Prologue to the Present

Larry Wolf (2018)

Twists and turns seem like a direct path in retrospect. One recent (not so recent) piece of my story of how I got here, making photographs and generally creating art (photos, zines, poetry, drawing, painting) dates from 2018 and 2019.

2018 - August

Rather than give in to obsessive thoughts of a new camera, I ordered The Soul of the Camera by David duChemin. It's about the photographer.

2019 - January

I was in dialogue with Shawn Rowe about his upcoming photography class, looking to catch up on the changes in thinking about and making photographs since my last immersion in the 1970s. It's about making photographs.

2019 - September

While in DC for HIMSS Health IT week, I was transfixed by the shifting light and shadows in my hotel room and captured a series of 18 images over the course of one minute. Noticing something visually compelling. Holding a camera. In the flow. Something about that minute felt so right, so what I wanted to be doing. Without thought, I was on the other side of the decision. Be a photographer.

Larry Wolf, More Or Less Transparent - Overview Grid, September 2019

2021 - January

Zine making became the answer to What do I do with my photographs? Zines are what I bring with me when I meet friends for coffee, have with me for when I meet someone new, are the form I've adopted for my contact info. Again it was Shawn Rowe who was my teacher. Thank you, Shawn.

In the Present, Prologue

Larry Wolf,
Robert Aitken's Present 1935 (2019)

During that September in 2019, I walked past this sculpture and inscription at the National Archives. A quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "What is past is prologue." The sculpture is titled "Present". I photographed that same sculpture in the past. I keep circling myself. 

Memory of June 1994

Silent Running

An evening celebration

Let’s meet people 

Establish my presence

Or at least an awareness

Of them

Perhaps

Of me

Alone at a full table

They know each other

Know each other well

Years of living

Years of loving

Years of tears

And cheers

And burials

And marches

Tonight, acknowledged

For of by the all of us

All of them

I know the causes they work for

I know the forces they work against

Just not here

Had I been in Montpelier

Or Burlington

Or Saint Johnsbury

Or Brattleboro

I would have known them

All of them

Might have been on the podium handing out an award

I had to leave

Staying was killing me

Here

Alone

Lost

On edge

I flee

Way before last call

Way before awkward goodbyes and see you soons

Ripped up decades of connection

Shred my heart

Left the cool mountains

For this sweltering swamp

Alone in a hostile world 

Smothered in southern gentility

Inner rage 

Quiet street

Back stairs

Bare apartment

Hum of air conditioning

Staring out at treetops

Wishing for a thunderstorm 

Dance in the downpour

Many reasons to have left

Many reasons to have come 

Dry tears of unresolved loss

-- Larry Wolf, 31 July 2025 

remembering June 1994

[Index of Poems]

Empty

 (1)

Chairs

Cups

Tea

Gone

Once

Voices

Paused

Quiet 

Glance 

Eyes

Held

Abyss

Loss

Too sad to cry

Beyond words

Space

 

(2)

Woods (chopped down)

Exotic (slave labor in a rain forest)

Local (clearcut off stolen land)

Metal (extracted from strip mines)

Space (held at great expense)

Polished (by workers, unacknowledged)

Street (cleared of all drifters)

Shadows (not enough to hide in)

Hazy (lost in memory)

Alone (with my lover)

Travelers (from afar)

Evidence (just this)

 

-- Larry Wolf, 28 July 2025

[Index of Poems]

Larry Wolf, Two Chairs (2025)

Me and Rimbaud

Larry Wolf, Arthur and Larry and Larry and Arthur (2025)

Arthur and Larry and Larry and Arthur

Many

Generations apart

Continents apart

Connected

In his web

Paul

David

Patti

Gay Sunshine chapbook - A Lover’s Cock

Collected poems and poems and poems and letters

Imaginings of Java and Abyssinia

Fragments

David made a mask

From a photograph

Friends wore it

He photographed

The mask became a pin

Souvenir from an exhibition

Rebel artists brought into the canon

I wear it

Explaining, always explaining

A zine of explanation

Grit became polished

Raw edges still present

Almost twice Arthur’s age

Almost twice David’s age

Patti recites the poems

I look over my shoulder

At sixteen

Burst on the scene

At twenty one

A last poem

Yet

A century later

Here I am

His descendant

-- Larry Wolf, 28 July 2025

[Index of Poems]

[Photo at The First Homosexuals exhibition. See also Two Bad Boy Artists and At 17 and 170.]

