BJP: Many of your photographs directly dialogue with Charcot’s, creating particular resonances between the hands depicted. What is your interest in them?
LL: The series of ambrotypes, for example, was spurred by looking at the women’s hand gestures and imagining them as secret signals – signals between subjects who are desiring, troubled and troubling. In the doctor’s playbook, physiological terms were used to describe the physical attitudes of the women’s hands: paralytic or atrophied. But, what if there was a language – parallel to the terms of diagnosis and under its radar – that allowed the relationships between the women to flourish? They could scheme, they could argue, they could exchange messages of love and condolence.
It’s an infuriating commonplace that women are still described as “hysterical” when asserting their subjectivities, speaking up and advocating for themselves. I was making the book during the long hell of the Trump administration, so my rage, fear and exhaustion fuelled the project. For me, the heart of the work is imagining what it means to live within a community and, by extension, participate in a broader struggle, not simply to advocate for one’s freedoms. Much of the book’s content, I realise, is very disturbing, but I think there’s hope and fire and fight in there too.
BJP: There certainly is, most prominent in the tableaus where you picture women interlocked in strenuous poses. They invoke a range of traditions – from dance to protest photography – yet also resist easy categorisation. I can’t help but read your concealment of the women’s faces as ripostes to Charcot’s quest to “see”.
LL: Yes, this is such a beautiful way to describe my strategy. It may seem strange to describe the photographs from Iconographie as portraits, but this is where I began. The idea of disclosure drives these photographs and portraiture more generally: that a portrait will reveal a condition or character. So, the idea of turning away in gestures of self-preservation and resistance was really important to me. Working with dancers – both professionals and amateurs – was also central. It allowed me to animate the women’s gestures and stories in unexpected ways. I worked with two incredible dancers – Lucille Toth and Mathilde Guibert – who collaborated with me to develop scripts for improvisation. We did this with attention to the gestures and postures in Charcot’s photographs and how they could provide cues for movement. There are echoes of protest photography – historical and contemporary – and images from reporting on the US border crisis. But I was also looking at photographs of the Judson Dance Theater performances, particularly Yvonne Rainer’s.