mark

su bj ect/obj ect/col l a bor ator

P h oto g r a p h s b y

robert fischer

mark
su bj ect/obj ect/col l a bor ator

P h oto g r a p h s b y

robert fischer

Copyright 2010 by Robert A. Fischer

Cover photos by Robert A. Fischer
Book design by slimgim designs

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the copyright holders.
Above: Kitt y Literatai

contents
Not just a Bobs Potted Plant

Richness of Uncertainty

21

Revealing Us To Ourselves

39

Guardian At the Gates of Taste

64

Comments

116

1 Variations on a Theme

Not just a Bobs Potted Plant

After about five years of modeling for Bob I know that a lot of my job was to show up, shut up
and do as Bob asked. That I did this is why Bob refers to me as his potted plant.
But even potted plants move in response to air currents and the direction of the light. And
so do I. Bob might be adjusting his camera, and I would take that opportunity to adjust my
body, the tilt of my head, the direction of my gaze, to something that I thought he would like.
Sometimes his response was no, no, no, and hed tell me what he wanted, and other times
it was yes, thats it hold it, and he began shooting. This was my small way of being Bobs
collaborator a participant beyond the malleable model.
There have been times when my participation as collaborator was more significant usually
driven by my moods. I am manic-depressive (bipolar disorder) and have mild dementia. The
drugs that I take to control my moods do an imperfect job of it, so it is not unusual for me to be
a little bit manic or moderately depressed on any given day. Like the day I was just a tad manic
and showed up at my front door in a black slip and dark sun glasses. I intended to greet Bob
in that outfit, but any of the neighbors could have walked by. Bob however arrived on time and
got the picture. Another day I was in a very dark mood and we were at a place where there was
a memorial to the Sheriffs Office, complete with a huge six point sheriffs badge. Bob told me
to go stand by it, but I went up to it and crucified myself on the six point star. It made a great
picture. These and one or two others stand out for the level of collaboration and represent rare
instances of unusually high levels of collaboration between us.
For the most part, my collaboration with Bob was around the edges of his work. Especially
when I was doing some character or was in a mask or Id been painted for the occasion. As
an object, there is little opportunity for collaboration and I come closest to being that human
version of the potted plant. But when Bob trains his camera on me, as I am, for a portrait, then
I become a subject , a person portrayed by Bob, not a potted plant. Bob must then deal with
me and my moods, my eccentricities, even the weirdness of my speech (I have a Tourettes-like
speech impediment) to get his picture.
So being Bobs model is mostly showing up and doing what Im told with some almost
subversive collaboration thrown in along the way. Those times when Ive acted out in bigger
ways that resulted in photographs that were mood driven manic or depressed I was driven to
bigger expression than what Bob expected. And finally, being Bobs model when the subject
was just me. But being Bobs model over these years has allowed me to participate in the
creation of a catalogue of truly excellent art.
Then we collaborated the most. I allowed him into me as a subject and didnt hold anything
back. He shot the unvarnished truth as he saw it, unflattering though it may be.
M.R.

This may be a relationship that only a mood disturbed person could withstand.

2 First Portrait

3 Framed

4 Metropolis is Looking Up

5 Hades

6 A Boo Garb

7 Spectre

8 Migelito

9 The Scream

10 Dark Shadows / Green Water

11 Hahahahahaha!

12 I Stand Alone

13 Herr Richters Lapdog

Richness of Uncertainty
Robert Fischers world is on no map to be found. When I first saw these images, I remember thinking I had
never seen anything like them before. They provoked strong feelings of attraction and repulsion at the
same time, like when you enter a completely unknown culture with rules and habits you dont understand
and even fear.
Underneath his vision is a dark and threatening incomprehensible power, the power of someone who has
seen it all, who has peered behind the faades of Happyland and who tries honestly and uncompromisingly
to define real values of his own. Bob builds on the ruins of an empty, void, crude world, without any
illusions or aspirations except for the fundamental believe in human tenderness. Seemingly anarchistic, not
hindered by any formal religion, by esthetic rules or by bourgeois moral restrictions.
The quest Robert undertakes is courageous and not without danger. It implies questioning not only whats
normal or acceptable in society, but also his own position. Without accepting any authority, subversive and
dissident, he searches heaven and earth he even descends into the Styx to detect and depict the
elements of his universe.
In his portraits and studioworks, Bob displays a true mastership in graphical arts. Moreover, he knows
the classics through and through, and he plays with their codes in order to create new meanings and
perspectives. The consequence is that Bob will never find a definitive identity. The new reality he presents
to us implies that identities and values are constantly shifting and evolving, uncontrolled and uncontrollable,
like the butterflies that so regularly reappear in his pictures. You can try to chain them to the bars of a bed
but theyll always escape, leaving the hunter with an empty net like what happens to all of us in our quest
for meaning. And exactly like this uncertainty, this unpredictability is part of the richness of our lives.
Bart Ramakers, Documentary Photographer, Brussels

