William Mortensen began his career more than a decade after Alfred Stieglitz and his circle of American avant-garde photographers began to turn from Pictorialist manipulations to the straightforward and pure, extremely detailed and finely crafted print. Rejected by the avant-garde as being anachronistic, Mortensen was nevertheless extremely popular with and had much influence over commercial photography produced at the time. His photographs have unabashedly manipulated objectives and overtly symbolic intent. By altering or texturizing either the negative or the print, introducing hand lettering, and staging the scene, he generated images that illustrated higher truths and universal themes.
Johan the Mad exemplifies this technique. A straight print using a texturizing filter and penciled lettering, the photograph represents Johan of Castile, whose epic journey across Europe carrying the corpse of her husband on her back symbolized "the tortured quest for something irrevocably lost."
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