That old black magic called self-love

Sorcerer of the lens Pierre Molinier's self-portraiture is the stuff nightmares are made of.

By Stephen Lemons

Aug 23, 2001 | What is it, this specter of evil gazing at us with glowing eyes? Clad in a form-fitting darkness suggesting the vague outline of stiletto heels, garters and bustier, it appears before us both feminine and malevolent. Pulling back ink-black curtains to reveal itself as would a conjurer, it calls to mind those nightmare figures that hover in the corner of your vision during sleep, readying to pounce as you are paralyzed with fear. Like the knife-wielding dwarf in Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now," or Bob, the leering killer crouched by the side of Laura Palmer's bed in "Twin Peaks," its very presence seems pregnant with the promise of murder.

The author of the image, and its gender-bending model, was the French surrealist photographer Pierre Molinier, a suicide at age 76 in the Year of Our Lord 1976. Molinier, a sorcerer of self-portraiture who longed to be a lesbian and who created hundreds of pictures wherein he explored with great sensuality his own transvestism, titled this particular photo "Le Chaman" ("The Shaman"). There's also a variation of this picture in which the same shaman stands before us, but this time with a full erection as well as large breasts. They're a peculiar pair of prints amid the perverse panoply of Molinier's work -- an oeuvre rife with fetish shots of Molinier by himself, in heels and stockings, fucking himself with a dildo or sucking his own cock. His was a sexuality turned on itself, yet still primarily heterosexual. The shaman was the projection of what he wished himself to be.

Why a shaman? In "Sexual Personae," Camille Paglia defines the shaman as "an archaic prototype of the artist, who also crosses sexes and commands space and time." She gives, as an example, the blind seer Tiresias from Greek mythology, whom T.S. Eliot describes as an "old man with wrinkled dugs."

Molinier was more old man with wrinkled dugs than he was a creature commanding space and time. A small, funny looking fellow, he always had the countenance of an elderly man, even when he was younger and in the army. Certainly, he was dangerous (he once shot at his cousin and did some time for attempted murder), but you wouldn't know it by seeing him. Rather, you'd take him for the village pervert, the one with a pocket full of candy and drool running down his chin. This same Molinier dreamed of being beautiful, powerful and a deadly practitioner of the black arts: a shaman. In the world he created for himself, he became one.

Molinier, whose work has been compared by commentators to that of Man Ray and Hans Bellmer and who would after his death be honored by a major exhibition of his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, lived for more than 40 years in the same pigpen of an apartment in Bordeaux. The apartment served as Molinier's dwelling, his studio and his photo lab. It was also his cum-stained temple of narcissism. Mirrors lined the walls and the ceilings. Dildos, self-made sex toys and handcrafted love dolls shared space with Molinier's box camera and his bizarre inventions for developing film, his techniques for which remain shrouded in secrecy.

There were female masks to hide his face in, and an endless array of fetish clothing and sexual prostheses -- like some odd matrimony betwixt Frederick's of Hollywood and "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." In the middle of his main living space, there was his filthy altar of self-abuse and sometime stage: his bed.

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