If you suffer for your art, your art suffers.

I coined this little zinger many years ago. For a man of lofty affinities and perversions, it sounds both concise and profound. I used it mainly to try and impress women during the lost decade of my thirties, as they proudly swerved or swallowed my drunken warrior-poet act. It took a while, though, for the broader truth of it to actually hit home, far from the perfumed chambers of sweet carnal conquest and bitter narcissistic shame.

Truth be told, I’ve never believed that I was truly good enough for anyone or anything. This became pretty evident in the early stages of my so-called photographic career. Back in the day, I quickly realised that I wasn’t blessed with an extraordinary eye or any form of visceral, visual genius. I also wasn’t in the habit of sucking dick (metaphorically or otherwise), so that burned some bridges where I didn’t even know rivers lay patiently waiting. My superpower, I felt, was my freakish work-ethic and selfless self-discipline. Fuck allmighty, I would do absolutely anything, no matter the risk to life and limb, at any hour day or night, to get as close as I could to that perfect shot. It pretty much instantly took the joy out of my work, but hell, I couldn’t give a shit about that.

I sweetly believed that there were two kinds of photographers in this world: great ones and lazy ones. And I knew full well which one I was going to be, no matter the cost. Where fellow photogs saw danger and difficulty, I saw a doorway to merit and validation. Whatever the assignment or project, I would always go way out of my comfort zone, hitting the high road on that lonesome extra mile, hoping that it would somehow put me on the map. It was thankless work, no love and all fear. People mostly just thought I was crazy. Still, I somehow believed that if I just kept pushing the pace despite of myself, I would eventually catch a break and the sky would be the limit. As it turned out, there was a musty ol’ ceiling up there and it was pretty fucking low, and I had too many stars in my eyes to see it falling.

Then, from somewhere within the great Strip Mall of the Universe, the mannequin came crashing skyward through it all, at long last laying it to beautiful ruin.

As with most grand ideas, it all started with being stoned. Grappling with The Fear, I was tripping out on the vacant stares of mannequins in boutique windows as I ambled through the inner city on some silver afternoon. I remember thinking how cool it would look to see one of them out in raw nature somewhere, far from the rot and the hustle, like a droid put out to pasture in a lush, alien land. It wasn’t exactly an eureka moment, but the visual juxtaposition drew me in over the next few days. I couldn’t get it out of my head. Beyond it all, I knew, simmered the will to transform into something ethereal a populist symbol of everything I hated in this world: the false idolry of materialism, our disconnection from the earth, mindless consumerism and, fuck it, fashion. But all that arty-farty stuff would come later. First, I needed a mannequin.

Once you start looking for one to do with as you please, they’re surprisingly hard to find. I eventually managed to get one from a photographer friend who kept it around for the odd lighting workshop. She was pretty beat up, but nothing some TLC wouldn’t fix. She even came with a glossy black wig, which did the rounds at some drunken parties after, but soon disappeared. Standing in his attic that night as we dusted her off, my buddy, who saw the crazed light in my eyes and knew it all too well, carefully suggested that I could perhaps just shoot some pretty landscapes and photoshop a mannequin in after. Or many mannequins. Hell, I could have as many as I wanted. I laughed in his face and he laughed at my back as I was struggling to get the damn thing into my car.

The first few times I took her out into the mountains had nearly killed me. In the one hand I carried a duffel bag with a bulky Nikon, studio light, softbox and a hammer for the metal stake which held her standing up. In the other was a clear plastic bag with a light stand, the mannequin’s head and torso and a half-jack of whiskey. On my back I had a big ol’ pack which held the arms and legs, the latter being so goddamn long that the bag could only hold about half of them with the shins sticking out, towering out in a “V” above my shoulders like a macabre peace sign from the depths of hell. The whole horrid mess weighed around fifteen kilos, and that was over rough terrain. By the time I got her assembled and everything set up in the last golden hour of day, I was totally fucking spent. And then I had to get to the actual work, trying not to worry about stumbling all the way back in the dark.  
There was also a downside.

