Quote:According to Charles Leslie, one of von Gloeden’s earliest serious biographers, the baron was “one of those rare men of the nineteenth century who refused to acqiesce to the annihilation of his true being as the price of being allowed to live in the so-called civilised Western world, one which officially despised him for what he was.”2 By Leslie’s account von Gloeden was a man concerned above all with self-realisation. For Leslie, an author influenced by the stonewall movement and the general awakening of consciousness among homosexuals during the 1970s, von Gloeden symbolised the act of liberation, offered an exemplary illustration of the artist and his self-realisation. Von Gloeden, however, is an important figure for two further reasons: his place in the history of photography, and his contribution to the local heritage ofTaormina, his adopted home. Especially at the beginning of his residency, while he was still a man of independent means, von Gloeden was a generous benefactor, helping the small Sicilian town to eventually become one of the fin de siècle’s most cosmopolitan watering holes. By the turn of the century, poets and actors, painters and famous society figures flocked to Taormina, making it a must on their grand tours of Italy. After admiring Taormina’s charming Greek theatre, the travellers would pay a visit to von Gloeden in his studio, purchasing his pagan “Illustrations of Theocritus and Homer” – as von Gloeden called his photographs. These living pictures by von Gloeden were mounted in travellers’ souvenir albums alongside the architectural studies by the Florentine Alinari brothers, and the Neapolitan folk portraits of Giorgio Sommer, a Frankfurt-born photographer living and working in Naples. Von Gloeden’s visitors’ book, since lost, could boast the signatures of Oscar Wilde, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Eleonora Duse, the King of Siam and King Edward VII, as well as those of such well-known bankers and industrialists as Morgan, Stinnes, Krupp, Vanderbilt and Rothschild. In 1911, von Gloeden was awarded a medal in recognition of his valuable assistance in helping Taormina become a favourite tourist destination.
In his work, Wilhem von Gloeden presented a vision of an Arcadian world, a golden age in Taormina, a town with a Greek, Roman, Arab and Norman past. Like the island of Capri, Taormina now became a favourite haunt of affluent homoerotic society. Customers for von Gloeden’s albumen prints were struck by the realism of the bodies, which photography – in contrast to the paintings of Hans von Marées, for example – could not idealise. Their attention was drawn to the photographs’ erotic possibilities, whereas educated mainstream tourists were encouraged, by the costumes and accessories, to see a sexually neutral Arcadia.
What makes von Gloeden’s work so fascinating to us today was his ambition to substitute the reality of his day with his own personal cosmos, one in which he even appeared himself in costume apparel. Taormina furnished him with the possibility of constructing a playful, aesthetic counter-world, one which he (and here lies its authenticity) never dismissed as solely an aesthetic fantasy. What was important for him was the artistic integrity of his transformations.
If one compares his oeuvre with the work of his contemporaries von Plüschow and Vincenzo Galdi, it becomes apparent that von Gloeden not only developed his own narrative style, but also cultivated a different working relationship with his models. In some cases photographs by von Plüschow have been attributed to von Gloeden, a confusion that arises because von Plüschow apparently sold works by von Gloeden. In other cases, as documented in the collections published by the authors Jean Claude Lemagny and Jack Woody, attribution has been hindered by the fact that the fragile albumen prints have been mounted and the copyright stamp obscured. Nude studies in which the secondary sexual traits have been accentuated stem in all likelihood from Galdi, a photographer with an inclination towards pornographic scenes.
Photography offered Wilhem von Gloeden the possibility of transforming his surroundings by applying the Pygmalion effect in reverse. He endeavoured to blend the antique and modern worlds, to create a backdrop against which his dream fantasies could be staged. This fusion of ancient and modern is clearly evident in one particular study of a youth who posed for von Gloeden over many years, and who is here shown embracing the Greek statue, extremely popular in the nineteenth century, of a youth (p. 17).
Ulrich Pohlmann, who has written the best von Gloeden monograph published to date, traces von Gloeden’s development from amateur to professional studio photographer and examines the genealogy of his tableaux vivants with their distinctive iconography. Tableaux vivants –