EXIT GHOST: DOUGLAS HUEBLER'S FACE VALUE

Beginning with his early systems‐based works, Douglas Huebler's photo‐conceptualism takes direct aim at various efforts to heighten or exaggerate the expressive content of photography. This essay examines a heretofore unnoticed but crucial strategy in this practice of negation: Huebler's use of images broadly associated with surrealism's efforts to tap into ‘the Marvellous’– mannequins, identical twins, extreme coincidence, and ghosts. Far from reinforcing the uncanny effects of such images and tropes, Huebler, I claim, is on the contrary concerned to flatten and drain all traces of subjective resonance from these once expressive forms. Examining a range of works in which Huebler effectively transforms the Marvellous into the risible, I argue that one reason for this transformation is that the historical conditions by which photography could be charged with uncanny affect are no longer in place. As a result, we are now able to recognize only signs and images of the Marvellous/uncanny in photography, but our emotive response, like Huebler's photographs, is essentially empty. The essay concludes with Roland Barthes' mournful description of the loss of the photographic uncanny, or what he calls the ‘madness’ of photography, as it occurs in the final pages of Camera Lucida.