Deana Lawson’s Subjects of Surveillance

For some days before and after I saw the photography-based artist Deana Lawson’s current exhibition at Gagosian (through October 24th), I read and reread John Szarkowski’s majestic and liberating 1966 book, “The Photographer’s Eye,” to remind myself of what’s fascinated me about the medium from the beginning. As the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991, Szarkowski organized complex exhibitions—now seen as historic—featuring the work of then relatively unknown artists such as Eugène Atget and Diane Arbus, photographers who illuminated the real and the fantastic in the mysterious modern world. “The Photographer’s Eye” sits in the hand like a family album. Its black-and-white photographs and minimal text are divided into sections: “The Thing Itself,” “The Detail,” “The Frame,” “Time,” and “Vantage Point.” Szarkowski doesn’t shy away from discussing photography’s limitations—it’s a time-based art, restricted to the facts of the moment—but also celebrates all the wonders that can happen within the frame. He draws a useful comparison between photographers and the Old Master painters Paolo Uccello and Diego Velázquez. Whereas those painters combined “elements which had been separate in space and time” to create a composite picture about military power and war, Szarkowski writes, photographers who shoot outside the studio can’t stage-manage in that way. “From the reality before him,” Szarkowski says, the photographer “could only choose that part that seemed relevant and consistent.” Denied the power of narrative, the photographer has to focus on the symbol or the “significant detail” to tell a story, while letting the image contain ambiguity, too. What could that dirt road and the horizon beyond it mean—hope or hopelessness? And what do that soldier’s eyes reveal as he looks out at us from Korea in 1950? Is he weary, or wary, or poised for battle? Szarkowski makes a number of other vital points in the book, chief among them that photography as a phenomenon belongs not just to the artist but to anyone with vision. This beautifully egalitarian perspective helped democratize the medium, allowing everyone a chance to look and to see. But it didn’t necessarily help the art market, or the role that creators like Lawson play in it.

Lawson, now forty-seven, first became widely known in the twenty-tens, when her work was shown in the MOMA’s “New Photography 2011,” and in “Ruffneck Constructivists” (curated by the artist Kara Walker), at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, in 2014. Lawson’s large-scale color pictures in those shows were, like much of her work, staged shots, in which Black figures were presented in heightened, theatrical contexts. Born in 1979 into a Black working-class family in Rochester, New York, Lawson, whose mother was an administrative assistant at Kodak and whose father was an amateur photographer, studied photography at Penn State and at the Rhode Island School of Design. Arbus was among the photographers she grew up admiring, and Arbus’s stunning “Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1966” likely had a considerable influence on “Roxie and Raquel, New Orleans, Louisiana” (2010), the first work of Lawson’s that I remember seeing.

In “Roxie and Raquel,” two young women of color—twins—kneel at the center of a mattress, their backs to each other, heads turned to face the camera. Each has one hand on her thigh and the other arm raised above her head, fingers touching her sister’s. (I learned later that Lawson herself is a twin.) What distinguishes the two women at first glance is their clothing: the sister on the left wears a gold tank top and gold high heels, while the one on the right has a modest white blouse under a sweater vest—sartorial versions of Toni Morrison’s Sula and Nel. Once you’ve taken in the twins’ outfits, you focus on their eyes; one sister looks sadder than the other. To this study of contrasts and sameness—the high-heeled sister, whose attire indicates that she wants to be looked at, is “bad,” whereas her twin represents modesty and goodness—Lawson adds a kind of sexual melancholy: Which woman will be desired in the world? Which will become a forgotten understudy in the theatre of life? Who will love them? Love is the ultimate ambiguity.

In the late nineteen-seventies, the art critic and curator Douglas Crimp dubbed the young artists Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Sherrie Levine, and Louise Lawler, among others, the “Pictures Generation”—artists making work that offered a critique of gender and of the notion of originality (and, thus, of Szarkowski’s view of the photographer as auteur). Alienation, role-playing, commercial impulses—these creators explored all of these things as they made Marxism visual. Political stratagems in art were shifting in places like New York and Los Angeles, and the Pictures Generation’s ethos began to speak to young Black and brown artists, ultimately intersecting with their desire for representation. Slowly but definitely, the “other” aesthetic made inroads into the formerly largely white and male art world and art market. These new and alternative visions were being seen because they were now part of the economy of art, and the stories that Lawson told, and wanted to tell, in her early works, like “Roxie and Raquel” or “Mickey and Friends” (2010)—in which two nude women, one dark-skinned and one lighter, stand facing each other, each with a hand on the other’s hip, below a mural of a delighted Mickey Mouse holding an ice-cream cone—showed how much photography and the market for it had changed in the preceding decades.