Perfectly Imperfect

Reflections in the Windows

Larry Wolf, Gustave in Chicago (2025)

Larry Wolf, Gustave in Chicago (2025)

Larry Wolf, Gustave in Chicago (2025)

Larry Wolf, Gustave in Chicago (2025)

Larry Wolf, Gustave in Chicago (2025)

Larry Wolf, Gustave in Chicago (2025)

Larry Wolf, Gustave in Chicago (2025)

As part of the Gustave Caillebotte exhibition, The Art Institute asked artists to make works at the "intersection of Art and Commerce in the City of Chicago". These by photographer Brad Danner are a wonderful combination of the Caillebotte paintings, current photos in Chicago and a lively imagination, plus my enjoyment in the reflections in the windows at the Berghoff restaurant. 

Noah, Not Seen, Not Invited

"I had a friend once," he said, so soft it came out as a whisper. He waited a long while, then, "We can call him Noah." He listened to the name leaving his mouth. 

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness, Page 314

Hai rose and brushed himself off ... and made a beeline toward his bike. Fingers shaking, he zipped up his UPS jacket, the same jacket he had found hanging from a nail in Noah's barn the day of his funeral, having ridden his bike through mud-frosted roads to get there. Because Hai was not invited to see the coffin. Because to Noah's family he never existed. He was locked inside the head of the cold boy in the pine box.

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness, page 319

The night he returned from New York ...  How could he have told her then that he had dropped out because Noah had overdosed, like nearly a dozen kids from his high school class, on a bad batch of fent-dope, and that a boy whose face she'd never seen had become the boy whose face he couldn't forget?

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness, page 190

He went over to where his jacket hung and ran a finger down its arm, his attention lingering on the stitching. The jacket once belonged to his friend Noah, a boy he met working tobacco when he was fourteen, the crop blooming verdant along the river that carved East Gladness in half. His real name wasn't Noah, but that's what Hai started calling him a week after he died. Because why shouldn't the dead receive new names? Weren't they transformed, after all, into a kind of otherhood? Like many boys throughout the county, the wide green valley swallowed Noah up and spat out a tombstone the height of a shoebox at Cedar Hill, high enough to hold his name and nothing else. It was one of those friendships that came on quick, like the heat on a July day, and long after midnight you could still feel its sticky film on your skin as you lie awake in your room, the fan blowing in what remained of the scorched hours, and realize for the first time in your peep of a life that no one is ever truly alone. It'd been two years since Noah's pine box was hammered shut, and nearly every day since, the UPS jacket draped over Hai's bony shoulders, sometimes even in bed on especially cold nights, the leather torn in places and the U nearly peeled off. But skin is skin, he told himself, even when it's not yours.

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness, pages 19-20

The Past Enters the Present

Larry Wolf, Considering Gustave (2025)

The artist goes for a walk

His dog comes along, perhaps there's a treat in a pocket

They're larger than life in this photograph

Made by the artist's brother, perhaps a staged moment of their everyday life

One hundred and forty years ago.

In this moment, my now

A grand exhibit in a grand museum

A patron of the arts who was himself an artist

Celebrated though we know little and speculate a lot

Who was this man who went for a walk on a cobblestone street?

A twenty-first century photographer frames this

A patron leaving the gallery

A guard leaning on the wall

The exit doors open

A pause before we continue with our everyday lives.

-- Larry Wolf, 10/23 July 2025

[Index of Poems]