The Shadow Dance: The Grotesque And the Erotic In the Work of William Mortensen

CHALLENGE TO CONVENTIONS

In an era when the "pure" photography movement, represented by Group f/64 and names like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, dominated the scene with its defense of realism, sharpness, and objectivity, William Mortensen (1897–1965) took the opposite path, exploring artifice, manipulation, fantasy, and, above all, the grotesque. However, his fascination with the grotesque should not be understood as a mere inclination towards the macabre or bizarre, as his work challenges conventions, inviting the viewer to confront the uncomfortable and the forbidden, leading us to oscillate between attraction and repulsion, pleasure and horror, beauty and deformity.

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THE GROTESQUE: A BRIEF HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The word "grotesque" derives from the Italian grottesca, a term used in the Renaissance to describe ornamental frescoes discovered in the ruins of the Domus Aurea in Rome. These frescoes featured hybrid figures, improbable combinations of humans, animals, and plant elements. Since then, the grotesque has become an aesthetic category associated with distortion, the mixing of genres, and that which escapes the conventions of classical beauty. Artists like Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Brueghel, and later, Francisco Goya, explored the grotesque as a means of moral critique, satire, or psychological investigation. In the 19th century, in the United States, although Edgar Allan Poe's literature intensely explored the grotesque, visual art remained relatively distant from this territory until the 20th century. Photography, in particular, developed under the sign of documentary objectivity, which made William Mortensen as unsettling as he was innovative.

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HYBRID DIMENSION

In the 1920s and 1930s, the period when William Mortensen consolidated his career, the grotesque assumed a central character in his work. Alongside conventional portraits and female nudes, he created entire series dedicated to monsters, demons, witches, and images inspired by occultism. His aborted project for a "Pictorial History of Witchcraft and Demonology" is exemplary, for him, the grotesque was directly linked to the imagery of fear, religious transgression, and radical alterity. The grotesque in William Mortensen was not only a theme but also a method, which can be seen from how he manipulated the photographic image through montages, retouching, textures, and graphic experiments, transforming it into something that approached drawing or engraving. This aspect was the target of harsh criticism from photography purists, who accused him of "violating" the essence of the medium. However, it is precisely in this hybrid dimension, between photography and painting, reality and imagination, that the grotesque in William Mortensen's work gains strength.

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Check out the extended version of the article in Premium and discover more about the eroticism and grotesque in Mortensen's work, the polarity that runs through his work, his fascination with occultism and demonology, his "shock" aesthetics, how he used the grotesque as resistance to realism, Morten's artistic philiosophy, his conflict with Group f/64, led by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and condemnation to oblivion, 31 additional photographs, and MUCH more...!!

Click HERE for an interview with the dark "occult" artist Saturno Buttò

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