Lifting the Veil:
de Clerambault's photographs of Moroccan Women

The French psychiatrist, de Clerambault (l872-l934), known for labelling the syndrome in which patients believe themselves to be the object of attention of a famous person, was himself preoccupied with woven material, its draping and also tearing. He made some thousands of posed photographs of Moroccan women in the veil. The collection of his glass negatives mouldered in the Musee d'Homme after his suicide, until a few years ago.

Using Joyce McDougall's (l986) concepts of theatres of the mind and of neo-sexuality, we may understand how for him the art of drapery = pleasure, but the work may also be related to concepts of female and male gender and to the hidden meanings in the C19 Orientalist school of painting.

Through the curbing of our impulses, in sexuality and indeed in looking, civilisation was possible, according to Freudians. De Clerambault overcomes the cultural deprivation through the creation of these images of order and beauty.

A survey of the veiled women's images, are examples of fine 'erotic daydreams carried out in reality'. In a limited interpretative repertoire, they show a specific cultural form of life's natural object which is, of course, to experience intense pleasure.

de Clerambault's photographs, for him illusion and consolation, are part of the phenomenon of beauty, which as Freud (l930) said, has no apparent cultural purpose and yet civilisation could not do without.

Representing the 'Huddled Masses'

The representation of 'poverty' and poor people has been the subject of photography since its invention. However, it was in the United States during the Depression that the New Deal agency, Farm Security Administration, gave photographers a formal structure.

The body of work was large. Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange are considered in some detail. They exemplify and demonstrate the cultural and political basis of the perspective which evolved. Walker Evans seemed to see his subjects as remote and alien. He showed them with an austere aesthetic. Lange too created beautiful images which clearly show her reformist position. Both open their subjects to the sympathy of the readers of the pictures. The timeless quality of the results of the propaganda motive remains stunning. One must only be concerned that the beauty of the images subverts the message.

The 1930s theme of 'noble suffering' is contrasted with later work by Diane Arbus and Andres Serrano. It seems that they see poor people as symbols of urban malaise or as free spirits. In neither case is there empathy.