without opposition.

Anti-Social Realism claims to enter the dark corners of the human mind without apology. Yet it selects a surprisingly narrow section of that darkness. There is little confusion, guilt, fear, tenderness, ambivalence or grief. The mind represented here mostly desires domination and congratulates itself for admitting it.

That is not the full darkness of humanity. It is one room with the door locked from inside.

The manifesto also attacks artists who supposedly enter a “pigsty” of provocative material and emerge clean, morally safe and committed to fashionable causes. There is a fair question hiding inside that insult. Art can use images of suffering as proof of the artist’s righteousness. Political concern can become a pose. A viewer may congratulate himself for witnessing pain without changing anything outside the gallery.

But this booklet does not deepen that criticism. It simply reverses the pose.

Where one artist may say, “Look how compassionate I am for showing this,” Anti-Social Realism says, “Look how fearless I am for not caring.” Both positions keep the artist at the center. The subject remains material from which a self-image can be constructed.

The title YOU ARE WORTH IT becomes increasingly poisonous as the pages progress.

It might initially be read as a dark joke aimed at the language of advertising and self-help. Commercial culture repeatedly tells consumers they possess value while attaching that value to purchases, appearance and performance. Placing the phrase over decomposition could expose the emptiness of such reassurance.

But the manifesto removes much of that possibility. It does not defend people against false affirmations. It openly denies that their value or emotional damage should matter within the work.

The “you” in the title is therefore unstable. It may address the viewer, the photographed subject, the artist or no one. Each interpretation produces a different cruelty.

If it addresses the subject, it lies.

If it addresses the viewer, it flatters the person permitted to consume the subject.

If it addresses the artist, it becomes self-congratulation disguised as generosity.

The booklet is effective at producing disgust. Its images are confrontational, its monochrome surfaces feel contaminated, and its statements remove the moral exits through which a viewer might otherwise reinterpret the material as humane critique. It knows how to construct a hostile object.

The more difficult question is whether hostility alone produces depth.

Discomfort can be useful when it interrupts a habit of perception, reveals a concealed structure or forces recognition of something ordinarily avoided. Here discomfort often completes a shorter circuit. A body is degraded. The viewer recoils. The manifesto declares the recoil a success.

Nausea becomes both method and conclusion.

This makes the object notably different from a publication that investigates its own appetite for extreme material. There is no internal debate, no countervoice and little evidence of suspicion directed back at the artists. The text has already decided that remorse, apology and concern are forms of weakness.

By excluding those responses in advance, the work protects itself from the most interesting questions it might have raised.

What does the subject experience?

Who possesses the power to make and distribute the image?

Why is one body permitted to become raw material for another person’s liberation?

Does a celebration of predation challenge social power, or merely imitate it on a smaller stage?

The booklet does not fail to answer these questions. It refuses to recognize them as valuable.

That refusal is the source of its grossness.

The sexual and decaying imagery supplies the visible filth, but the deeper contamination lies in the desire to transform indifference into a mark of artistic courage. Cruelty is treated as a solvent capable of washing away convention, politics and sentimentality. What remains is called realism.

Yet realism without interest in another person is not more truthful. It is simply a restricted view of reality.

The physical object remains valuable as evidence of a particular end point within transgressive art. It records the moment when provocation stops arguing with society and begins building a tiny society of its own, complete with principles, approved materials, forbidden emotions and a heroic identity for the provocateur.

Its artists claim to reject self-empowerment, but the entire project elevates their ability to look without pity. Their hardness becomes the real subject.

The bodies are scenery.

The forest image on the cover may finally be the most honest page. Matter collapses, identities dissolve and nature continues without consulting human ideals. Decay does not possess empathy, but neither does it take pride in its lack of empathy. It has no manifesto.

Only the people who placed the slogan over it need to announce that concern has been defeated.

YOU ARE WORTH IT is the single phrase in the booklet that gestures toward human dignity. Every page beneath it works to empty that phrase of meaning.