I’m not sure when or how it happened, but the holy thirst for punishment that held me to my martyrdom was fading. This had been my most ambitious folly yet, and, racy as it was, it failed to hit the vein with that sublime sense of strife that kept my hand steady under the grindstone. It was just plain tough and nothing else. Although the odd prime picture came out of all that noise, the ends did somehow not justify the means. I was stumped. Perhaps I was finally turning into a citizen, or just getting old. God, the whole thing was terrifying. And yet, with the winds of High Art in my tattered sails, I somehow soldiered on. To peaks and lakes and valleys far and wide my equally dumbstruck companion and I ventured forth as one, pensive as a Jerusalem mule, forever chasing the Light.

One autumn eve in the Cederberg, I got hopelessly lost on the way back to my car. Mad with rage and exhaustion, I eventually had to bundu bash through about three kilometres of waist-high bramble thicket to get back onto the road. My legs were torn to shreds. Finally hitting the tarmac in the dead of night I could hear the blood sloshing in my shoes, knowing full well I didn’t get the shot. I had a bad cut on my face and my right shoulder was partially dislocated. I don’t remember how exactly I got home, but I couldn’t get out of bed for a week. My woman was walking around the house crying and cursing for days. It was a pretty bad scene.

In all fairness, that should have been it. Still, a month or so later, when she demanded we head out to the Garden Route for a while to try and get a break from whatever the hell else was going on at the time, the mannequin rode shotgun with me in the front without a word being said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

On our last day in Nature’s Valley, having spotted a glade in the forest that would probably work quite well for a frame, I was trudging as usual through the trees with my burden, the mannequin’s feet snagging on branches overhead. It was rough going. Feeling dazed and drawn as I crossed the track leading to Bloukrans Pass, a lone station wagon slowly rambled past just as I stepped out from under the canopy. The guy hit the brakes about two seconds later, screeching to a dusty halt. The poor fucker had his entire family in the car, and they were all rubbernecking around to have a look at what must have appeared to be some psycho forest-trash killer carrying his dismembered prize deep into the woods to do only God knows what with next. Looking back at them I couldn’t free my hands, so I tried a wry, disarming smile. I felt my face crack into a leering grin instead as a small kid in the rear window stared at me with a wide-eyed mix of awe and horror. As his old man finally sped off into the dusk, I realised once and for all that I had to loosen up and get a goddamn grip.

I have no idea if I caused any permanent damage to that kid. What I do know is that some little boy inside me, who’ve never felt wanted and believed that tough love was all he deserved, who thought that valiant art was the only antidote to a dull and ugly world, who tried to stand a fighting chance in a broken system by breaking himself in turn, was left at the roadside that day. No mess, no fuss. It just happened. Looking up into the whispering trees as if for the very first time, I quietly vowed to never be a slave to the Muse again. I would find another way to love her, Lord help me, or simply become a waiter or a monk.

Returning the mannequin a few days later, my friend, perhaps sensing my pristine defeat, helped me carry her battered form back into the attic with quiet reverence. It felt like sacrilege to have someone finally lend me a hand there at the very end, but hell, I didn’t really mind. I felt light, released, renewed. The one thing I regret to this very day, though, is not giving her a name, seeing as she taught me much.

While she became an all-too concrete symbol of capitalistic carnage and senseless consumerism in my fevered fantasy, vapidly mocking female flesh as she stands between us and the natural abundance of Mother Earth, it dawned on me that ranting and raving against a supreme unnatural order, inside and out, is pointless. You just need to somehow turn your back on all that shit and find a way to be good and true to yourself. Without that, all’s for nothing any old how. Time is art. Whether you’re swimming upstream or cruising with the tide to get to wherever it is you want to go, you have to find a way to work smarter, not harder. ‘Cause the harder you push at anything in what’s left of this life, the harder it pushes back. We’re’ all out of our depth in the end, son, and to struggle is to drown.
Hindsight is a bitch. And yet, while the end result of the entire ordeal could have indeed turned out to be something truly seminal if I was able to manage the pace and not burn out so goddamn quick, I like to think that it still stands, in its own way, as a faded pillar of truth and beauty in a prison of dread and deceit.

Old habits, of course, die hard. I could easily run the whip across my back one last time and ask myself why I even bothered, as hordes of plastic souls can be seen haunting the Great Plains of Servitude these days, but I’m not going to.

Perhaps that could be left to some younger, stronger grunt brimming with spunk and sass. Tough as it may be, I just want to sit around drinking scotch and eating crow, kicking back on my high horse in the no man’s land of a brave new Wilderness.

Photography, words, narration © Copyright Jac Kritzinger.

Music © Copyright Albertus van Rensburg.