Lochner’s art photographs were exhibited in Cape Town last month and have now been published by Bell-Roberts in a collection entitled SNLV. As her use of the formula for warning movie-goers or TV-watchers about the sex, nudity, language (meaning obscenity) and violence they are about to experience indicates, these pictures are likely to raise some eyebrows.
Already Lochner and Bell-Roberts have had some production problems — the binders scheduled to bind the book refused to do so once they saw the photographs, and emergency measures had to be taken. According to Lochner, the binding had eventually to be done, in secret, by some moonlighting Bible-binders.
Lochner has shot advertising campaigns for some pretty big names — Corsa, Young Designers’ Emporium, Fatti’s and Moni’s, Adidas, with the Levi’s Asia campaign and Foster’s beer (China campaign) coming up. She’s done a lot of fashion work, but nowadays refuses more than she accepts. She has created interesting spreads for magazines such as SL and Womyn, where her edgy sensibility is appreciated, but as far as the mainstream women’s fashion/lifestyle mags go she finds it frustrating. “It’s so bland,” she says. “It has no guts.”
That is not an accusation anyone is going to fling at SNLV. The cover features a replica of fresh ejaculate, and the first section is composed of Lochner’s hilariously disturbing “cow porn” pictures. These juxtapose a woman in a state of undress with pictures of cows and their generous udders. The comment on the straight male gaze is clear. They are “every man’s fantasy,” says Lochner, with an implied laugh — “the big tits — and all those nipples!”
If the world of modelling, fashion and advertising has a way of treating women like cattle, Lochner’s work both comments upon that tendency and finds ways to undercut it. Some of her images in SNLV push the objectifying gaze so far that the objects, as it were, come back to life. Lochner gives us photographs of a woman who, in her physical bulk, is the opposite of the scrawny fashion model. She coolly reproduces a blood-stained tampon and a piece of semen-soaked toilet paper. She shows women’s faces in extreme in a shape not a million miles away from the gape of the blow-up sex doll.
Lochner studied photography, specialising in fashion. “But,” she says, “my real training came after an abusive seven-year relationship which sent me running away to London. I ended up working in a ‘live show — sexy girls’ club in Soho for four years.” She says the experience taught her “so much about human behaviour — we all have a darker side.” Her first solo exhibition featured the employees and clientele of Soho.
Lochner reminds us of the real body underneath the strictures of beauty and the labels we are sold by advertising. In one lovely sequence, Lochner photographs the male body in a way that reminds us forcibly — though not, ironically, in an overtly sexual way — of the genitals usually occluded by the fashionable underpants with their all-important logo on the waistband. There’s something rather touching about the vulnerability here, and something powerful in the simple realness on display. Advertising may want us all to aspire to a dream-world of perfect bodies dressed in all the right labels, but Lochner uses that template and that impulse to find something very human under it all.
In another sequence, Lochner has her models (male as well as female) playing with a chicken carcass. They are shot in a way that makes the people appear pale, almost corpse-like, themselves. The contrast between human skin and that of poultry is a little chilling. The figures are cropped severely, echoing the classic feminist critique of objectification: their “humanity” has apparently been removed along with their faces. But do faces alone make us individuated humans? Our physical bodies, surely, with all their oddnesses, and their proximity to death, do as much, if not more, than our faces to define us as embodied creatures.
These are the kinds of resonances Lochner’s photographs set up. But she’s not just down on desire. She also has a bunch of men (and not just model types either) sniffing panties. There is something intensely mysterious, private and erotic about them, and the fact that these images are made by a woman (who then shows us the stained panties as well) is remarkable. The traditional boundaries between the desiring subject and the desired object have been shifted, and the anodyne perfection of advertising is replaced with something much more real and much more powerful. They are also amusing. “Amongst all the sadness in my work,” Lochner acknowledges, “there is a twist of humour.”
SNLV certainly scores on the sex, nudity and violence levels — the violence of the sexual, objectifying gaze, that is. When it comes to the language, the book is done with what seems the usual Bell-Roberts scattershot approach: it is larded with comments on Lochner’s work from magazine editors, models, a lover and even a shrink. One sample quote would be: “Jillian is unafraid to express her inner feelings,” which, like most of them, adds little to the book and makes it look like a testimonial rather than a solid, serious body of work. What we’d really like is a good critical essay, setting the context and giving some background. Still, it’s a fascinating collection of photographs.
And, despite Lochner’s engagement with issues of sexuality in the media and so forth, her approach comes from a very personal place. She has spoken of dealing with things like abortion, anorexia and abusive relationships. “I am an extremely sensitive and emotional person,” she says, “with a desperate need to express myself and to communicate.” That drive is, in part, a result of the lack of understanding she feels she has often experienced. What throws people, she says, “is my honesty and openness”. That doesn’t surprise.