Customer Reviews

Jeffrey Silverthorne: Photographs

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I think of myself as an open-minded student of photography with a broad spectrum of likes. And I have been fascinated with the photographers of the grotesque (such as Joel Peter Witken) for many years. But I can honestly say that this little volume of Jeffrey Silverthorne's works (from a show at Galerie A, in Stuttgart) is one of the most difficult books in my collection. It is one of the few volumes that I warn people about when they go to pick it up.

Silverthorne has an intense fascination with death, and an equally eerie sense of the sensual. Most of the photographs in this volume are drawn from several series done in morgues. This isn't a new idea; Witkin did a great deal of work in similar circumstances. But what Silverthorne often sees is a sexuality that is nearly as chilling as death itself. Constantly in these photographs your first reaction is as if the subject (a sleeping girl, a mother, a pair of lovers) is alive. And then the eye sees the whole picture, and with a shock you must adjust your vision to include the scars and cuts of death and autopsy. Other shots have an almost poetic balance which also shatters in the mirror of mortality. Few photographers can consistently evoke such a sense of horror.

In another series Silverthorne works with found models in the motels of Detroit. These have a different kind of horror. Despite the casualness of the participants there is a strong theme of alienation and loss. These are people thrown together as if they were bodies. Each responds to the camera as if the others on the image were not there. This is not the horror of death, but the horror of anomie. A loss not of the body, but the spirit. One is changed in viewing these images, and not in comfortable ways.

I cannot help but admire a photographer who can produce such strong and unnerving images. But I am more comfortable when the book is tucked away on its bookshelf than when I am looking through it, or when it is opened for discussion. In a way the work helps me to define my own limits, and to be very glad that they are there. (Also in the volume are an interesting introductory piece by the photographer and some fine analysis by Gregory Fuller.)