Nightswimming

by Stephen Barker

Stephen Barker has taken a camera into spaces whose existence hinges on their being unrecorded and anonymous. His photographs were taken in New York City's sex clubs. The indistinct figures merge and melt into the industrial architecture of darkened cinemas and hallways reserved for anonymous sex, but there are flashes of clarity even here tenderness or indifference, passion or release. The distinguished American poet and translator Richard Howard contributes an essay to the book.

Genres: Photography, Queer

99 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 2000

Reviews

[H · Rating 4 out of 5]

It will be touch, certainly, that is comparably privileged, even as sight and sound recede, in a state of privation. Let me amend that: seeing is not recessive here, only difficult. Never before have I understood so well the ferocious expression, "keep your eyes peeled." Is it because of our approximate darkness and relative silence that we become connoisseurs of contact, interpreting the body's Braille with an astonishing range of muscular engagements?

— Richard Howard, Beholden For Beholding [from the afterword]

The mere suggestions of form found within Nightswimming are strongly seductive; Barker's work has often been criticized as being "too blurry", but those viewers are missing the point. When all is stripped away, and we are left with a suggestion of a calf here, a curve of a neck there — that is where eroticism lies. To the discerning viewer, it won't be surprising to learn that these shots were taken at various sex parties, in an extremely off-the-cuff manner. Barker's style of photography allows complete anonymity for his subjects, adding to the mysterious allure of the collection.

One of Barker's photographs was used for the cover of the classic novel Dancer from the Dance (how I discovered his work!).

[Harrie Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous (expensive) quality photographic reproduction and a fascinating discourse on the club as architectural space.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully produced book nearly uniformly black from cover to cover with suggestive and erotic splashes of somewhat lighter tone in the soft-focus and grainy photographs. Here and there are glints of true white: a ring, a paper cup, something perhaps liquid. Each picture invites the observer to enter in, or at least remember when he was in a similar situation himself. The photographic art here is nearly palpable.

Poet Richard Howard's afterward "Beholden for Beholding" (printed on dark grey paper: white would ruin the effect) fits the atmosphere perfectly, setting the work within the larger context of participatory voyeurism and gay sexual desire. "By day we are negligible, by night we are ourselves: so speak the personnel haunting these impermissible images, wherein nothing is product, everything process. These 'shots' are the unacknowledged trajectory of certain events whose sublimity is secured only by their enactment, never by their objectification."

Black...oh so black...swimming at night in the daytime.