14 Mirror, Mirror Cracked

15 Maloquio

16 m-i-c-k-y -- m-o-u-s-e

17 Godhead

18 Bombay Beach with William Burroughs Lookalike

19 Toss Off

20 My House Hitchcock St yle

21 Jitter

22 Waiting for the Robert E. Cockring

23 Suck the monster!

24 Amazonian Cone Head

25 Pick One Up Today

26 Dust Bowl

27 Sentry

28 Dervish

29 Loulou Falais

30 Block Head

Revealing Us To Ourselves
In 2009, the photography world celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of
the publication of Robert Franks groundbreaking book, The Americans.
When The Americans was published, critics assailed its selection of 83
now-classic photos as a sad poem for sick people, denouncing the
photographer as a joyless man who hates the country. Five decades
later, after the massive social changes of the Sixties, we know better.
Despite his cool lack of sentimentality, Frank is the link between the
democratic vision of America shared by Frank Whitman and Walker
Evans and later photographic and anthropological adventurers like Diane
Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, and Nan Goldin.
Robert Fischer follows in that humanist tradition. Coming of age during
the Sixties, he followed a circuitous path to photography that may
explain his works unusual combination of visual authority, cultural
richness, and psychological depth. Born in Chicago in 1949, he earned
a psychology degree there but gravitated instead toward the artistic
hippie counterculture. Discovering almost accidentally a talent for
painting, he avidly studied Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Velasquez,
Picasso, Hopper, Avery, Magritte and Matisse, whose sinuous forms
and sumptuous patterns fused the spiritual tension of the German
Expressionists with the sensuality that Fischer admired in pop culture
phenomena like Busby Berkeley films and George Hurrells Hollywood
celebrity portraits. Working from photographs, Fischer painted portraits
that combined and juxtaposed cultural icons from different periods I
did my share of Marilyn Monroes and incorporated, for additional
visual punch, fabric, rhinestones and glitter, all meticulously glued by
hand.
Fischer was successful as an artist and, occasionally, even a dealer.
His talent for empathy, and for deep listening related to his interest
in psychology, led to a career as producer of neo-vaudevillian theater
events that assembled an incredible soup of unusual people punks,
freaks, wealthy business people, leather and rubber queens, leashed
slaves and suburban housewives from all walks of life. Fischer:

People who would never talk to one another, . . . [who] would

walk on the opposite side of the street, . . . would have great
conversations and . . . realize that there was no reason to be
afraid, brought together under the umbrella of art.

In the 1990s, Fischer began using photography instead of painting

to continue exploring gender, identity, and personality. His curiosity
about and rapport with people, his artistic assimilation of Avedon,
Bellocq, Brassai, Gilles + Gilles, Mapplethorpe, Newton, Penn, Sherman,
Weegee, and Witkin, and a prodigious work ethic produced over the
ensuing two decades a huge trove of ironic, absurd, romantic, erotic
and tragic images in five major series of work, Mark, My World, USA,
Heads, and Odalisque. The Bay Areas diversity and tolerance and
Californias tradition of reinvention provided a congenial climate for
these explorations; collaborations between artist and model, director
and actor (assisted by props, body paint, and digital manipulation), they
constitute Fischers psychological theater. In five major series of work
Mark, My World, USA, Heads, and Odalisque he plumbs the
psychology of color to reveal us to ourselves.
James Mann, former curator of the Las Vegas Museum of Art, describes
what he calls Robert Fischers Human Comedy as a gross, if not
grotesque, frank, free, full, forthright presentation of human ripeness,
as opposed to the fat-free austerity of slick magazine photography
enslaved to fashion. That dream worlds airbrushed artificiality and
pinned-down perfection are at the farthest remove from Fischers inyour-face physicality of imperfection.
In a digitally connected global economy of increasing diversity and
complexity, with geographical and cultural borders diminished, were
increasingly asked to reconsider our provincial or insular values. Robert
Fischers humanistic but unsentimental photographs force us to be
both more truthful and more tolerant, as Franks The Americans did.
Its an idea that seems to be finally achieving widespread acceptance,
particularly among the young, who seem less troubled by the diversity of
the human animal. Fischer notes: Im sixty and I can still relate to people
who are twenty; they look at my work and say: Awesome! You are really
radical.
Dewitt Cheng

31 Pride

32 Empress of the Universe

33 Shes Leaving Home, Bye Bye

34 Anguish

35 Velveteen Rabbit

36 I Really Like to Smoke

37 Grande Soy Latte

38 Mouse in the Studio

39 Cumbersome Addiction

40 Antoine and Me

41 Oreo Love Minus One Cookie

42 I Love the Nightlife

43 Ode to Degas

44 Steeled

45 Contemplating My Future

46 First Date

47 Lion Witch Wardrobe

48 In My Bedroom

49 In My Bright Shiny Kitchen

50 Bedazzled

51 Mama always loved you best

52 Dazed and Confused

53 The Collector and the Slave

Guardian at the Gates of Taste

Bob Fischers images burn brightest at the edge of oblivion.