Still, I found it difficult to see beneath the surface of those early photographs of Lawson’s. Did the work borrow from Surrealism, from Claude Cahun’s and Hans Bellmer’s staged photographs exploring play, sex, and identity? And, if so, where was the mystery that I was accustomed to seeing in those older (and, yes, European) artists’ work? In the end, for me, looking at Lawson’s early pieces was like listening to Mary J. Blige trying to sing in Chaka Khan’s register: she was flat. And what she was showing us, with her many oiled-up—if not greasy, and thus “funky”—bodies (Lawson doesn’t do anything as plebeian and real as “ashy”), was a testament not to a vision but to the power of the internalized white gaze.

The Gagosian show features seventeen photographs from a series that Lawson began in 2023, titled “Edge Control”—for a popular beauty product that smooths out the baby hairs along women’s hairlines and is one of the most frequently stolen items from beauty-supply stores. “Edge Control” is inspired in part by Jonathan Crary’s 2022 book “Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World” and also draws on Philip K. Dick’s novel “A Scanner Darkly,” a dystopian tale from 1977 that is full of mad poetry and brilliant imagery. At its center is a youngish man named Bob Arctor, an undercover cop who starts using drugs in order to infiltrate a house full of addicts in Southern California. At a certain point, he becomes addicted to Substance D, or “Slow Death,” a powerful psychoactive drug, and then other things happen to heighten his sense that the world and his body are one, and that both are being secretly spied on. It’s on the idea of surveillance that “Edge Control” hangs its theoretical hat, and the beauty product here is the addictive substance. Is beauty worth stealing? Can you steal it?

A fair number of the people we see in this series are Black women. The images are photographs of photographs: Lawson shot “walls of shame” in beauty-supply stores, where surveillance-camera stills of suspected shoplifters are posted. The original pictures are low quality—at once smeary, ominous, and mundane. They’re artifacts from a place we recognize but don’t want to inhabit, part of Lawson’s sleaze aesthetic. At the same time, the works are all handsomely printed and framed with black mirrors. Lawson has said that she hoped the frames would make the photographs seem “like jewels,” and would make the women depicted proud if they ever saw the works. But the framing also underlines the difference between the presentation of the images and the presumed impoverishment of their subjects: money trumps poverty every time.

At times, I felt queasy looking at these pictures, in part because Lawson doesn’t ask us to take her subjects in. All is alienation and bright colors—even when blurred. Lawson’s ostensible thieves have the look of zombies. Their interiority is not the point; apply enough political theory and you lose sight of the human—something Arbus never did. Arbus used the “odd” as a way in; Lawson stops at the door. She seems more interested in the subject’s surface than in the soul. I kept going back to “Edge Control,” trying not to see race as a kind of prop—an excuse for the agitprop—in the work. Do we mirror the society we’ve made? All those skulking people in harshly lit aisles looking for the transformative power of beauty that they can’t afford? Or is Lawson primarily interested in making a commodifiable object, in which the subject is raw, down, but is viewed from an attractively framed distance?

The question of photography and surveillance is, if not an old one, certainly a familiar one. (These themes were explored in the Tate Modern’s important 2010 show “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera” and, in 2018, in the Met’s “Everything Is Connected,” about art, surveillance, and conspiracy.) The second time I went to Gagosian to see “Edge Control,” I remembered some color photographs that Nick Knight took of Kate Moss for Vogue in 1995. Moss, styled by Camilla Nickerson, appears in various pristine white outfits and is shot as though from a surveillance camera; the images look slightly blasted out, cold. This is a sleek world, and Moss is makeup-ready, but you feel something for the woman she portrays in the images: she is isolated, standing in an elevator, sitting behind the wheel of a car, walking down a city street, all in a world mysteriously devoid of other people. She’s alone with all her marketable beauty; only Big Brother is watching her, is watching us now. In fact, Moss’s lonely woman may be one of the reasons someone would want to steal Edge Control in the first place—to look like a commodified object. This is a powerful dream. Remember that moment in Jennie Livingston’s extraordinary documentary “Paris Is Burning” (1990), when the trans woman Octavia St. Laurent shows up at an open call to be a Ford model? Every baby hair is in place; she loves the clothes and the fantasy that magazines promote; she knows that she belongs in that world. But her fantasy can’t break through the reality of her race and the fact that she’s trans. Her dreams exist in opposition to a marketplace where she does not fit. And when has the poor individual ever beat out capital?

