JOYCE BARONIO

Shining Light in Dark Places

PAT MUNDUS

Costumes have always fascinated the photographer Joyce Baronio. Her first images were of people acting out fantasies in small American towns: beauty pageants, parades, tractor pulls, cheerleaders, horse shows, demolition derbies, square dances, fashion shows, and body-building events.

"But I always shot my subjects while they were waiting to present themselves, never from the audience's perspective," Ms. Baronio said of her work. She records fantasies and explores the people they involve.

Ms. Baronio was trained in art history at Kenyon College in Ohio, graduating in 1974. She went on to receive a master's of fine arts at Yale in 1976. While studying art history and anthropology, she enrolled in a photography course and, much to her surprise, found she preferred making new images to researching existing ones.

Nude Competitions

It was at Yale where she became a student of Walker Evans. "He bought one of my first photographs. He said it was 'a real heart-breaker'."

It was a portrait of a small town teenaged beauty queen. "She wasn't particularly happy, wondering where and who she was. It was all there in her body and her face," Ms. Baronio recalled.

Following the beauty pageant circuit, Ms. Baronio encountered nude beauty competitions, where she started to examine to what extent the situations in her photographs depended upon costume. This led her to attend a nude beauty competition in New York City, which differed from traditional nudist events in that it recruited contestants mostly from the sex entertainment industry.

Photographing in dressing rooms, Ms. Baronio discovered a larger subject. She felt that, despite the popularity of nude or semi-nude or 'erotic' models throughout the history of photography, something essential and personal about the models themselves had, with only a few exceptions, eluded the camera.

"Through my viewfinder, I saw that most 'erotic' photographs actually conceal, obscuring the spirits of the subjects even while exposing the flesh," she stated.

In the late '70s Ms. Baronio spent four years photographing sex show performers in Times Square. Gaining the trust of the performers and their managers wasn't easy. "I wasn't a performer and I wasn't even in the business. It wouldn't do any good to tell them that I studied with Walker Evans," she joked.

Beyond The Stage

Ms. Baronio commuted daily from married life in Connecticut to spend time photographing performers on stage in Times Square. "Yet the show lighting prevented the photographs from transcending the reproduction of reality," Ms. Baronio carefully explained.

So she rented a small white room upstairs with southwest exposure, in the midst of the red light district, and photographed the sex performers between shows in natural light.

"Everyone knows that you have to keep remembering you are photographing light, not things or people, but you have to practice and not get excited by the subject matter. It's a great discipline to learn," she pointed out.

In A New Light

Ms. Baronio used only the models, the light, and the empty room. Many artists had already done sad and tawdry, dark, cheap photographs before.

Rather, Ms. Baronio sought to capture performers with sensitivity and humanity, with many of the models in their own hand-crafted costumes. Ms. Baronio said, "I simply thought of the performers as people and I wanted to see what would happen if I shot them in bright natural sunlight, literally in a new light!"

Gradually, she gained access to the live sex performers, by photographing them and renting the photographs to their managers for show advertisements. It was incredibly stressful, Ms. Baronio said, but she managed to maintain a sense of humor about the process. "It was funny having to explain the photographs to managers," she said.

Artistic Freedom

"For example, a manager would ask, 'So how come you left the window in the picture?' I'd reply, 'Well Vito, see how the bars on the window go with your bondage theme?,' and he'd say. 'Oh yeah? Yeah, good idea,' and be satisfied. I had total artistic freedom."

Ms. Baronio came to be known as the house photographer, all the while creating a body of work she called "42nd Street Studio." She found overnight fame, and international acclaim, for the photographs. Published in a large-format book, "42nd Street Studio" won the Award for Excellence from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

The photographer Hans Namuth called it the "best photography book of the '80s" and brought the book to the attention of Leo Castelli, the art dealer. In 1986, the Castelli Gallery awarded Ms. Baronio a stipend to continue her photography.

Human Habitat

"42nd Street Studio" was an incredible drain on Ms. Baronio, so she started going to the Museum of Natural History while in New York because it was open and cool and quiet.

