Absence And Presence: Notes On Michael Somoroff’s Photographs - article by Donald Kuspit

By DONALD KUSPIT October 14, 2025

Michael Somoroff is a spiritual artist, a Jewish artist, like Mark Rothko, as Somoroff’s Illumination I, 2006, installed at the Rothko Chapel, makes indisputably clear.  “Only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine,” Rothko declared.  But to be at the threshold of the divine is not to cross it:  Rothko’s God remains the deus absconditus, “the God who hides himself,” as Isaiah 45:15 says, leading would-be believers to doubt his existence.  If he never manifests himself, except in such quirky miracles as the burning bush, he must be no more than a quirk of nature, like a will o’ the wisp, understood as an omen of death, for it is the soul of a dead human being.  If he is always more absent than present, he can’t be counted on to come to one’s rescue when one needs him.  God certainly didn’t come to Rothko’s rescue, but left him in emotional hell, abandoned him to masochistic suffering—the self-doubt implicit in and symbolized by the Rothko Chapel paintings.  They epitomize what Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death that is depression.  They were the stepping stones to Rothko’s suicide, the final expression of his sense of the futility of life—and art.  Their bleakness indicates that Rothko lost all hope, including the hope implicit in creativity, which gives presence to being.  Rothko was a Jew who struggled to believe in God—the Holocaust shows that He let the Jews down, to say the least, and was not worth the trouble of worshipping—but was not able to do so unequivocally:  the gloomy—morbid--paintings of the Rothko Chapel convey his loss of faith, his self defeating disillusionment with religion--except, perhaps, the religion of art that Jacques Barzun said was born with 19^th century romanticism.  Dare one say that Rothko’s suicide indicates his identification with God, who committed suicide at Auschwitz?    

And Rothko is a romantic, if to identify with God is romanticism ne plus ultra—the first verse of the Old Testament declares God to be the first creative artist, for He created the cosmos, and, significantly for the vanity of the artist, made man in His image and with that gave him God’s creative power—and if, as Baudelaire said, black is the most romantically mysterious of colors, as Matisse also thought.  Baudelaire also thought black—the absence of color that was paradoxically the profoundest color--was the most aristocratic of colors, for it was worn by the most fashionable men of his time:  it was not only romantically mysterious, but upper class (as God no doubt was; thus the divine right of kings).  Early in the 20^th century the religion—worship—of art became de rigueur with non-objective art:  art rid itself of “the external,” as Kandinsky wrote, and with it the figure.  In Absence of Subject Somoroff eliminates the figure from every last one of August Sander’s photographs of People of the 20^th Century, leaving us only with the context in which they appear, its objects now peculiarly transformed into simulations, the whole work now unexpectedly “mystical,” to allude to Kandinsky’s idea of the mystical content of art.  A tour de force of what Jose Ortega y Gassett called the dehumanization of art in modernity, it also exemplifies the skepticism of objective truth and universal knowledge typical of ironical postmodernism.  There is an ironical nihilism in Absence of Subject, on a par with the apocalyptic nihilism of the Rothko Chapel paintings.  If the task of photography is to convey presence, Somoroff’s Illumination I and Absence of Subject shows him obsessed with absence.   