One woman in the “Edge Control” series wears an affirming T-shirt that says “Self Love Club,” but how can she be self-loving in a world that identifies her—because of her race and her poverty and her gender—as a presumed thief? I wonder if the women in “Edge Control” are actually used to being surveilled, because of their poverty. Is surveillance supposed to protect “us” from “them”? To protect the haves from the have-nots, with all their awful need, not just in beauty-supply shops but wherever those destitute monsters threaten our world of health and prosperity with their raggedy wigs and clothing and their covert, thieving behavior? The narratives of the people in “Edge Control” don’t move beyond the picture frame; Lawson fails to present significant details that might—as Szarkowski suggests—tell us more about this or that moment, this or that person. Instead, the works in “Edge Control,” despite the pain of the racism depicted, are two-dimensional documents in which Black people, the poor, and women are targeted, and then what? So what? Lawson’s idea runs out of steam early on in the series, because it’s less an idea than a trope stuck to a pretty piece of paper.

It’s not that the artist Marianne Wex has any answers about the gendered body, but, boy, does she take the question and run with it. In her brilliant 1972-77 photographic series “Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures”—which is the standout work in “Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives” (at MoMa, through May 2nd)—gestures say so much, and women, in particular, physically mimic power without questioning its source. Wex was a young painter, living in Germany and working at the same time as the Pictures Generation, when she created the series. She didn’t consider herself a photographer, but she wanted to document what was happening to her body, and why. In an interview with the curators Roxana Marcoci and Madeline Weisburg, Wex says, about the genesis of the work, “I didn’t know why I sat so tight, so constricted, even when I was alone. This led me to want to see how other women occupied their space in the world.”

Using a Japanese medium-format Mamiya camera, Wex went out looking for herself and found a universe of sick bodies—bodies made ill by the patriarchy and by poverty. She would mount her small black-and-white prints on boards and write brief captions for them. On one board, with the caption “Sitting Arms,” we see, in the upper right-hand corner, a man and a woman in bright sunlight on a park bench. The man is reclining, his arms resting on the back of the bench, while the woman sits upright, with her legs and arms crossed. Below that image are five photographs featuring men, each sitting in a way that suggests repose. The next row shows a series of women who are not so relaxed. Indeed, they are all posing for the photographer, their hands held close to or around their face or neck. If the camera is male, or an instrument of power—and it is—these women have been trained to make themselves “feminine” for it.

On the two boards that make up “Possessive Holds,” Wex makes you see something else. Guys rest their arms on girls’ shoulders while looking straight at the camera, as if to say, Mine. I know these pictures to be true because, without exception, when I walk alone on the streets of New York, if a white man spies me—and all I represent to him—approaching, and his girl seems unaware of the imminent threat, he makes sure to take her arm and claim her quickly. Mine. But to whom do the women in Lawson’s pictures belong? I’m not entirely sure that she views them as anything more than objects of otherness. They seem framed less by the camera than by the photographer, made “real” by Lawson’s desire to convey menace, socioeconomic disadvantage: the funk of Black life.

Lawson doesn’t want to eliminate Szarkowski’s view of photography as much as she wants to render it outdated, trivial. The world that she presents here is not a new Black Eden but a beaten-down community, familiar to the white man within. The Gagosian show includes works that aren’t part of “Edge Control,” a number of sad, lost pictures that bear no direct relationship to the isolation or to the world of fashion that Knight’s Kate Moss inhabited, though they do reflect a trend in art. In “Baby Throne” (2025), for instance, we see a young Black woman, with swollen legs, nursing a baby at her oversized breast. The mother’s white bra straps and red dress are part of the landscape of color in the living rooms and bedrooms where Lawson finds her images. Here, the walls are yellow, as is the fabric covering of the couch that the woman is sitting on; to the left of the frame, we see the white knitted cover of another piece of furniture, with a white Teddy bear resting on it. This young mother is a child holding a child. She is also an object of political fascination—the underprivileged as spectacle—while the knitting and the Teddy bear call to mind hip art, like the Mike Kelley-inspired fantasy world that Precious Okoyomon puts forth in her installations. One feels anguish while looking at “Baby Throne” because of what Lawson leaves out (what Alice Neel, for instance, has full command of in her extraordinary 1972 portrait of a mother and her disabled child, “Carmen and Judy”): reciprocal emotion. Would any of these images work without their signifier-heavy settings and props? Lawson’s world may read as Black, but in the end it’s the kind of Blackness that any white person can readily understand—and commodify. ♦