Photography

Over the past months I’ve ordered up fancy prints of old snapshots of Warhol, Corso,and Ginsberg, and am bringing a different eye, for me, to black-and-white photography. I had thought Photography in Germany and Austria, 1900-1938 at the Neue Galerie would feature Nazis or creepy porn. Nope. The petit musee which brought New York Klimt and Schiele chose as its photographers the usual: Sanders and Moholy-Nagy and Jacobi and Feininger. Not even a telephoto of Hitler by Leni Riefenstahl. Ah jeez and I so prefer photos to forms.
Photography should be true as a court deposition and dry as scientific theory. Henry Fielding observed that the eyes melt indistinguishably at the sights of a well-powdered buttock and a well-cooked and nicely seasoned chop. Pornography evokes a creepy hunger. It may all be good, as D.H. Lawrence might say; but then Lawrence had that creepy German wife. The great photography show currently in NYC is Diane Arbus at the Met. I’ve published Arbus photos in Unmuzzled OX and contributed a mite to the original San Francisco show. Arbus was Sylvia Plath with a camera.