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| Larry Wolf, John Perry Optics Lesson (1977) |
In 1977 I took a photography course with John Perry, a physicist at the University of Vermont. John is also a photographer. Here he explains how a lens works, drawing freehand, at the intersection of his worlds. I already knew that lenses bend light and flip the projected image. Nonetheless, I love a science lesson. Then and now.
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| Larry Wolf, Brain at Build Cafe (2023) |
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| Larry Wolf, Swapped Brain at Build Coffee (2024) |
Moving forward from the fresh insight that the camera, with a single sensor, is not like the old stereograph cameras with a separate frame for each lens. Enter the editor (me) to swap the two halves, effectively treating them as distinct frames.
Look at these with a stereoscope (Colleen Woolpert (navigate to Twinscope Stereograph Projects), London Stereoscopic Company).
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| Larry Wolf, Self Portrait with Stereoscope (2024) |
The first image doesn't want to align. The second does, it's what I experienced at the patio of Build Coffee, where I'm close to the wall on my left, filling more of the frame.
Like our brains, split down the middle, our two eyes with separate optic nerves feeding the visual brain which combines the seeing into one world with depth perception, this second image recreates the depth of the scene.
Finally this is making sense.
for your viewing pleasure
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| Larry Wolf, Stairs (swapped) (2024) |
(finishing the story from the other day).
Library of Congress - Digital Collections - Stereograph Cards
Eastman Museum - Classifications: Stereograph - Image Available
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| Larry Wolf, At the Edge (2024) |
What the f is happening here? The perforated graphic on the bus window has a sharp edge that is covering the right lens of my camera but I'm seeing the mesh mostly on the left side. Huh?
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| Larry Wolf, Looking Beyond the Edge (2024) |
And again here. Whatever it is, is consistent.
Let me try to noodle it out with some diagrams...
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| Larry Wolf, Dual Lens Schematic (2024) |
There is one "object" in this simplified world, with two arrows, one up and the other to the right. There is a pair of lenses on the camera, each projecting an image onto the sensor. The projected image is flipped by the lens, classic optics, with the arrows now pointing down and to the left. The right lens projects on the right side of the sensor; the left lena projects on the left side of the sensor. There is some vignetting at the edges and overlap between the images.
But. Looking at the display screen on the back of the camera, I see an image where up is up and left-right orientation is correct. I can read the text on the bank; passing cars create motion blur in the correct direction.
But.. the right side has become the left side, so the camera must be rotating the image 180 degrees. With just a single lens, this is the end of the story. With this dual lens, it's just the beginning.
With the mesh covering one lens (and a bit of the field of view of the second lens), what is seen by each lens becomes apparent. This is beginning to explain how my two-lens-single-image pictures look the way they do, something I notice when I'm making the photograph but isn't obvious to the viewer of the resulting image.
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| Larry Wolf, Stairs (2024) |
I'm closer to the stairs which appear on the left side than I am to those on the right; they just appear to be diverging differently in the image. If anything it looks like have bent the visual plane. Ah ha.
I've been using this lens for over a year and finally a corner case happened, in a way I noticed while making the photographs. It was clear the right lens was looking through the mesh... but seen on the left side.
A good reminder to pay attention to details, to be open to surprise and to puzzle through what might be happening.. or just enjoy the surprise!
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| Larry Wolf, Mirror Stage (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Mirror Stage (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Mirror Stage (2024) |
The protagonist of The Mirror Stage is Simon Fujiwara, an 11-year-old boy. He’s going through puberty, the process of deep emotional and physical confusion. Simon lives in a small fishing village ... [he] feel[s] suffocated and repressed. For Simon is hiding a terrible secret: Simon is gay and nobody knows it, not even himself. ...
The Mirror Stage is a play about a young artist who walks into a museum one day and sees a painting that changes his life forever. When I was 11 years old, I saw this painting, which is on the wall in front of me here. It’s called the Horizontal Stripe Painting, and it’s by Patrick Heron, and it was painted in 1959. ...
