Yelena Yemchuk, The Nordic Light, published in Japanese Vogue in 2006. Photo courtesy Art-Dept.com.

Today we are pleased to introduce a new column titled Authors on Art by various writers curated by Blake Butler. This month we welcome guest author Ben Spivey.

Giving a mannequin the characteristics of a breathing human with a beating heart wasn’t easy.

I was first introduced to the photography of Yelena Yemchuk in 1998 on the cover of, and in the accompanying booklet for, The Smashing Pumpkins album Adore. Right away I noticed a beautifully lifeless quality to her work. A quality that made me feel uneasy.

Fast forward to 2008, ten years later, and Yemchuk’s photography helped shape a character in my novel, Flowing in the Gossamer Fold: a mannequin.

Yelena Yemchuk, Once Upon a Time, photography for fashion editorial with Leith Clark. Photo courtesy Art-Dept.com.

Yemchuk is a Ukrainian-born photographer, painter, and film director. She has contributed to publications such as the Italian Vogue, the Japanese Vogue, and the New Yorker.

While writing Flowing in the Gossamer Fold, I rediscovered Yemchuk’s work, and I was again attracted to how uneasy it made me feel.

Her photography removes the soul. This removal was key in my descriptions of the mannequin as a living lifeless thing.

She removed the soul from the eyes of people all while leaving a mysterious and surreal emotion intact. This is how I wanted the mannequin to be: real and surreal, full of life, but also void of it, empty in the eyes.

I remember looking at the cover of Adore, the image of the woman—she was in a black dress, leaning forward, arms back, with deep dark emotionless eyes. And then on the back of the album, the two horses pulling something unknown in a seemingly timeless world.

When Flowing in the Gossamer Fold was a finished manuscript and as I began editing it, I found myself looking at more and more of Yemchuk’s photography.

I wanted to create a visceral experience for the reader that was empty without being meaningless, timeless without being lost—that’s how her photographs looked, beautiful and unnerving.

I had the idea that each scene in the book would be like a photograph, a still shot.

One picture in particular kept me coming back—the cut image of two women in a small boat, both sinking into the other, no emotion and the still placid water—that image left an impression on page 120 of my book: “The light at the surface, shining on the top of the ocean was like a flashlight beamed off glass,” and, “In the boat was the mannequin. It looked at me. I looked at it.”

Her uneasy bitter photography helped give life to a mannequin in words.

Ben Spivey is a young local Atlantan author whose first novel, Flowing in the Gossamer Fold, was recently released by Blue Square Press. It is a beautiful, often dreamlike novel where space and the objects inside the space have wills of their own. Gary Lutz said of the book: “Ben Spivey’s alluringly melodial debut novel of a marriage gone asunder unreels itself with the indisputable logic of dreams and delivers, along its phantasmagoric and dazing way, emotional clarities that feel entirely new.”

I asked Spivey to write about a work of art that inspired him in the creation of the novel. This column begins a series by authors who will do the same.

Check BURNAWAY for Authors on Art curated by Blake Butler on the second Monday of every month! We hope these columns will further and enrich the ongoing dialogue between the visual arts and related creative fields.