Snowmen. David Lynch as photograph and "The Uncanny"

Abstract

David Lynch’s work is not limited to the cinema, as the 2007 exhibition The Air is on Fire, held at the Cartier Fondation in Paris, showed. However, theoretical studies have neglected what galleries and museums have highlighted for some time: Lynch the painter, photographer, musician and polyhedral artist. The article focuses on a photographic series, Snowmen and is taken from a piece of research by Paolo Sebastiano Lanzi on David Lynch the photographer. In the light of Freud’s essay on The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche, 1919), the Snowmen are interpreted as images of death. Aspects of the artist-director’s poetics come to the fore, such as the unease of the Inland Empire or certain ideas integral to Surrealism. The study of Lynch’s photographic production fills a void in the critical analysis of his work, which should be reappraised in a much wider perspective.