William Mortensen began his career
more than a decade after Alfred Stieglitz and his circle of American avant-garde
photographers began to turn from Pictorialist manipulations to the straightforward
and pure, extremely detailed and finely crafted print. Rejected by the
avant-garde as being anachronistic, Mortensen was nevertheless extremely popular
with and had much influence over commercial photography produced at the time.
His photographs have unabashedly manipulated objectives and overtly symbolic
intent. By altering or texturizing either the negative or the print,
introducing hand lettering, and staging the scene, he generated images that
illustrated higher truths and universal themes.

Johan the Mad exemplifies this
technique. A straight print using a texturizing filter and penciled lettering,
the photograph represents Johan of Castile, whose epic journey across Europe
carrying the corpse of her husband on her back symbolized "the tortured
quest for something irrevocably lost."