Anne Noggle (American, 1922-2005)
Myself as a Pilot, 1982
Silver gelatin print
14 x 16.75 in
Gift of the Anne Noggle Foundation
Photographer Anne Noggle titled her self-portrait series The Saga of Fallen Flesh. To her, a face became photographable when its individual story was wholly legible in the language of skin folds and wrinkles. She said, “I find young faces a tabula rasa, nothing is written there.”
Noggle’s own youth was spent in flight. She obtained her pilot license as a teenager and served in the Women’s Air Force during World War II when she was in her early twenties. When she retired from her career in flight and was able to focus on her photography, Noggle embraced her identity as a “youth betrayed by age.” Erupting, after long endurance, came her expressive coloratura. Noggle’s earlier portraiture was more traditional, but she collected the stories of her subjects, the first female combat pilots, and later began investigating the subject of aging. Turning her attention to her own “fallen flesh,” Noggle abandoned formality for playful experimentation. No longer did she respectfully compliment flesh with her camera: she began documenting its reality. Her incorporation of nudity defied the tired objectification of women through photography and claimed space for women’s experiences instead.
To me, her self portrait series appears as a montage, a cloud of time wafting and morphing before my eyes.
When Noggle decided to get a facelift, it was not — as I first assumed — to scrape away years of wind and military procedure from a palimpsest of skin. Instead, by bringing us to the fresh stitches under her swollen eyes, she showed us a war-like resistance to the ebbs of time, well aware of the futility of her attempts. She challenged, from both sides of the lens, the limited domain of women as subjects who were previously not allowed agency or depth.
Molly Smith ’24