Narrative Artists' Books and the Human Condition: The Work of Philip Zimmermann

Abstract

Most artists attempt to balance the personal and societal, but the artist's books of Philip Zimmermann, who spoke at Visual Studies Workshop's 2016 Photo-Bookworks Symposium, achieve this balance with uncommon ease. For Zimmermann, considering the personal and social is not just a communication strategy--it is an end in itself. Zimmermann makes work about the relationship between self and society. Through personal experiences, historical incidents, and contemporary issues, he examines how knowledge and belief shape the way humans share the world with one another. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Zimmermann uses the narrative artist's book especially effectively to expound the long history of the self and society. Five recent works--Celsius 233 (2015), Cruising Altitude (2011), Incident in Deseret (2014), Paradise luist: An Allegory (2013), and Reaper (2015)--all integrate photographic images with a running text. Celsius 233 and Paradise Lost: An Allegory also include drawn imagery, each to different effect. Zimmermann often combines original (personal) content with appropriated (more universal) text and image, augmenting or reconfiguring the borrowed media to construct new meaning. He manipulates the imagery to create a cohesive visual vocabulary from disparate sources. Drawing on expertise in photomechanical color separations, his signature exaggerated halftone dots, color screens, and other devices clue the reader in to a media-critical mindset. One must consider how the aesthetics of commerce and warfare, propaganda and exoticism, and objectivity and sentimentality ultimately contribute to the repeated shortcomings of humanity that Zimmermann addresses. As investigations into human nature, totalitarianism, and faith, Zimmermann's books parallel political theory. For example, Hannah Arendt's observations about self and society map onto these artists' books in an interesting, generative way. First, Arendt argues, the public sphere is constructed. Thus, citizenship and communal belonging manifest through political participation, not through supposedly inherited qualities like race. Second, she posits an inherent spatial aspect to politics. For Arendt, political opinions are necessarily formed and tested through engagement in the public sphere. Zimmermann's narratives play out in these spaces of social engagement, or investigate how an individual's thoughts are shaped in this sphere. This social force exerted on the individual is addressed by Arendt's third point: the distinction between private and public life. She claims the public interest is only achieved by overcoming private self-interest and thinking about the long-term consequences of one's actions. (1) The constructedness of the public sphere is investigated in Cruising Altitude, where Zimmermann explores how identity, through language, race, and ethnicity, impacts one's status and participation in a community or culture. The book's dos-a-dos (double-sided) structure emphasizes the juxtaposition between positive and negative aspects of travel. One side, Above, follows a personal narrative of wanderlust via text set atop what appear to be vintage postcards. Flipping the book over presents Below, in which each page features a single word--synonyms of foreigner in various languages--over photos taken from inside an airplane. Against words like undocumented and outsider, the liminality suggested by the airplane cabin morphs from the traveler's invigorating sense of displacement in Above to unsavory implications of a life spent not belonging. Contrasted with the postcards' nostalgic visual treatment, the techno-scientific objectivity associated with unmanipulated aerial photography furthers the sense that reality is more accurately reflected in the bleak otherness expressed in Below. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Zimmermann continues this investigation into the human capacity to overcome nature, and human nature, in Paradise Lost: An Allegory, an update of John Milton's 1667 poem about Adam and Eve's fall from grace. …