American Grotesque

American Grotesque
The Life and Art of William Mortensen
Edited by Larry Lytle and Michael Moynihan
Feral House, 2014

Before there was Photoshop, scanners, digital artwork, or the artist J. K. Potter, there was William Mortensen.

Mortensen (1897 - 1965) grew up in Park City, Utah, and served in World War One as an Army camouflage painter. He returned to Utah and in 1920 worked for a year as a art teacher at a Salt Lake City high school, where he often would take female students into the surrounding countryside to pose for 'artistic' photographs (!). After a communication from the Board of Education, Mortensen was asked to leave the position, whereupon he decided to make for a locale more sympathetic to his artistic visions and departed in his sidecar motorcycle for Los Angeles.

Upon his arrival in 1921, Mortensen connected with the rapidly growing motion picture industry and became a well regarded supplier of still photographs for the major studios. During the later 20s he began experimenting with a variety of imaginative darkroom techniques for converting photographs into 'artistic' compositions, by (for example) superimposing montages or mattes onto his prints.

One of his most famous photographs, L'Amour, featured on the cover of the book, features a man in a gorilla suit. Mortensen used a self-designed 'texture screen' - a piece of film with minute cross-hatchings scored on its surface - in order to give the finished image the outward appearance of an engraving.

By the 30s, Mortensen was a superstar of the photography world. Major exhibitions featured his works, high-profile magazines like Vanity Fair featured his photographs, and his articles in trade journals were carefully studied by a generation of photographers eager to apply his methods to their own work.

Among his most striking images were a series of photographs taken during the 1920s for a projected pictorial history of witchcraft and demonology. Mortensen was canny enough to know that the artistic value of such an endeavor was measurably enhanced by the inclusion of nubile young women posed alongside fetish imagery..........

 

Mortensen's approach to photography began to fall from fashion in the later 40s and early 50s as more realistic photography (championed by Ansel Adams, among others) took hold of the public consciousness. Although Mortensen retained an interest to documenting the 'grotesque', he shifted emphasis to glamour and pinup photography while continuing to run a school in Laguna Beach devoted to teaching his methods. He died in 1965 from leukemia.

In the 1990s there was a revival of interest in Mortensen and his works and an acknowledgement that his role as an artist had been deliberately undermined by the 'mainstream' photography enterprise. In 2014 Feral House published a nicely produced hardbound book, American Grotesque: The Life and Art of William Mortensen (300 pp). 

American features a biographical essay on Mortensen, along with an additional essays on his darkroom techniques. Mortensen's own essays on the nature of his art also are included, and there is of course an expansive portfolio of pictures representing the entirety of his career.

I'm not an avid fan of photography, but Mortensen was a true original and if you are interesting in the history of fantastic art, then perusing American Grotesque may be worth your while.