"While in the museum, I started to wonder about clothes and what they meant. I began to imagine what humans would look like if placed in the museum's dioramas instead of the animals. You know, the human animal in its natural habitat! That's how I got the idea for the 'Wetlands' project," Ms. Baronio explained.

She had been spending time in East Hampton during the '80s, and, having lived on the western bank of Accabonac Creek, photographing the meadows. In the summer of 1985, she led a nature photography workshop; it was named a "Best Bet" in New York magazine.

Mucking Through Marsh

"I told Leo I wanted to do nudes and nature and he liked the idea of being in East Hampton," Ms. Baronio said. So, in 1987, she purchased a small house in Northwest in close proximity to the expansive salt meadows of Northwest Creek and went to work photographing nudes in the marshes.

Work it was. The "Wetlands" series was shot on Northwest and Accabonac Creeks, in the kettleholes of Big Reed Pond, and on the beach at Shagwong and Culloden Points in Montauk.

Using a Calumet 8-by-10-inch view camera, the shoots required wading, hiking, and mucking about in unspoiled areas. "It had to be pure - no power lines or houses," said the photographer. The camera, tripod, weighted focusing cloth, and film holders with this type of camera are substantial. This was old-fashioned photography, lugging over 50 pounds of gear through the unstable marsh.

Not Easy

Once they were at the location, convincing the model to unclothe and lie in the mud wasn't always easy. Ms. Baronio didn't have any assistants, makeup people, or hair stylists.

What the models were experiencing shows in the images. "I let them find a clump or spot on the muddy bottom where they were most comfortable - and we took a lot of breaks," she explained. But she never forewarned them about green flies, she admitted.

The photographer had to step in and out of the mud, struggling against the bog suction, from back to front of the camera and back under the focusing cloth to adjust tilt, swing, and focus. Each shot took nearly an hour to adjust the camera. "Every shoot was a workout, but fortunately a couple of my models were massage therapists," Ms. Baronio stated with a perfectly straight face.

The "Wetlands" photographs are studies in skillfully managed light, reflection, and time. "With that camera," Ms. Baronio said of what she also calls her "magic box," "I can bend images and manipulate reflections and change the size of shapes to suit myself. Because the lens is not fixed, I can alter normal space."

"I need to create a big horizon or a hole in the clouds," she explained. "I need to always look beyond - a way out!"

Using a big view-camera, normal space is what one can get away with. "But it takes a long time to learn," she emphasized. Ms. Baronio sees the images upside down under her focusing cloth, which she prefers. "I don't want to see grass, water, model, and sky. I just want to see shapes," she said.

Feeling Nature

The "Wetlands" nudes are a departure from the 20th-century nudes traditionally portrayed by men. "I wanted my models to feel nature enough to let go of the self-awareness resulting from socialization," Ms. Baronio said.

Although they have been called "erotic innocence" or "innocent eroticism," by art critics, her "Wetlands" photographs intertwine natural human beauty with environmental splendor, making a statement about the rightness of an intimacy with nature. They manage to be sensual without being prurient.

Back in the mid 1970s, while teaching photography in Baltimore, Ms. Baronio indulged in her interest in costumes, collecting thrift shop vintage clothing and incorporating them in her whimsical fashions.

Back To Costumes

Much later, at the suggestion of Mr. Castelli, Ms. Baronio began a series of self-portraits against the backdrop of the East End. Her upcoming book, "Fantasies on a Shoestring: Dressing Well in Thrift Shop Clothes," will contain these lighthearted self- portraits.

"I needed a break from all the hard work and discipline of my other projects," she said with relief.

Ms. Baronio now divides her time between her home at Northwest Creek and her home in Narrowsburg, N.Y. She has moved out of her New York City residence temporarily since she became fascinated with "the Big Eddy," a raging maelstrom on the Delaware River at Narrowsburg.

"I'm always hungry for images," she concluded rather mysteriously.