MAX MIN MAN MIX
MAX: Photographs by Max Vadukul (New York: Callaway, 2000)
Orchidelirium by Harold Feinstein, introduction by Robert M. Hesse (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2007)
Masks and Figures from Easter and Southern Africa by Ladislav Holy, photographed by Dominique Darbois (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1967)
The World of Rodin: 1840-1917 by William Harlan Hale and The Editors of Time-Life Books with photographs by Lee Boltin and Dmitri Kessel (New York: Time-Life Books, 1969)
FMR, Numbers 4-6, 8, 14, 16, 48, 71, 85-88
Surgical Treatment of Head and Neck Tumors, ed. by Jorge Fairbanks Barbosa, illustrations by José Gonçalve, translation by Rosemarie von Becker Froon (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1974)
An Atlas of Head and Neck Surgery by John M. Loré, Jr., illustrated by Robert Wabnitz (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1962)
Surgery of the Upper Respiratory System, Vol. 1, by William W. Montgomery (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1979)
American Folk Sculpture by Robert Bishop (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985)
Museum of Fine Arts Boston (New York: Newsweek, 1969)
MAX MIN
MAN MIX
Max Vadukul describes himself as a British-Indian photographer who is based in Italy. He’s in his mid-sixties now, but he has had an international reputation since the 1990s as an edgy documenter of the worlds of celebrities and sophisticates. He works entirely in black and white, and he likes to capture his subjects in a characteristic environment, almost never in a studio. He calls this art reportage, but he seems ready to veer away from precisely rendered detail and instead aims to gather impressions, whether from extreme close-ups, odd angles, or energetic swirls of figures in motion. His pictures can seem at first like expressionistic splashes of human form, but then your eye catches details that you can put together and associate with the glorified world—stars and geniuses and gorgeous bodies—just what the finest magazines will pay a prestigious photographer to capture.
His 2000 portfolio MAX uses the pun on his first name to justify a book that maximizes the effect of his pictures by its exaggerated scale, more than double the square inches of the usual art book. Most of the images are printed out to the edge of the page, and the scraps of text, in red and black, are variable in size from nearly microscopic to huge, with little in between. The book imposes on your space and screams at you and insists on its own voguish importance.
In short, this is a book that rubs me the wrong way. I bought it used at the Planned Parenthood sale. (This book at PP is like a Humvee at a Save the Earth meeting.) What could I do with it? That question vexed me for years. The book is so big I could not even rest it on my usual bibliolage work space. Besides, any material I would put into this thing would have to deal with that MAX scale, and I’m used to working with tiny cut-and-paste interventions in the books I collage.
At last, over this past holiday period, I felt I would have the time in the day to work on this project, using the large table we have in a back room. I had located some pools of imagery I thought might have a chance to work on that scale, something to interrupt all that glamor and allure, but the key discovery that led me to begin the work was a book of close-up color photographs of orchids, those ostentatious flowers that are the celebrities of the blooming world. I also had a wide range of images of sculptural human figures, many of which came from the ancient or indigenous worlds. They would bring expression to the faces of Vadukul’s subjects, who tended to adopt that dour look of a notable person being noted in a magazine like Vogue or The New Yorker. Finally, I was given a handful of medical books about surgery on the mouth and neck. These line drawings help us see the inner human, and I thought they might help us see behind the faces of these A-list people.
No one strategy could be used on every page, and instead I had to puzzle over each image separately, so the work took more than a month, and solutions were found, page by page.
Max would meet min through these gestures, and the result would be a new mix of man.