What makes deadpan feel so off, so destabilizing, so dryly funny? <\/p>\n
One reason is that performers \u2013 particularly comedians \u2013 are expected to be expressive and over the top, or even hint to the audience that they\u2019re supposed to chuckle, similar to a sitcom laugh track.<\/p>\n
As I recently organized an exhibition on photography\u2019s relationship to humor<\/a>, I found myself thinking about how deadpan works in photography. A still, deadpan image might seem like a paradox: Don\u2019t you need a real, live performance? But exploring how photographers have deployed deadpan sheds light on just how powerful and incisive this form of humor can be.<\/p>\n Are you not entertained?<\/p>\n \u201cPan\u201d was slang for \u201cface\u201d in the 19th century<\/a>. The genre of deadpan humor was popularized in movies by actor Buster Keaton<\/a>, whose expressionless, blunt and stilted presence before the camera inspired his nickname, \u201cthe Great Stone Face.\u201d<\/p>\n Sprung upon an audience, deadpan can yield a reaction that reveals what philosopher Ted Cohen has described<\/a> as the \u201cconditional\u201d nature of humor \u2013 that it plays into assumptions, expectations and prior knowledge precisely to disrupt them. <\/p>\n Puzzled by the unmet promise of a clear emotion or narrative, the audience laughs uncomfortably at their own bewilderment. The performer\u2019s restraint registers as absurd. <\/p>\n The opposite of postcard perfect<\/p>\n As a medium, photography has historically been burdened by debates over its ability to convey ideas or expression. To early critics<\/a>, a photograph seemed \u201cmechanical\u201d because it appeared only to reproduce the world, rather than express something new. Compared to drawing or painting, they reasoned, the camera could merely copy. <\/p>\n But I would argue that for these very reasons, photography is a rich lens to explore how deadpan works visually. In photography, deadpan doesn\u2019t even need to involve people. <\/p>\n Take the work of Californian photographer Henry Wessel Jr<\/a>. Known for his decades-long documentation of everyday life in California, Wessel was one of 10 photographers featured in the watershed 1975 exhibition \u201cNew Topographics<\/a>\u201d at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, which trained a lens on landscapes altered by humans rather than nature alone \u2013 think gas stations, parking lots and tract homes instead of national parks.<\/p>\n Yet the shift Wessel and the other photographers initiated did not simply concern subject matter, but the manner in which they presented it: coolly, at least by the standards of iconic landscape. Previously, photographers such as Ansel Adams<\/a> had infused their pictures with drama and contrast to provoke the same reverence that they felt toward nature\u2019s beauty. Museumgoers were accustomed to seeing these kinds of landscapes: picturesque and sublime, featuring sprawling mountain ranges and billowing clouds rendered in dramatic tonal ranges.<\/p>\n By contrast, Wessel photographed suburbia in the American West<\/a> \u2013 and with irreverent affection. He composed his images with mock casualness and printed in a narrow tonal range, as if yielding to the leveling quality of the bright sunlight on the stucco and concrete<\/a>.<\/p>\n Henry Wessel, Tucson, Ariz., 1974. This was puzzling; Wessel\u2019s pictures seemed worlds away from fine art landscape photography. They resisted awe and transcendence in favor of dry bemusement. By 1970s standards, his subject matter and aesthetic were equivalents of deadpan\u2019s monotone. Who in their right mind would make the effort to take such a plain picture of a humdrum house?<\/p>\n Yet by adopting this style, Wessel encouraged audiences to pay greater attention to their immediate surroundings<\/a>: to read front porches, carports and landscaping as evidence of people\u2019s lifestyles and values. His photographs demonstrate the wealth of information that lurks in the mundane.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n To Wessel, the seemingly mundane was brimming with intrigue.<\/p>\n Why so serious?<\/p>\n Other photographers have marshaled deadpan to explore themes of identity and belonging. <\/p>\n Tseng Kwong Chi<\/a> was a prominent personality in the East Village art scene in the 1980s and a friend of pop artist Keith Haring<\/a>. In his landmark series of proto-selfies, \u201cEast Meets West,\u201d the Hong Kong-born artist used a funny personal experience<\/a> as the point of departure.