Word: wackerbarth
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...madder metaphor. What is it about scarlet and its ilk that would simultaneously produce two completely unrelated books of photography devoted to pictorial variations on the same red object? Kenn Duncan's Red Shoes comprises 42 photos of the famous in fuchsia footgear, Kevin Clarke and Horst Wackerbarth's The Red Couch is the record of the amazing overland odyssey of twin crimson chaises through the heart of America...
Clarke and Wackerbarth represent two other extremes: Clarke the intellectually artistic, and Wackerbarth the commercially artistic. Previous collaborators on a West German exhibition project, both men share an ideal of photography that demands intellectual as well as purely aesthetic content. The surprisingly copious text was written by William Least Heat Moon (chosen perhaps because his first book was entitled Blue Highways...
...Wackerbarth and Clarke take the different tack of tacky. Since symbolic red sofas are not a literary or cinematic commonplace, they started right off with a metaphor in search of a meaning. Least Heat Moon's informative but overly journalistic commentary describes the origin of the sofa project in an unused college swimming pool, revealing in a reverent tone that the photographers initially envisioned suing the Red Couch "to disturb the commonplace into something new, and then photograph the results." The presence of the sofa in every picture imposes self-consciousness on the photos, becoming a big red photographic...
Where Duncan indulges his subjects. Wackerbath and Duncan challenge theirs, putting them on the couch for photographic psychoanalysis, squeezing sides out of their subjects that they often would rather not provide. Wackerbarth had to surrender the negatives for his portrait of Larry Hagman that looks far cheaper and sinister than J.R. could ever be. The injury behind the photo of the Illinois Nazis is almost as interesting as the picture itself: a deep woodpancled room with the Nazi's arranged defensively in the rear, conspicuously ignoring or suspiciously eyeing the camera...
...Wackerbarth always looked for a different angle on the couch: homosexuals in the act, a surrealistic family portrait of a man, woman, and a coyote, and midget actress Zeidah Rubinstein of Poltergeistian fame holding a ruler and magically shrunken sofa. Despite all this ingenuity, the Red Couch never manages to attain true metaphoric nirvana, but it manages to reach the state of a truly useful photographic tool for two talented photographers...
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