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Nothing New is a monthly featured devoted to photography and other visual artifacts that I feel have not been given the recognition they deserve. That may include underappreciated portions of the body of work of a major photographer, the entire body of work of a relatively unknown photographer, or particular kinds of visual media that–for whatever reason–haven’t gotten their dues.

Sometimes it seems that important people are left out of history simply because there’s no logical place to put them. Such is the case with Eugene von Bruenchenhein. Bruenchenhein is relatively well known in outsider art circles, but he doesn’t get much attention from the photography world. That could be because outsider art and photography don’t really mix. An outsider artist is someone who produces art for personal or religious reasons, without any real thought to any wider audience, much less a commercial one. By those standards, an outsider photographer would be…well, almost anyone who isn’t a professional. Snapshots and vernacular photographs are about as close to outsider photography as you can get.

Nevertheless, a few critics and curators have tried to create a space for outsider photography. Only two shows that I’ve ever heard of have been entirely devoted to the genre: one at Intuit in 2002 and the traveling survey “Create and Be Recognized” in 2004. Both have ingeniously skirted the confusing nature of the term “outsider photography” by implicitly defining it as photography produced by an outsider artist–as a subset of outsider art, rather than a parallel. And both shows included Eugene von Bruenchenhein.

Bruenchenhein’s photographic work–like much of his artistic output–was inspired by and centered around his wife, Marie. Eugene and Marie collaborated to produce private erotica featuring the semi-nude Marie in a number of pin-up girl poses, surrounded by carefully placed homemade props meant to simulate the glamour of the centerfold. (All of this work was first brought to public attention after Eugene’s death in the early ’80s.) Personally, I think the entire genre of private photographic erotica interesting, but what elevates the von Bruenchenhein’s pictures above the others is the dense network of connections it shares with those other narratives of visual culture from which it is, for the most part, excluded.

These images are clearly inspired by pin-ups. As such, they provide a valuable example of the way that fashion photography (however old-school) penetrates the psyches and fantasies of consumers. These days it’s often said that the demands placed upon women by images are so great that almost no one could live up to them. Consequently, those images and their producers are blamed for any number of things from the anorexia to political apathy. [More on that in a later post…] Maybe those allegations are all true. But von Bruenchenheim’s work seems to offer a touching alternative: the possibility that those images can prompt an average guy (he worked at a greenhouse and a bakery during his lifetime) to project the glitzy fantasies of consumer culture onto an average woman. The homespun costumes that adorn Marie are potent symbols of the same process–the transformation of everyday blue-collar reality into something spectacular.

The transformation is only partially complete, of course. In Eugene and Marie’s world, Marie is a superstar; to the third-person observer, she doesn’t necessarily make the cut, and her surroundings never completely shake off the feel of an elaborate arts-and-crafts project. This division lends the entire body of work an element of camp. (Marie seems like she would have fit quite nicely among the motley crew depicted in “Pecker”.) It also connects the von Bruenchenheims’ experiments to other early experimenters with photographic fantasy.

Early art photographers like Henry Peach Robinson, Lewis Carroll, and Julia Margaret Cameron often used photography to imitate the fantasy images they admired–pastoral watercolors, Romantic novels and poetry, and pre-Raphaelite painting. While their work was less erotically charged, the theatrics they employed often look similarly low-budget or even ridiculous to the modern eye. Eugene von Bruenchenheim shares a few other connections to these early artistic pioneers. Like them, he exhibited an interest in techniques that would later be associated with the Surrealists, like double exposures and other photo-mechanical manipulations. His intellectual concerns ran the gamut from botany to metaphysics; he was, like many early photographers, what would once have been known as a “natural philosopher.” I see Eugene von Bruenchenheim as independently undertaking the same task as Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Robinson, etc. at a different place and time, using home-made set-ups to photograph replicas of what captured the male imagination around the mid-twentieth century. His outsider status and isolation from the photographic community make him an even more interesting figure, since he undertook similar tasks to other photographers without any external provocation.

For all these ties to the old-timers, though, Eugene von Bruenchenheim is decidedly modern. He sits nicely at the intersection of a number of focal points of current visual study. As an outsider artist, he straddles the vernacular and the conceptual. He built constructed images, he manipulated photographic technique, and he experimented with identity–especially female identity and male desire in the context of über-normative mid-century American culture. Best of all, he didn’t do it to make a statement. He did it instinctively, as a natural response to his own desires and the world that surrounded him. As such, it seems criminal that he has yet to be offered any place in mainstream photographic history.