William Mortensen

William Mortensen’s colorful career in art has become a thing of forgotten spectacle. Once dubbed the Antichrist by Ansel Adams, Mortensen has gone unacknowledged for decades. The sparse literature on his work that does exist generally centers around his conflict with the aforementioned Adams and the sensational, grotesque imagery which he spent his life making is often left by the wayside. Yet, at times, Mortensen ventures into the crassly commercial, sensationalist, perverted, even pedophilic, so it is comprehensible that, even though such transgressions remained generally out of the public eye, the memory of Mortensen and his work has not been long enduring. It is thus important to investigate and distinguish between the art of Mortensen and the life of Mortensen.

William Herbert Mortensen was born January 27, 1897 in Utah to Dutch immigrant parents and worked from a young age at the family grocery store. He displayed precocious talent in art and was soon apprenticed to James Taylor Harwood, French-educated painter who earlier had worked within Academic Realism but later turned to Impressionism. [1] He was drafted into the Army during World War I and began training at Camp Merritt in New Jersey, but the war ended before his regiment could be deployed. [2] Immediately afterwards, he enrolled in classes at the Art Students League but left after two years in late 1920 after being declared talentless at drawing. [3] He briefly travelled to Greece to hone his art with views of the great monuments, but was quickly defeated by poor finances and forced to return home. Upon returning, he began teaching art at Eastside High School in his hometown Salt Lake City. It was here he began his photography, with his teenage students for nude models and the Utah countryside for his background. [4] He referred to his time at Eastside High as a campaign to bring “the message of the Old Masters to sixty seductive young Mormons [emphasis added].” [5] Naturally, and for the better, he was forced to resign when discovered in this practice, but his use of the nude in his photography was not resigned. [6] He moved on to Hollywood, where he truly cut his teeth as an artist and photographer. It is unclear exactly how, but within months he found himself working as a set designer on the set of A Lover’s Oath by director Ferdinand P. Earle. [7] From there, he went on to his most famous collaborations with Cecil B. DeMille, including a photobook of still photographs from the 1927 film King of Kings. Mortensen would come to leave Hollywood in the 1930s because of, in his words, “the depression, the talkies, growing dissatisfaction, and possibly a tardy arrival at maturity.” [8] Upon his departure from Hollywood, Mortensen established the Mortensen School of Photography in Laguna Beach where he taught somewhere around 3,000 students in total. [9]

Mortensen’s work, situated as it was outside the lofty realm of “fine art” and with such vulgar subject matter, has often been excluded from the art photography canon. Additionally, his continued allegiance to the Pictorialist movement and the enmity towards him from the advocates of straight photography like the Newhalls and, famously, Ansel Adams. [10] It should be noted that Mortensen’s enduring attachment to the Pictorialist method and aesthetic has been grossly overstated as a result of his critique of Group f/64 and straight photography as a whole. As Michael Dawson explains, Mortensen’s opposition to straight photography places him, among others, at the beginning of a critical discourse surrounding the indexicality of the photographic image. The relegation of his work to a lower cultural echelon follows a consistent theme at the time that “reduced all other approaches to the medium to mere reflections of the insipid taste of popular culture.” [11] This disregard was not aided by parts of his biography: the failure of his foray into more traditional artistic mediums, his commercial work both inside and outside of Hollywood, and the lack of influence despite the thousands of students who attended Mortensen's Laguna Beach school.

Mortensen is considered by many to have been at the forefront of the grotesque in American art. Much of his art photography centers around the sinful, lurid, sexual, violent, subliminal, and dark. Mortensen explains his focus as the expression of a dialectic between Venus—the vital, erotic, and creative—and Vulcan—the material, the bestial, the malformed. In his words:

Everything exists through its opposite. For pictures of calm and tranquil beauty to have any meaning. it is necessary that the grotesque and the distorted exist. Perfection of form is significant only because the malforms exist also. Those who turn away from the grotesque are losing the richness and completeness of artistic experience. [12]

His photographic method further demonstrates this interplay of form and malform.  For example, he published a written and ordered system for maintaining decency in nude photography, but much of his work—especially his most successful work, both commercially and artistically—makes an intentional, overt, and nigh-pornographic display of feminine sexuality. [13] Moreover, this aforementioned system belies Mortensen’s supposed attachment to dignity and decency. Mortensen orders his system, “(1) The picture must, by its mere arrangement, make you look at it. (2) Having looked – see! (3) Having seen – enjoy,” thus locating pleasure at its end above any loftier sense of formal beauty or timelessness. [14] However, many of his more formulaic works were commercial efforts above all, and such formulas themselves were a product for his own subsistence. In accordance with his personal doctrine of art, Mortensen more poignantly argues the perfection of the nude as a subject in its being “a form at once abstract and personal, combining in one symbol the impulses of the flesh and of the spirit.”[15] His explanation of his predilection for the grotesque follows suit; he refers to it as “a descent into a world of murky and primitive fears…the material is unfamiliar, and, by ordinary standards, unpleasant; yet it calls forth a deep instinctive response…viewers are torn between repulsion and attraction.”[16] Here again is seen the interplay between form and malform—the pure consonance of Venus personified in the nude and the unconscious, repulsive dissonance of Vulcan. The true aesthetic statement of Mortensen’s oeuvre is found in this dynamic.

An interesting deconstruction of the nascent relation to form of his aesthetic opponents in Group f/64, this dynamic has still faltered somewhat over time. Take—as an example of the more sour aspects of Mortensen as an artist—the images of young white nude females in the midst of being ravaged by dark forces;  gross, especially with the lack of obvious metacommentary on such imagery. Instances like his time at Eastside High doing nude photography with teenagers certainly do not help. Yet, his art maintains a certain potency, at times by virtue of that very willingness to transgress. Even then, however, it holds itself back to avoid becoming unmarketable, whether by shrinking the audience with less immediate work or by offending the more prudish sensibilities of the mass American audience. Nonetheless, Mortensen holds a prominent place in the American imaginary and his unique visual language spoke strongly to unconscious desires and fears of his audience.

Endnotes

[1] Stephen J Gillette, “The Life and Times of William Herbert Mortensen: United States, 1897-1965.,” PSA Journal 63, no. 6 (1997): 6.

[2] Gillette, “Life and Times,” 6.

[3] Gillette, “Life and Times,” 6.

[4] Gillette, “Life and Times,” 6.

[5] Michael Dawson, “William Mortensen: Gothic Modernist,” essay, in William Mortensen: A Revival (Tucson, Arizona: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1998), 12.

[6] Gillette, “Life and Times,” 6.

[7] Gillette, “Life and Times,” 6.

[8] Dawson, “William Mortensen: Gothic Modernist,” 20.

[9] Gillette, “Life and Times,” 6.

[10] Dawson, “William Mortensen: Gothic Modernist,” 10-11.

[11] Dawson, “William Mortensen: Gothic Modernist,” 11.

[12] Dawson, “William Mortensen: Gothic Modernist,” 21.

[13] Heather Pridemore, “The Command to Look: The Nudes of William Mortensen,” The Command to Look: The Nudes of William Mortensen (thesis, Ryerson University, 2010), 28.

[14] Pridemore, “The Command to Look,” 28.

[15] Pridemore 28

[16] Diane Dillon, “William Mortensen and George Dunham: Photography as Collaboration,” essay, in William Mortensen: A Revival (Tucson, Arizona: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1998), 63.