Aperture

APERTURE

Editor's Note

“There is not art without intoxication. But I mean mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man’s reach.” —Dubuffet

Guest edited by W.M. Hunt, this issue of Aperture features work by photographers and scientists in their efforts to capture delirium on paper. Images ranging from contemporary through 19th Century show how delirium, clinical or colloquial, has been documented, analyzed, codified, worked over, and wondered about for the last 150 years, together creating a psychic agitation that can be as dark as it is witty. Artists include Nancy Burson, Debbie Fleming Caffrey, Ellen Carey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eugene Richards, Weegee, and many others.

Here, terror looks like ecstasy, stupor looks like pleasure, innocent joy like panic—and vice versa. Moving sinuously through various states of mind and body, as well as from the objective to the subjective, from the specific to the abstract, the strange, idiosyncratic, sometimes other-worldly, sometimes frightening images comprising “delirium” are unnerving as they almost toy with our sense of things. Images that might otherwise feel benign and eminently normal are, in this evocative context disquieting, yet somehow magical.

In a 1972 issue of Aperture, editor Minor White asked: “What would we see in photographs if we could look at them in contemplation? Catalysts at best....” Like a photographic Rorschach test, “delirium” provokes questions about what is actually in these pictures, and what we may be projecting on them, revealing the continuing power of the photograph to incite and fuel our imagination and psyche.

The Editors