<\/p>\n Dining at Windows on the World<\/a>, the restaurant atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Tseng decided to wear a Zhongshan suit<\/a>, or \u201cMao suit,\u201d as it was known in the West, due to its association with the former Chinese leader Mao Zedong.<\/p>\n The restaurant\u2019s staff treated him as a dignitary, inspiring Tseng to embark upon what ultimately became over 100 self-portraits in which he appeared in this guise of an \u201cambiguous ambassador.\u201d In the series, Tseng appears in front of popular tourist destinations \u2013 Disneyland, Mount Rushmore<\/a>, Cape Canaveral<\/a>, Paramount Studios<\/a> \u2013 but never cracks a smile. Goofy hams it up for the camera as Tseng\u2019s suit and serious expression subvert the conventions of tourist snapshots. <\/p>\n In doing so, \u201cEast Meets West\u201d deploys deadpan to tell a broader story about the search for belonging as an immigrant and a queer person of color. <\/p>\n Tseng Kwong Chi, Disneyland, California, 1979. Similarly, in his series \u201cEntering Zig\u2019s Indian Reservation<\/a>,\u201d Zig Jackson<\/a> adopts a caricature-like persona to both mock and resist Native American stereotypes. <\/p>\n Jackson was the first member of his family to leave their reservation in North Dakota. He spent time in various western states before enrolling as a photography student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n Early in his time there, as he went for a jog in the city\u2019s sprawling Golden Gate Park, he heard grunting bison from the nearby paddock<\/a>, a beloved San Francisco landmark since 1892. Jackson felt simultaneously at home and homesick, like he was \u201camong relatives.\u201d <\/p>\n Wearing a war bonnet, or feathered headdress \u2013 an item of regalia that is often appropriated by white people \u201cplaying Indian\u201d \u2013 he returned to the site to \u201cclaim the buffalo as my own,\u201d as he explained to me in an email.<\/p>\n In the image, Jackson meets the camera with an expressionless gaze, sitting next to a sign he made to mark his fictive reservation. This and other works from this series are deadpan: Jackson\u2019s headdress registers as jarring with his street clothes, and the rules spelled out on the sign \u2013 including \u201cNO PICTURE TAKING\u201d and \u201cNEW AGERS PROHIBITED\u201d \u2013 read as tongue in cheek. But the photographs are also melancholy visualizations of feeling out of place.<\/p>\n Zig Jackson (Mandan\/Hidatsa\/Arikara), Buffalo Enclosure, Golden Gate Park, 1997, from the series \u2018Entering Zig\u2019s Indian Reservation.\u2019 The matter with fact<\/p>\n Sometimes I find myself wondering whether photography itself is inherently deadpan. It possesses a built-in bluntness that registers as absurd or confusing in certain contexts.<\/p>\n For her series \u201cSkirts<\/a>,\u201d British conceptual artist Clare Strand<\/a> rented banquet tables from a commercial catering company, covered them with linens and photographed them one by one. She then presented the images as a grid, as if they were specimens. <\/p>\n The viewer might initially assume that there is some sort of overarching narrative: Are they for a party? An award ceremony? <\/p>\n But Strand provides no answers. All dressed up with nowhere to go, the tables show that to photograph something is to transform it: In anointing an object, person or scene as worthy of being singled out, the photographer confers importance on it. From there, the viewer is left to fill in the blanks.<\/p>\n Clare Strand, \u2018Skirts,\u2019 2011.![\"Black](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/file-20250818-56-87hnt8.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n \u00a9 Studio Henry Wessel<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Young](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/file-20250818-56-n472yw.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\n Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Purchase. Photo \u00a9 Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc., New York<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Man](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/file-20250818-56-urdmlp.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\n Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Ansel Adams Endowed Acquisition Fund \u00a9 2025 Zig Jackson\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Ten](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/file-20250818-56-mi9tki.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\n Collection SFMOMA, John Caldwell, Curator of Painting and Sculpture (1989-93), Fund for Contemporary Art purchase \u00a9 Clare Strand<\/a><\/p>\n