Stan Douglas: The Enemy of All Mankind @David Zwirner

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 large scale color photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung against white walls in a series of connected gallery spaces. All of the works are inkjet prints mounted on Dibond aluminum, made in 2024. Physical sizes are roughly 48×84, 48×120, 59×59, 59×79, 59×119, and 79×59 inches, and the prints are available in editions of 5+2AP. (Installation shots below.)

Comments/Context: Performative staging has been part of the history of photography almost since its invention, with 19th century artists like Julia Margaret Cameron re-staging scenes from mythology and Shakespeare using costumed friends and relatives as models. But in the past few decades, an amplified, cinematic version of this kind of staging (or re-staging) has developed into its own specific artistic genre. Led by artists like Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, and more recently Alex Prager (and others), full blown Hollywood-style production techniques have been applied to photography and film/video staging projects, pushing the resulting imagery beyond simple performance for the camera to something almost hyper real in its visual intensity, its atmospheric precision, and its conceptual underpinnings.

When faced with pictures like these, my first instinct is to dive into the “how” of the extensive stylistic detail captured in the compositions, reveling in every little choice and decision to be discovered. But more often than not, when that surface appetite has been sated a bit, I can then move on to the more subtle questions of why these scenes merit such expensive, time-consuming, and meticulous creation or re-creation. When an aesthetic style has been crafted (or appropriated) with such attentiveness and care, it is almost always in service of a particular set of ideas that are worth unpacking.

Of the pioneers of this kind of photographic approach, Douglas has consistently proven himself to have impressive range, with successive projects over the years liberally moving between time periods, locations, moods, historical moments, and visual languages, as seen in numerous gallery shows of photography and video (in 2018 here; in 2016 here; in 2014 here; in 2012 here; and in 2011 here), and in various art fairs, in the past two decades. And in project after project, Douglas’s efforts haven’t been just seductive style for style’s sake, but have quietly grappled with nuances of memory, race, politics, colonialism, and even current events.

Douglas’s newest series features nine staged images recreating scenes from the English writer John Gay’s eighteenth-century comic opera Polly. Gay is likely best known for his 1728 satire The Beggar’s Opera, which featured the now-famous characters Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum. Polly is the 1729 sequel to that first work, following further adventures of the two characters in the West Indies; at the time of its release, the sequel was censored by the British government, went unproduced, and was generally overlooked. But from Douglas’s perspective, its pages remain filled with themes of race, class, and gender that feel remarkably contemporary, and so he adapted the drama into a series of moments that he then choreographed as cinematic still photographs.

Like most comic operas of that period, Polly is filled with plot twists (as well as escapes, romances, and battles), all of which provide the fodder for humor and satire, often enabled by disguises, role playing, and other misdirection. Douglas makes the most of these situations, and enriches them with a deeper sense of race, in the form of a mixed race hero pressed into indentured labor (who once passed as white and is now identifying as Black) and a society of once-enslaved Maroons (in place of other indigenous peoples). When added to the other turns of the play – a poor heroine unwittingly betrayed and sold into a life as a courtesan for a rich white estate owner, a daring escape dressed as a man, a near romance with another woman (who turns out to be the hero’s new wife), a roaming band of pirates, a sword fight, an execution, and the resulting heartbreak – Douglas has all the raw material he needs for a selection of resonant scenes that push on various cultural pressure points.

After a scene setting “Overture” picture retelling the arrival of Captain Macheath (his hands bound but still wearing a military uniform), most of the images in “Act I” take place inside the plantation estate of a wealthy landowner and provide opportunities for class-based caricatures and comedies of manners. Most are staged as conversations stopped midsentence, creating a theatrical sense of posed interaction. “Scene V” features the grand setting of a checkerboard floored entryway, where Polly is chatting with the family friend who “helps” her into the lady’s maid/mistress situation; it’s an aesthetic setup worthy of a Dutch master painting, with elaborate textiles, cast light, and dark architectural details, all arranged to follow the receding lines of perspective. The succeeding argument between the husband and wife (over whether Polly is indeed a mistress or not) in “Scene VIII” could almost be a momentarily halted dance sequence, with its formal poses, ordered divisions, and upraised hands.

The other two scenes from “Act I” are similarly staged in various rooms of the estate, with mirrors activating the compositions and clothing offering distinct signals of class and power. “Scene XI” finds Polly arguing with her employer, the nearby mirror doubling her presence, echoing the dual roles of maid and mistress being discussed. And “Scene XIV” depicts the moment when Polly conspires with the wife and her maid to plan her escape dressed in the clothes of the wife’s deceased nephew. Two mirrors double this three-way exchange, with Polly’s face isolated and reflected in one, even though she is turned slightly away from the view of the camera. While the maids are dressed in modest clothes, the wife is seen with her corset and underskirts visible, making clear the difference in social position between the women.

The rest of Douglas’s scenes, from “Act II” and “Act III”, take place outside, in wooded areas further from the plantation. In these images, the gender, racial, and identity signifiers are more fluid, with Polly dressed as a man, encounters with Prince Cawwawkee of the Maroons (wearing a long embroidered vest), and Captain Macheath transformed into Morano the pirate (now with his dark hair grown out into an untamed mass), with the pirates (of various skin colors) in mismatched forms of makeshift formal or military dress. Again, aside from one active sword fight in “Scene VII”, the setups are largely standing conversations, where the misunderstandings, tensions, and confusions of the script are slowly being worked out. Douglas seems intrigued by the collaborative proto-democracy of both the pirates and the Maroons, where gender, race, and class roles are less important than starting anew and building outsider societies that can protect themselves. In these pictures, all three individual signifiers (gender, race, and class) become highly performative, in a surprisingly modern way.

I’ve always felt like the kind of cinematic obsessiveness seen in the work of Douglas, Wall, Crewdson, and the like can hover in a slippery zone between reverent homage and underplayed mockery, so it’s interesting to see Douglas lean into that friction and pull elements of overt satire directly into the atmosphere he’s creating. Many of his pictures have a resulting sense of mannered awkwardness, like players caught in the midst of reciting lines, but that formality also adds a little space for subtle contradiction, which seems to grow with more time spent with these images.

As we unravel the stories further and further, these underlying tensions and dualities start to dominate, making the obvious plotting of any given scene less important. This leaves us, in the end, with pictures that seem quietly unstable or even uncertain, their meanings and possibilities shifting right before our eyes. That stubborn instability is a good sign that Douglas has deliberately left plenty of room for interpretation and dialogue in these photographs, allowing us to graft our own stories onto the rootstock he has already modified.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $60000 and $120000, based on size. Douglas’s photographic work has been available at auction only intermittently in recent years, with very few of his more recent large-scale images coming up for sale. Recent prices have ranged between roughly $10000 and $69000, but this data may not be entirely representative of his entire body of work, including his videos.

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JTF (just the facts): A total of 65 black-and-white photographs, framed in white/unmatted and hung against light beige walls or mounted between sheets of plexiglas and displayed on pedestals. Includes ... Read on.

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