Rothko committed suicide in 1970, when Somoroff was thirteen, the year he came into his own as a Jew and became a man, for he was bar mitzvahed, which confirmed his spiritual superiority to and power over woman, orthodox Jewish men giving morning thanks to God for the fact that they were not born female.  Duchamp, a more avant-garde and cynical—certainly not spiritual--artist (some would say devilish anti-artist) than Rothko, was ironically idolized in Somoroff’s perverse treatment of Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending A Staircase, 1912, one of his many misogynist works.  Mockingly turned into a slow motion abstract film indebted to Eadweard Muybridge’s series of automatic electro-photographs of a horse in cinematic motion, Duchamp’s robotic nude jerkily descends the staircase in masturbatory motion into abstract orgasmic oblivion in Somoroff’s work.  It is another masturbatory use and ironic abuse of the object, finally cancelling it; Duchamp’s nude slowly but inevitably loses human presence, becoming an abstract cipher, not to say an ironic simulation, vacuous at the core—an empty presence, not to say a hollow woman.  Somoroff was clearly not inspired by Rothko’s grandiose abstraction nor Duchamp’s abusive cynical wit.  His subtly derogatory treatment of them was a last hurrah to modernism—a final working of it through to clear the way for his humanist photography.  Somoroff is not another trendy “experimental” modernist, making the aesthetic best of modern alienation and anomie, but a neo-humanist figurative artist.  Somoroff didn’t need to be and wasn’t inspired by Rothko or Duchamp to come into his own as an artist—an original photographer.  They were not the father figures of his insightful photography, but his biological father, Ben Somoroff, whose works were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, was his spiritual father—one of the many original insightful photographers who were his  guides to the mysteries and complexities of photography.  They were his role “models” as his subtle portraits of—homages to--them make clear.  However different, both Rothko and Duchamp are implicitly nihilistic—apocalyptically announce the death of humanistic art, and with it the noble figure, noble because it is of sound mind and body.  Somoroff restores the figure—the individual person--to stylistic credibility by giving it photographic freshness, aesthetic immediacy, and emotional meaning—indeed, existential depth--giving the great tradition of humanistic art a fresh photographic re-start and emotional subtlety. 

Somoroff’s mother was a famous model, who glamorously appeared on the cover of the April 14, 1952 issue of Life Magazine.  She is indeed full of life, radiantly beautiful, and implicitly a femme fatale, as her phallic shoes, crowning her blossoming dress, suggests.  She has great presence, emotional and physical, conveying what Ashley Montagu called the natural superiority of woman.  She symbolizes what Goethe called the eternal feminine. Full bodied, Somoroff’s mother is altogether unlike—irreconcilably antithetical with--his German wife, a thin, small former ballet dance whom he recently divorced.  Somoroff’s beautiful, glorious mother, full of life, symbolizes what Goethe called “the eternal feminine that drives us on,” while Somoroff’s wife seems like a “mouse,” a German term of endearment.  A child of divorced parents typically identifies with one of them, usually for emotional reasons, but also for cognitive reasons.  Somoroff clearly identified with his father, as the fact that he became his father’s studio assistant indicates.  In the studio he learned the ropes of the photography profession, becoming a master photographer, like the many brilliant, famous photographers he met through his father, and whom he celebrated—idealized, not to say idolized—in a serious of subtle photographic portraits, each an aesthetic masterpiece  as well as an insightful and empathic study of the master, an all but worshipful homage to them in gratitude for them.  Concentrated in themselves, they all have remarkable presence, the calm and fullness of being that comes with creative confidence, conviction, and fulfillment, along with the respect and admiration of one’s peers that comes with creative success and recognition of one’s originality, as well as the future generation of photographers, symbolized by Somoroff.  Somoroff projectively identified with his mentors, idealized them in the act of internalizing them by respectfully photographing them, with a sensitive tenderness and gratitude for their existence and art.  They were masters of nuance, aesthetic and emotional; I don’t know of any similar tribute to—unequivocal respect for--a master by his disciple.  The art historian Max Friedlander said that a portrait is convincing—only works—if and when the portraitist identifies with the portrayed, unconsciously, one may add, as well as, in the case of another artist, out of conscious respect for his creative achievements, and with that for his person—his genius.  Somoroff’s portraits are hero worship; he was fortunate to have had heroes to worship, many father figures whom he could admire and from whom he could learn.  Somoroff’s sense of gratitude seems rare to me.  It seems clear, from the evidence of their portraits, that they took Somoroff under their wing, and treated him as an equal, which is the reason Somoroff’s portraits of his mentors have the plenitude of presence and expressive nuance that Rothko’s miserabilist abstractions lack, to allude to Breton’s attack on the miserabilism that was self-evident to him in modern life and modern art.  Somoroff’s portraits of his mentors are masterpieces of psychological insight and attunement, all the more so because they invite empathic recognition of them and with that acknowledgement that photography can be a fine art, as Somoroff shows it is, not simply a journalistic record of events and people. WM

More images below: