Fashion, Circus, Spectacle: Photographs by Scott Heiser

The work of Heiser, a Wilmington-born photographer who died at 44 in 1993, is featured in a retrospective exhibit at the Delaware Art Museum. Best known for his fashion work, which appeared in Interview magazine from 1978 to 1986, Heiser specialized in severely cropped images shot from dramatic angles. Sometimes softly blurred, mostly black-and-white, exposed with available light rather than typical strobe lighting, the images often give little idea of what a garment, much less a collection, looked like.

But they are gorgeous. Heiser’s evocative representations of fleeting moments, events, and people allow viewers to experience, rather than to see, events. His photographs don’t depict a fashion show, they seat us with Heiser at the side of the runway — a spot from which he saw both the performance and the mechanics behind it. Backstage lights in our eyes, we might see only silhouettes, a plumed hat perched like a bird on a perfectly shaped head. But we’d hear the rustle of exquisite fabric swirling over our heads and feel the air shift as the models stalk by. From shows that lasted minutes, and styles that disappeared after a season, Heiser made timeless images.

I photograph fashion shows as performances; figures in motion within a specific space. . . . In France, the fashion collections are spoken of as a cultural event, as I believe they are. Spectators witness processions of ideas, many of which will never be seen again. — Scott Heiser

In 1981, Interview sent Heiser to cover Thierry Mugler’s spring collection and ran just one photo: A disembodied arm in a long black glove appears on the left of the frame. On the right, a billow of silk, and in between, a fluted column. It was, they concluded, enough.

Over eight years, the magazine sent Heiser to Paris and Milan, as well as New York, to cover influential designers who included Ungaro, Issey Miyake, Karl Lagerfeld, Sonia Rykiel, and Yves Saint Laurent. This work is well represented, but as its title implies, Fashion, Circus, Spectacle includes more.

Events and non-events

Editors liked to send Heiser to places where nothing was going on, just to see what he’d shoot. Whether the assignment was a blind alley or the performance events in which he specialized, such as the Big Apple Circus, the Westminster Dog Show, or the Miss America Pageant, Heiser brought back the unexpected. Searching beyond intended views, peeking behind curtains, and observing the edges of things, he delivered more personal, and more nuanced, impressions.

Acrobats balancing on an elephant, for example, are almost cropped out of a circus photo. Instead, Heiser pushes extraneous human appendages to the periphery, directing our attention to the pachyderm glancing sideways at the camera. Another circus image shows acrobats suspended in the rigging, a beautiful geometry. A third isolates a stagehand waiting onstage, oblivious to the audience, in the spotlight but not the performance.

At an American Legion Parade, Heiser photographed a huge American flag, suspended on long poles and obscuring the marchers who carried it aloft. Shooting into the sun, he captured both the stars-and-stripes and the silhouettes of the people supporting it.

An image made the year Heiser died depicts a man gazing at armor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Positioned behind the man, Heiser framed the photo to include his head, adorned with a yarmulke, and the helmet he studied. His caption read, “Helmet: a protective covering for the head — Webster’s Ninth and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

This more straightforward piece is representative of the portraits in the exhibit. Heiser photographed New York cultural figures, including Interview founder Andy Warhol, for Interview, Soho Weekly News, and Paper. Warhol, no stranger to portraiture, chose Heiser to create his image.

Unlike Heiser’s performance work, in which he dictates his point of view with angles and cropping, his portraits are shot from the front at eye-level and usually with the subject looking right back. They are more a conversation than a dictation. The settings are spare, yet evoke the subject. Jazz singer Alberta Hunter, photographed from the side, sits on a couch, smiling and leaning forward, head propped on her hand: it is unclear whether she’s relaxing after a performance or preparing for one to come. Artist Jamie Wyeth stands in a muddy pen, two giant pigs at his feet. For Warhol, Heiser divided the frame in two, placing the subject on the right, standing in shadow. His head, white hair, and slender hands are the only spots of light. The left side of the frame is blank, except for a circle of light reflecting off a paneled wall, the ghost of Heiser’s flash.

Creative contrasts

Accompanying the 80 gelatin silver prints on exhibit is a video loop of undated color slides which, it is explained, Heiser often shot simultaneous with his black-and-white work. He rarely printed in color, however, because of the cost. It is interesting to compare the two. In color, Warhol’s blue suit is more noticeable, grabbing attention from his pale face and hands, which dominate the black-and-white version.

Color changes the emphasis. It can overwhelm texture and shading in a photo, dragging an image into the immediate present, while black-and-white frees it from a specific place and time. The subject could exist now, long ago, or somewhere in imagination. By peeling away the distraction of color, black-and-white images force us to look beneath the skin of the everyday, just as Heiser leads the eye beyond the conventional view.

This is the first time Heiser’s photography has been presented in a museum, and if not for his untimely death, it is likely that by now he would have been known more widely. It is sad to think that there will be no new images coming of dour models or quirky beauty queens, or lithe trapeze artists, or whatever bits of them Heiser might see fit to shoot. We could use more of his exceptional vision.