This painting was extremely significant for me for two reasons, because firstly, it made me realize when I saw it, that I wanted to become an artist, and secondly, that I was gay. ...
in 1995, IKEA bought the rights to actually copy the color code of the painting and put it on their range of soft furnishings, everything from ironing boards to bed covers. And I was actually able to buy those bed covers that were based on the painting as a teenager and literally dream in my favorite artwork. ...
a French philosopher, Jacques Lacan ... , wrote this paper, and in it he explains how human beings go through this process of looking for mirror images of themselves in other people and in objects and in the world around them. And that, during puberty, this becomes extremely heightened, that pubescent children look for mirror images—but sexual mirror images—of themselves in other people, but also in other objects. So, Patrick Heron, who made this painting, was very influenced by this notion of the mirror stage. He would even describe his paintings sometimes as being mirrors to the inner soul. And what’s interesting, or what inspired me as a teenager, is to see for the first time an abstract expressionist painting, an image in which the body has disappeared, and its just pure form and color, a sort of internal experience sort of made flesh ...
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Rough Cut 1977/2024 Watercolor (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Rough Cut 1977/2024, full sheet unfolded (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Rough Cut 1977/2024, Risograph Mini-Zine (2024) |
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| Pop Up - Bimbox, Issue #2, Summer 1990 |
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| Bimbox, Issue #2, Summer 1990 |
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| Bimbox, Issue #2, Summer 1990 |
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| Bimbox, Issue #2, Summer 1990 |
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| Peter Nadas - Self Portrait with Rolleiflex (1963) |
I was previously interested not in the moment of self-knowledge, not in my individuality, not in the peculiarity of my way of looking at things, but rather in the peculiarity that appears in the common, the individual formed in the perspective of the collective levels of consciousness. The individual version that appears in the monotony of the crowd. / Not the one-time thing, but the one-time thing that repeats and recurs, which the other person immediately recognizes as something of their own.
...
Their attention was not focused on objects, things and events, not on cameras, equipment or development techniques, but on images of pure intuition, which always wrote the light in their place or caused it to be written through them.
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| Larry Wolf, Twin Lens Cropped (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Twin Lens Cropped (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Twin Lens Cropped (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Twin Lens Cropped (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Twin Lens Cropped (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Two Portraits of Arthur Rimbaud at 17 by Etienne Carjat 1871 as seen through the pages in Wyatt Mason Rimbaud Complete 2002 (2024) |
Patti Smith reminded me that yesterday, 20 October (1854), was Arthur Rimbaud's birthday. She recited a poem, I think her own translation, transcribed by me, with apologies for any errors.
My Bohemia
Fists in torn pockets, I departed.My overcoat grew ideal too.I walked your night, oh muse,And dreamed, oh what glorious love.My only trousers had a hole.Little Tom Thumb,I dropped my dreaming rhymes,My lodging was the great Bear Inn.And in the sky my stars were rustling.I listened seated by the roadIn soft SeptemberWhere the dew was wine vigor on my face.And in weird shadows rhymingPlucked like lyres the laces of my martyred shoes,One foot against my heart.
I wear a button on my shoulder bag strap with the face of a man that was used as a mask. People ask: "Who is that?"
It's Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), a French poet and all around bad boy. He's been much loved by artists including David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992). In 1979, David created a mask from a photograph of Arthur and photographed friends wearing that mask at various New York landmarks and in personal spaces (at Coney Island, on the subway, at the piers, jerking off, shooting up, ...).
In 2018, David, then dead 26 years, was celebrated with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night), now welcomed into the art canon, a radical accepted in the mainstream. As a souvenir of the exhibition, they created a pin of the Rimbaud mask. There were additional exhibitions at PPOW Gallery and NYU Fales Library.
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| Larry Wolf, Enfants Terribles (2024) |
After years of questions and months of thinking about what I wanted to say, I made this accordion-fold zine.
Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891)
David Wojnarowicz (1954 - 1992)
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| Larry Wolf, Enfants Terribles - a side (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Enfants Terribles - b side (2024) |
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| David Wojnarowicz at ACT UP FDA demonstration Rockville, Maryland, October 11, 1988. Photo by Bill Dobbs |
I don't know when I first learned of David Wojnarowicz; it seems he's always been a part of my life.
Certainly by the 1990s, when he was one of the artists attacked for their upfront homosexuality. He aggressively, and successfully, fought back. Sometimes the reward was symbolic - a favorable court decision and a $1 payment (Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association, 745 F. Supp. 130 (S.D.N.Y. 1990)
Or perhaps in 1988, his jacket emblazoned with "IF I DIE OF AIDS - FORGET BURIAL - JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA"?
