Last fall, Peter McGough, one half of the American-born art duo McDermott and McGough, traveled from his perfectly preserved Art Deco apartment in New York's West Village to another environment at odds with the present: the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, a massive institution established by the automotive pioneer in 1929 to house the greatest hits of American history. It's where you go when you want to get a good look at the chair that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in, or to think deeply upon the sealed tube containing Thomas Edison's final earthly breath. McGough was here to meet with some hopeful Midwestern print models vying to be included in the pair's latest feat of time-travel. With backdrops provided by the museum's staggering collection of vintage interiors (from Buckminster Fuller's experimental 1948 Dymaxion House to a pristine Texaco station stuck in 1939), and through the portal provided by a chunky old 4 x 5 camera, McGough would arrange to send his subjects back to midcentury America.
"This girl showed up for the shoot in a tracksuit with JUICY written on the ass," McGough recently recounted over cocktails at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin, the city that he and McDermott moved to in the early 1990s (McDermott ended up staying), and where the Irish Museum of Modern Art is hosting a retrospective of their iconic early photographs. A team of stylists then transformed the unwitting girl into the kind of fetching creature who would not be out of place on the set of Mad Men. "I couldn't believe how beautiful she was. I looked at her and I said, 'You look like a young Gloria Vanderbilt,' and she said, 'Who?' I told her, 'Well, her son is Anderson Cooper,' and she said, 'Who?' So I said, 'O.K. — just get in front of the camera and shut up!' The kids all hated the way they looked." But somehow it worked: The anomie of the age of Britney was channeled into a series of luminous new pictures — McDermott and McGough's first major photographic output in over a decade — that, like the pair's best work, offers glimpses backward that are as dreamy as they are unsettling.
"Now that is just spooky," McDermott marveled as he pored over prints from the shoot, which are now on view at New York's Nicholas Robinson Gallery. (The show is called, simply, Detroit.) "These photographs are haunted," McGough added. "This is the world I escaped. And he escaped." Coming of age in sixties suburbia (McDermott in Clifton, New Jersey; McGough in Syracuse, New York), the eventual collaborators fled to Manhattan, where they became eighties art-boom luminaries and close confidants of the Schnabels. Most famously, they turned their lives into a rigorous experiment in existing outside of the present, cutting improbable figures in stiff Edwardian collars and starched waistcoats, ripping every mod con out of their Avenue C townhouse, and slow-cruising the East Village in a 1913 Model T. Along the way, they began harnessing antiquated photo technologies — palladium, cyanotype, and gum bichromate printing — to create images that are alarmingly indistinguishable from the creations of such 19th-century practitioners as William Henry Fox Talbot, Mathew Brady, and Nadar.