I have seen Bobs photography joyously wrestle with its own
physicality over the last decade and his graphic, synthetic
pictures are dizzying, confounding and uniquely moving.
Fischers elliptical narratives in which the protagonist forever
shifts between disarming candour and veiled, grotesque
theatrics has a fascinating cumulative effect and leaves a
most pungent residue. This oscillation between the mask
and a seemingly more intimate identity lets you absorb
the characters in Fischers universe in amorphous, lovingly
adorned fragments, yet it is quite often the obscured face
on the verge of dissolving that is most emotionally arresting.
Lovingly hurled into the void, Bobs imagery is restless, garish,
nightmarish and relentless inner flesh coaxed into the light.
Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Film-maker, Melbourne, Australia

Overleaf: 54 Repulsion

55 Smell My Toes

56 Magritte Schpin

57 Lostutterer

58 Kitt y Literatai

59 The Fat Black Woman Inside Me

60 Jokers Wild

61 Left Out on the Inside

62 Conversation

63 Sub

64 A Portrait in Black

65 Facing Paradise

66 A Beautiful Palm Springs Sunday Morning

69 Death at the Train Station

Opposite, top: 67 Paranoia

bottom: 68 Waiting for Godot

70 Im On my Deathbed . . . !

71 Psychobitch

72 Two Ladies

73 The Fluffer

74 Striped Torso

75 Used Friend

76 Its Raining All Over the World

77 Casablanca

78 Mandingo Part y Platter

79 Down on Me

80 Fridaesque

81 Didgeridoodah Day

82 In Search of the Blue Man Group

83 Buddahs Pot-Bellied Blues

84 Ill Fly Away

85 Girls on the Loose

86 Nude Descending a Staircase

87 Dead Ringah

88 Iphigenia at Aulis

89 Butterfly

90 Puck

91 Mephistopheles

92 Hatchet Job

93 Clown

94 Im Fading Away, Mama!

95 Solitary Confinement

96 Another Saturday Night and Im Alone

97 Jack in the Box, 4 a.m.

98 Mark in Front of the Motel (Wintertime, Palm Springs)

99 Scared Shitless

100 Paean to Ken

101 Death of Candi-O

102 Red Baaaaaaaaaaaack

103 Schism

Variations on a Theme

First Portrait

Framed

Metropolis is Looking Up

Hades

10

A Boo Garb

Spectre

Miguelito

The Scream

Dark Shadows / Green Water

11

12

13

14

15

Hahahahahaha!

I stand alone

Herr Richters Lapdog

Mirror, Mirror, Cracked

Maloquio

16

17

18

19

20

m-i-c-k-y -- m-o-u-s-e

Godhead

Bombay Beach with

William Burroughs
Lookalike

Toss Off

my house hitchcock style

21

22

23

24

25

Jitter

Waiting for the

Robert E. Cockring

Suck the Monster!

Amazonian Cone Head

Pick One Up Today

26

27

28

29

30

Dust Bowl

Sentry

Dervish

Loulou Falais

Block Head

31

32

33

34

35

Pride

Empress of the Universe

Shes Leaving Home, Bye Bye

Anguish

Velveteen Rabbit

36

37

38

39

40

I really like to smoke

Grande Soy Latte

Mouse in the studio

Cumbersome Addiction

Antoine and me

41

42

43

44

45

Oreo Love Minus One Cookie

I love the nightlife

Ode to Degas

Steeled

Contemplating my future

46

47

48

49

50

First Date

Lion Witch Wardrobe

In my bedroom

In my bright shiny kitchen

Bedazzled

51

52

53

54

55

Mama Always loved you best

Dazed and Confused

The Collector and the slave

Repulsion

Smell my toes

56

57

58

59

60

Magritte Schpin

Lostutterer

Kitty Literatai

The Fat Black woman

inside me

Jokers Wild

61

62

63

64

65

Left Out on the Inside

Conversation

Sub

A Portrait in black

Facing Paradise

66

67

68

69

70

A beautiful palm springs

sunday morning

Paranoia

Waiting for Godot

Death at the train station

Im on my deathbed . . . !

71

72

73

74

75

Psychobitch

Two Ladies

The Fluffer

Striped Torso

Used Friend

76

77

78

79

80

Its raining all over

the world

Casablanca

Mandingo Party Platter

Down on me

Fridaesque

81

82

83

84

85

Didgeridoodah day

In search of the
blue man group

Buddahs Pot-Bellied Blues

Ill Fly Away

Girls on the Loose

86

87

88

89

90

Nude Descending a staircase

Dead Ringah

Iphigenia at aulis

Butterfly

Puck

91

92

93

94

95

Mephistopheles

Hatchet Job

Clown

Im fading away, mama!

Solitary Confinement

96

97

98

99

100

Another Saturday Night

and Im alone

Jack in the box, 4 a.m.

Mark in front of the motel

(wintertime, Palm Springs)

Scared Shitless

Paean to Ken

101

102

103

Death of Candi-o

Red Baaaaaaaaaaaack

Schism