It could have been earlier, in the 1970s or 80s, when I, as a twenty-something, was finding photographers who inspired me (Duane Michals, Arthur Tress, Peter Hujar). I might have come across David and his work then. The earliest books I have weren't published until the 1990s; I already knew about him when they were acquired.
There's so much more I could (and will eventually say) about David. The David Wojnarowicz Foundation website is rich with information and images.
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| Photo: Etienne Carjat, Arthur Rimbaud (1871) |
Arthur's arrival in Paris in 1871 at 17 was a big deal among some of the established poets who paid for his train ticket to Paris. He was taken under the wing of Paul Verlaine (or perhaps Arthur took the lead in that relationship). During that first year, Arthur was photographed by Etienne Carjat.
My zine includes the beginning and ending of one of Arthur's many poems. This translation is by Wyatt Mason (2002).
My sad heart drools on deck,A heart splattered with chaw:A target for bowls of soup,My sad heart drools on deck:Soldiers jeer and guffaw.My sad heart drools on deck,A heart splattered with chaw!Ithyphallic and soldierly,
Their jeers have soiled me!Painted on the tillerIthyphallic and soldierly.Abracadabric seas,Cleanse my heart of this disease.Ithyphallic and soldierly,Their jeers have soiled me!When they've shot their wads,How will my stolen heart react?Bacchic fits and bacchic startsWhen they've shot their wads:I'll retch to see my heartTrampled by these clods.What will my stolen heart doWhen they've shot their wads?
May 1871
In 1978, Paris was covered with wheatpasted images of Arthur Rimbaud by the artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest, based on the Carjat photograph. David Wojnarowicz arrived in Paris that fall. David's journals from 1979 include sketches of Arthur, labeled as studies. It is certainly possible that David's Rimbaud in New York series was inspired by Pignon-Ernest's work.
I only recently learned of Pignon-Ernest's work from Benjamin Ivry's very gay positive biography of Arthur Rimbaud in a wonderfully named chapter, Hauntings: From 1892 to Today. I'm definitely haunted by Arthur.
"Returning to New York in 1979 after an extended stay with his sister in Paris, Wojnarowicz decided to visualize Rimbaud's autobiographical writings in terms of his own biography in the American metropolis. With access to copying equipment, he enlarged the cover image of the New Directions paperback edition of Rimbaud's Illuminations to create a life-size mask of the poet. The photo is used in 1979 to make the mask David Wojnarowicz would use in his Rimbaud in New York series.
... Wojnarowicz staged photographs of several friends--Brian Butterick, Jean-Pierre Delage, and John Hall--wearing the mask in places important to his own story: the subway, Times Square and the x-rated theaters around Forty-Second Street, Coney Island, all-night diners, the Hudson River piers, and the loading docks in the Meatpacking District. Several of these enigmatic images appeared in alternative publications at the time ..."
The project was featured in the Soho Weekly News in June of 1980.
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| David Wojnarowicz, Rimbaud in New York (Soho Weekly News, Vol 7, No 38, June 18-24, 1980) in Dear Jean Pierre, Primary Information (2023) |
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| Larry Wolf, Enfants Terribles - front and back cover (2024) |
The title page of the zine uses the ACT UP Protest Font created by Be Oakley of GenderFail. They make fonts from protest signs, re-animating the original protest in a form that can be used in new work, as here with this zine.
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| GenderFail, ACT UP Protest Font - Upper Case |
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| GenderFail, ACT UP Protest Font - lower case |
David Wojnarowicz, Rimbaud in New York 1978-1979 (PPP Editions, 2004) Worldcat
David Wojnarowicz, In the Shadow of the American Dream, The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz (Grove Press, 1999) Worldcat
Cynthia Carr, Fire in the Belly, the life and times of David Wojnarowicz (Bloomsberry, 2012/2013) Worldcat
David Breslin and David W. Kiehl, David Wojnarowicz - History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018) Worldcat
Benjamin Ivry, Arthur Rimbaud (Absolute Press, 1998) Worldcat
Wyatt Mason, Arthur Rimbaud - Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library/Penguin Random House, 2002) Worldcat
