Mystery and a curious disorientation is a first reaction upon viewing the most recent manifestation of Henry Horenstein's photographic art. By all accounts, this should not be the case. His subject matter is the human body of which we all have intimate knowledge, albeit at least with our own. The strangeness of Horenstein's imagery is that he has concentrated on the extreme close-up scrutiny of the human body, turning it from the outer layers of distinct personalities and individuals into universal landscapes with flesh substituting for soil and hair acting as foliage. This visual test of our sensibilities has a basis for explanation. We are so used to our own bodies that we see, but don't really observe ourselves. Except for noting something out of the ordinary, such as the appearance of a bruise or blemish, we see through ourselves as we go about the private activities of dressing, bathing, and seeing our reflection in the mirror. We gaze on the bodies of others in admiration, envy, or eros, but rarely with the dispassionate intensity of these photographs.

These are not in any conventional sense nudes in the often grand and equally often tawdry tradition of photography. They are not scientific or medical, despite the disturbingly clinical close-up viewpoint the take. Finally, they are not abstractions, even though some of the imagery is challenging through the manipulation of focus and cropping. In actuality, there is some truth to Horenstein's recent work containing aspects of all of the three categories mentioned above, while maintaining an originality all its own.

There are few contemporary photographers whose works, like Horenstein's, do not make the human body the object of a cultivation of beauty. The languid, ample female nudes of Irving Penn come to mind in their balance between grace and grotesque. Likewise, the gnarled and drooping flesh of the late John Coplan's powerful self-portraits that chronicle the ravages of time.

In his intense and candid examination, Horenstein cannot but invest his works with sexuality. The lack of narrative or objectification, however, removes any sense of eroticism that would compromise his vision. Horenstein's photographs are aspects of the human body as geography. The more the works defy immediate identification, the more they stimulate our imagination. Through concept, focus, cropping, and exquisite printing, Henry Horenstein transforms the ordinary and seemingly obvious and makes us re-examine the components of what we are.

Robert Flynn Johnson
Curator-in-Charge
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

ROBERT FLYNN JOHNSON
Robert Flynn Johnson is Curator in Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. His publications include Lucian Freud: Works on Paper (W. W. Norton), Peter Milton: Complete Prints, 1960–1996 (Chronicle), Plant Kingdoms: The Photographs of Charles Jones (Thames and Hudson), Leonard Baskin: Monumental Woodcuts, 1952–1963 (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), Artists' Books in the Modern Era 1870–2000: The Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), Reverie and Reality: 19th Century Photography of India from the Ehrenfeld Collection (FAMSF), Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers (Thames and Hudson), and The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco).