Mario Cattaneo

The Photography of Mario Cattaneo

In the period between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the economic resurgence of the 1960s, Italy experienced enormous social and political transformations. Italian photographers responded to this post-war era by creating images that examined the realities of everyday life. These images, although seen as neo-realist or humanist in the tenor of social documentary photography, actually contained a wider range of motivations and styles.

Photojournalism thrived with the rapid growth of illustrated weekly magazines. At the same time, amateur photographic organizations sought to promote photography as a form of art. These photographers produced images of urban street life in the industrial cities of northern Italy. Southern Italy also became a primary source for the camera. While the site of the greatest post-war economic problems, southern Italy was a place of national unity, where local customs persevered amid Italy’s rapid modernization.

Born at Milan on the twenty-eighth of January in 1916, Mario Cattaneo was a significant but little-known Italian photographer who found the world of photographic clubs to be a place for his artistry and a framework for discussion and debate. Within those clubs, Cattaneo studied the technical aspects of photography,the works of established international photographers, and the theoretical and aesthetic concepts of the medium. The influences of French photographers Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson can be seen in Cattaneo’s attention to lighting and photo compositions.

Cattaneo’s first photographs, the series of images known as “La Fera del Sinigaglia”, were taken at Milan’s traditional flea market in the commune of Sinigaglia. The images he captured included portraits, articles for sale, and moments of spontaneous human interactions, often between buyers and sellers. Started in 1950, Cattaneo’s “Alleys” series explored the vibrant, and sometimes violent, everyday life found in Naples’s alleyways and also captured the hidden beauty and human stories found among the city’s narrow passages. A collection of these Naples images was later published in 1992 by Electra under the title “Vicoli”.

After his return to Milan, Mario Cattaneo became interested in the leisure and entertainment of Milanese youth during the economic boom of the post-World War II era. His photographs were taken at amusement parks, dance halls, and Sunday excursions at the Idroscalo, a city park with artificial lake that offered boating and swimming events as well as open-air concerts, bars and nightclubs. The images of Cattaneo’s three series “Luna Park”, “Una Domenica all’Idroscalo (A Sunday at the Idroscalo)” and “Giovanni al Juke Box” present the hope and carefree spirit of the young Milanese generation in newly adopted social activities and imported fashions.

Cattaneo continued working in Milan from 1964 to 1977 during which time he created two more series: the 1964-1965 “Caravaggio” and the 1973-1977 “Pop Festival”. Alongside his social and cultural presentations of Italy, Cattaneo produced travel images shot during his explorations of diverse cultures, among which were several trips to India.

In 1991, the Federazione Italiana Associazioni Fotografiche (FIAF), an Italian photography confederation that supported amateur groups, named Mario Cattaneo “Author of the Year” and dedicated a traveling exhibition to his work. He received awards and recognition in Italy and overseas, including first prize in the competition “Racconto e Reportage Fotografico (Storytelling and Photographic Reportage)” held in Fermo. In 1996, “La Fera del Sinigaglia”, with editing by W. Tucci Caselli, was published by the Fondazione E. Monti.

Mario Cataneo died in 2004 on the last of his many journeys to India. Following a donation from his heirs in 2006, the Mario Cattaneo collection has been owned by the Fondazione Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea in the Italian commune of Cinisello Balsamo. The photographic collection comprises over one hundred-ninety thousand film negatives, slides, prints, and contact sheets. This extensive collection attests to Cattaneo’s work between 1950 and 2004 as well as his ability to capture the beauty inherent in humanity, even within the simplest single shot.

Notes: Images of the Mario Cattaneo Collection of the Fondazione Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea can be found online at: https://www.mufocosearch.org/autori/AUF-10090-0000020?pageCurrent=1#paginationTop

The Italian photographic website The Mammoth Reflex has a short article on the work of Mario Cattaneo with several images at: https://www.themammothreflex.com/grandi-fotografi/2020/07/14/mario-cattaneo-mostra-cielo-aperto-cinisello-balsamo/

Top Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Osteria”, 1970, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Second Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Giovanni”, Juke box Series, 1960-1962, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Third Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Napoli”, 1954, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Bottom Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Napoli”, 1954, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Jubi Arriola-Headley: “An Oracle Done Hiding At Last”

Photographers Unknown, An Oracle Done Hiding At Last

Imagine now how your fingertips throb (1)
in silence, wild, (2) an oracle done hiding at last,
all the mystery made, (3) all the grave markers,
all the crude headstones – water-lost, (4) I think
by now the river must be thick (5) – red is the operative
word. (6) What a relief it would be to scream yourself hoarse, (7)
let the empty stage receive the light, (8) linger only with
healthy ideas. Salty ones. (9) God give us a long winter
and quiet music and patient mouths. (10) (We talk about God
because we want to speak in metaphors, (11)
como un demonio sin freno, (12) between hot dog stands
and hallelujahs.) (13) Change our fates, shoot down
the plagues, beginning with time, the children sing to you. (14)
Ha. (15) You have to face the underside of everything
you’ve loved; (16) there will be no more sons. (17)

1. Olga Broumas, (…imagine now/how your fingertips throb,,,)
2. Cecilia Vicuña, “Jungle Kill”
3. Carl Phillips, “Unbridled”
4. Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy for the Native Guards”
5. Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy” (I think by now the river must be thick)
6. Linda Dove, “Fear is a Hummingbird Drunk on Taillight”
7. Raymond McDaniel, “No, You Shut Up”
8. Jon Davis, “Gratitude”
9. Alain Border, “Sleep Log”
10. Adam Zagajewski, “A Flame”
11. Jericho Brown, “To Be Seen”
12. cecilia Vicuña, “Horticultura”
13. Matthew Olzmann, “My Invisible Horse and the Speed of Human Decency”
14. Arthur Rimbaud, “To A Reason”
15. Jubi Arriola-Headley
16. Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems” (Poem V)
17. Chelsea Dingman, “Elegy for Empty Rooms”

Jubi Arriola-Headley, Cento, original kink, 2020, Sibling Rivalry Press

Born in Boston, Jubi Arriola-Headley is a Black queer first-generation American poet and author whose work explores the issues of joy, manhood, and vulnerability. In his work, vulnerability is the key to preserving one’s own authenticity and humanity. With the hope that you will be loved regardless, one has to take the risk of being known for who you really are.

The son of Barbadian parents, Jubi Arriola-Headley is a descendent of a long line of Caribbean story tellers. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Miami and is a 2018 PEN American Emerging Voices Fellow. Arriola-Headley’s work explores the themes of masculinity, vulnerability, joy, rage and tenderness. His poems have been published with Southern Humanities Review, Nimrod, The Nervous Breakdown, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, among others.

Currently, Arriola-Headley is the author of two collections of poetry, the first being “original kink” published in 2020 by the Sibling Rivalry Press in Arkansas. This volume of poems, written in casual speech rhythm, relentlessly probes the issues of family dynamics, manliness, injustice, and cruelty, both self-inflicted and imposed. The “original kink” collection was the recipient of the 2021 Housatonic Book Award for Poetry presented by Western Connecticut State University.

Jubi Arriola-Headley’s second volume of poetry “Bound” was released in February of 2024 by Persea Books, a New York press co-founded by Michael and Karen Braziller. A collection of lyrical poems in varied poetic format, “Bound” boldly examines conventional notions of race, sexuality, gender and pleasure in an attempt to create a world where Black and queer individuals can live without trauma. Plotting a new path to life, Arriola-Headley points out what it means to be human and how we can find freedom and liberation in the very spaces we thought would destroy us.

Arriola-Headley is currently working on a memoir in an essay format. An essay from this work, entitled “Pissant”, explored his teenage years in 1980s Boston, the racism he faced, his queer desires, and the hyper-masculinity of his immigrant father. This excerpt won the first place 2023 Prize for Creative Nonfiction presented by Florida’s First Pages organization, a non-profit that recognizes and encourages emerging writers.

Jubi Arriola-Headley currently lives with his husband on ancestral Tequesta, Miccosukee, and Seminole lands in South Florida. His website, which contains selected poems, interviews and videos, is located at: https://www.justjubi.com

Notes: A video is available online at the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation site on YouTube showing Jubi Arriola-Headley reciting his poem “Superhero Origin Story (S. O. S.)”.

An October 2020 interview between Jubi Arriola-Headley and PEN America’s Jenn Dees and Michelle Franke can be located at the Pen America site: https://pen.org/the-pen-ten-jubi-arriola-headley/

A 2024 audio interview between Poetry Foundation’s Ajanaé Dawkins and Brittany Rogers and poet Jubi Arriola-Headley can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/1530526/jubi-arriola-headley-vs-masculinity?query=jubi%20a

Robert Giard

The Portrait Photography of Robert Giard

Born at Hartford, Connecticut in July of 1939, Robert Giard was an American portrait, figurative and landscape photographer. He is best known for his black and white, unadorned portraits of American poets and authors, a two decade-long series that specifically focused on gay and lesbian writers.

Robert Giard received his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University where he majored in English Literature. He earned his Master of Arts in Comparative Literature at Boston University. After graduating, Giard taught at the private New Lincoln School in Manhattan, New York. In 1972, he began, entirely self-taught, to photograph portraits of friends, nude figurative works, and the landscapes of the South Fork region of Staten Island. Giard’s early landscapes were mainly shot in late autumn to the beginning of spring when many of the homes were empty for the season. Included in these landscapes are photographs taken at The Creeks, artist Alfonso Ossario’s estate.

In 1974, Giard and his life partner, early childhood educator Jonathan Silin, settled in the popular resort hamlet of Amagansett on the south shore of Long Island, where they remained for nearly thirty years until Giard’s death. In 1985, Giard attended a performance at New York City’s The Public Theater of playwright and gay rights activist Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” which dealt with the AIDS crisis in the gay community. Sensing the enormity of the situation, he decided to use his photography to record the experiences, history and culture of the queer community. Combining his interests in literature and gay issues, Giard began documenting through portraits both the significant and new literary figures on the scene.

Robert Giard’s portraits included such notable figures as poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, poet and essayist Adrienne Cecile Rich, playwright Edward Albee III, poet and performance artist Assotto Saint, and novelist Michael Cunningham, a later literary Pulitzer Prize winner. A selection of the more than five hundred portraits Giard had amassed at the time were published in 1997 as an anthology entitled “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers” by MIT Press. This collection served as the companion volume to the New York Public Library’s 1998 exhibition of the same name.

In his later years, Giard began working on a portrait documentation of the three hundred twenty-one grant recipients of the Thanks Be To Grandmother Winifred Foundation, which supported until 2001 projects by women fifty-four years or older that benefitted other mature women. These grants supported research and artistic projects as well as those with social, economic or medical problems. Before his death, Giard had successfully photographed two hundred and forty-one of the women grantees. He traveled extensively across the country by train, bus or plane and kept a diary of his travels and his visits with the diverse group of women he met.

While traveling to a portrait session in Chicago, Robert Giard passed away on the sixteenth of July in 2002 at the age of sixty-two. His published version of “Particular Voices” won the 1997 Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Photography/Art Book. A recipient of many awards and grants, Giard had a long and distinguished solo and group exhibition career in the United States. His work is in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, and the Library of Congress. Giard’s complete archive is housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in its American Collection.

The Robert Giard Foundation was formed in 2002 to preserve his photographic legacy, promote his work for educational purposes and encourage young photographers. The annual Robert Giard Fellowship is a ten-thousand dollar grant given to visual artists whose work addresses gender, sexuality and issues of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity.

In 2005, Crones’ Cradle Conserve Press published “The Grandmother Winifred Journals” 1996-2002” which contains all Giard’s images of the women grantees plus his diary entries that documented each session.

Notes: Although the Robert Giard Foundation site has not been updated since 2022, the Robert Giard Grant Cycle is still active. The pertinent addresses are: https://robertgiardfoundation.org and https://www.queer-art.org/giard-grant

The Lambda Literary Foundation has a biographical article on Robert Giard on the Gale Literature Resource Center site. It can be accessed through your library system’s card: https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA92049131&sid=sitemap&v=2.1&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E9af9193c&aty=open-web-entry

Top Insert Image: Toba Tucker, “Robert Giard”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Portrait of the Photographer”, (Self-Portrait), 1982, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm, Estate of Robert Giard

Bottom Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Newton McMahon”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.6 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

George Platt Lynes: “José Martinez”

George Platt Lynes, “José ‘Pete’ Martinez”, 1937, Photo Shoot at Lynes’s Studio, Vintage Silver Prints, Private Collections

Born in Mexico in March of 1913, José Antonio Martinez-Berlanga was a ballet dancer who in the early 1940s danced with both the American Ballet Caravan and the Ballet Society, precursor ensembles of the New York City Ballet.

José Martinez at a very young age moved with his family to Houston, Texas. After graduating high school, he relocated to New York City where he studied at the School of American Ballet founded in 1934 by Lincoln Kirstein, Edward Warburg and George Balanchine. Martinez eventually gained a full scholarship and, upon graduation, was invited to join The Ballet Caravan, a touring company founded by Lincoln Kirstein to provide off-season employment to American ballet dancers. Martinez gradually became involved with the group’s creative process and provided ideas and librettos for ballets.

Martinez eventually began an intimate relationship with Lincoln Kirstein; they lived together in a Greenwich Village townhouse at St. Luke’s Place. After Kirstein married graphic artist Fidelma Cadmus, the younger sister of artist Paul Cadmus, Fidelma moved into the apartment for the first year of the marriage. This triangular romantic relationship was similar to that of their friends, Paul Cadmus, Jared French and his wife Margaret Hoening.

José Martinez performed with the Ballet Caravan in the 1941 “Pastorela”, a one-act ballet choreographed by Lew Christensen and dancer José Fernandez, that toured Latin America with great reviews. The work included music by Paul Bowles and traditional songs orchestrated by Blas Galindo with words by Rafael Alvarez. Martinez tried in 1942 to enlist in the Army but was denied. He moved to Haverford, Pennsylvania and began work at a Jewish refugee hostel where writer Christopher Isherwood, whom he had met through Kirstein in 1939, was already employed. From Isherwood’s diaries, it is known that their relationship, except for one sexual encounter in August of 1942, was platonic.

José Martinez and Christopher Isherwood traveled together several times to New York City to visit the Fidelma and Lincoln Kirstein. They both left Haverford in September of 1942 and went their separate ways. Their friendship, however, continued and they met several times in California and New York after the war years. Called up for service during the Second World War, Martinez was trained at Norfolk, Virginia, and served in the United State Army in northern France until 1945.

As a member of the Ballet Society, Martinez toured the United States with visits in both large and smaller cities. The Society’s repertoire was very different from those trained by Sergei Diaghilev, who founded the Ballets Russes. Martinez danced in the original cast of George Balanchine’s “Four Temperaments” in which he performed the first Theme with Beatrice Tompkins in the 1946 performance tour. He also originated and danced the role of the minister in dancer and choreographer William Dollar’s 1947 “Highland Fling”.

In late 1947, José Martinez suffered a knee injury which forced an end to his performances. Hesitant about the next part of his life, he drifted for a year before beginning life as a dance teacher in Norfolk, Virginia. Over the next two decades, Martinez founded dance studios in Ohio and California where he continued to teach ballet until his retirement in the mid-1960s. José Martinez-Berlanga died at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California on the twenty-fourth of June in 1997 at the age of eight-four.

Notes: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and his wife Margaret Hoening would spend the summers from the late 1930s to the early 1950s on Fire Island where they painted and took photographs. This collaborative artistic endeavor became known as the PaJaMa collective, taken from the first two letters of their names. Artist George Tooker would later join the collective during the period of 1944 to 1949 when he was in a relationship with Paul Cadmus.

Many friends would often visit the group on Fire Island, among whom were ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, artist Bernard Perlin and photographer George Platt Lynes. Lynes became acquainted with José Martinez through this group of friends and would also photograph him. Although Martinez appeared in many of the pre-war photographs, Lynes’s studio portraits of Martinez wearing the straw hat are the best known.

The Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society has an article entitled “The Fire Island Muses of George Platt Lynes & the PaJaMa Collective” by Brian Ferrari on its site located at: https://www.pineshistory.org/the-archives/fire-island-muses

Top Insert Image: William Caskey, “José Martinez”, circa 1935-1955, Vintage Print

Second and Bottom Image: Photographers Unknown, “José Martinez”, circa 1935-1955, Vintage Prints, Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society

Peter Hujar

The Photography of Peter Hujar

Born in Trenton, New Jersey in October of 1934, Peter Hujar was an American photographer known for his black and white portraits. Only marginally known during his lifetime, he has since been recognized as one of the major American photographers in the late twentieth-century.

Peter Hujar never met his father, who abandoned his mother Rose Murphy during her pregnancy. He was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents in the rural landscape of Ewing Township. Hujar remained with his grandparents until his grandmother’s death in 1946. After which, Hujar lived with his mother and her second husband in New York City; however, the household situation was difficult. He left the home in 1950 at the age of sixteen to live independently.

In 1953, Hujar entered Manhattan’s School of Industrial Design, later named the High School of Art and Design, where he expressed an interest in photography. Encouraged by his teacher, poet Daisy Aldan, Hujar became a photographic apprentice at a commercial studio where he mastered the technical processes of photography. Four years later, his photographic work had reached museum quality. In 1958, Hujar was able to accompany realist painter and watercolorist Joseph Raffael on study trip to Italy.

Having been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, Peter Hujar returned to Italy in 1963, this time with painter and sculptor Paul Thek, to study and photograph the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily. These images would later be featured in Hujar’s 1975 “Portraits in Life and Death” published with a written introduction by writer and critic Susan Sontag. Upon his return to New York City in 1964, Hujar became the chief assistant to commercial photographer Harold Krieger, widely known for his innovative advertising work and celebrity portraits.

In the mid-1960s, Hujar met Andy Warhol and posed for four of Warhol’s short, silent black and white film portraits, the “Screen Shots” series. Four hundred and seventy-two of these three-minute films depicting New York’s cultural figures are known to have survived. In 1967, Hujar was selected as one of the photographers in a master class led by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. The quality of Hujar’s classwork led to assignments from Harper’s Bazaar and other publications; through this class, he met photographers Diane Arbus and Alexey Brodovitch.

In 1967, Peter Hujar made the decision, at great financial sacrifice, to leave the commercial world and pursue his own photography that would reflect his true personal identity. Hujar and his lover at that time, political activist Jim Fouratt, witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York’s West Village. An influential artist and activist of the gay liberation movement, Hujar, although not actively involved with the Gay Liberation Front, shot the group photo that was used on many of its posters. In 1973, he settled into a loft above the East Village’s Eden Theater on Second Avenue where he resided for the rest of his life.

Throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Hujar traveled in the art world of lower Manhattan shooting portraits of noted actors and writers including William Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz, drag queen actor Divine, Susan Sontag, and Rolling Stone writer Vince Aletti. He visited and shot photos at the area’s bars and also the abandoned West Side piers on the Hudson River, a gathering spot for artists and the gay community. In early 1981, Hujar met filmmaker and artist David Wojnarowicz who had become one of the prolific members of the avant-garde artists who used mixed media, graffiti and street art. After a brief period as Hujar’s lover, Wojnarowicz became his protégé and remained closely linked to him for the remainder of Hujar’s life.

Peter Hujar was a consummate technician and master of the darkroom who produce images that, though stripped of excess, were highly emotional. His photography covered a wide range of subjects, including abandoned and ruined buildings, cityscapes, animals, portraits, still life, and nudes. Due to his connection with the sitter, Hujar excelled in portrait work and was able to achieve an intimate and honest pose for the camera that caught his sitter’s idiosyncrasies and inner feelings. He never used props in his portraits and focused entirely on the sitter as opposed to the backdrop of the shot.

Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS in January of 1987. Ten months later at the age of fifty-three, he died at New York’s Cabrini Medical Center on the twenty-fifth of November. Hujar’s funeral was held at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village; he was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In his lifetime, Hujar had few substantial solo exhibitions and attracted little notice by the press. His only major show in his lifetime was a 1986 exhibition of seventy photographs curated by Sur Rodney Sur of New York’s Gracie Mansion Gallery.

Peter Hujar willed his entire artistic estate to novelist and historian Stephen Koch, a longtime friend. Since 1987, Koch has worked to place Hujar’s work in its rightful position in twentieth-century art. Photography curator Joel Smith assembled a collection of one hundred and sixty-four images from Peter Hujar’s work for a 2018 retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. Hujar’s work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and is housed in such public collection as the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Notes: All images, unless noted, are from the Peter Hujar Archive which is located at: https://peterhujararchive.com

An exhibition of Paul Hujar’s work is currently being held at the Ukrainian Museum, 222 East 6th Street, New York City until the 1st of September, 2024. Article: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/peter-hujar-rialto-ukrainian-museum-2490813

An excellent 2018 article by the New Yorker’s longtime art critic Peter Schjeldahl, entitled “The Bohemian Rhapsody of Peter Hujar”, can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-bohemian-rhapsody-of-peter-hujar

New York’s Pace Gallery has an online conversation moderated by the gallery’s curatorial director Oliver Shultz, entitled “Cruising Utopia”, that coincided with its 2020 exhibition of Hujar’s intimate photographs of queer culture: https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/conversation-on-peter-hujar-video/

Top Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Self Portrait Jumping (1)”, 1974, Gelatin Silver Print, 63.2 x 58.1 cm, Fraenkel Gallery

Second Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Christopher Street Pier #3”, 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Third Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “The Shareef Twins”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Fourth Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Gary Schneider in Contortion #1”, 1979, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed”, 1973, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver: “Take Me to the Ocean Where My Heart Once Drowned”

Photographers Unknown, Take Me to the Ocean Where My Heart Once Drowned

take me outside to the place we both knew so well
when i’d hold your hand while walking barefoot
even though the soil was littered with bindis
but i preferred the earth to know who i was
from the taste of my blood and the way it filled with grains of sand
than to have to speak my name in a language it could never understand
with a voice i was still discovering

take me to the mountain we would go to sit
and watch the stars fall past the edge of the earth
like they were always destined to do
let me think of the people i used to know when i was small
and remember the things i forgot about them
the pieces of gold that captured my heart into loving them
and the ways they hurt me that saw me quickly let them go

take me to the ocean where my heart once drowned
as people in barely-there swimsuits watched me stand
in waves that broke on the shoreline
as my bones shattered beneath the forceful hands of the sun
and all its reasons for keeping the world alive in a chorus of separate songs
let me dance in the sand one more time
while you take photographs of the footprints i leave behind
so i can remember their rhythm long after i’ve left them

take me to the tree outside the home where i grew up
and i’ll carve my name into its bark
beside the one i made at nine years old
i’ll climb its branches and stretch my arms out so
i’m taller than the leaves
and higher than the light that bleeds over them
i’ll feel the greatness of everything you’ve given me
the power of all i am
and i’ll know this to be a journey of infinite steps
that encase golden prayers in the face of a western wind
trusting i’ll be going home and knowing i’ll never be coming back

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver, the light that bleeds, more than these bones, 2023, Magabala Books, Broome, Australia

A descendant of the Bardi Jawi people of the Kimberley region of north-Western Australia, Bebe Backhouse-Oliver is a poet, writer, illustrator and leader of diverse community projects. His work embraces issues of love, loss, identity, sense of country, and both Aboriginal and gay existence. Oliver has for many years maintained his home in Naarm, the traditional Central Kulin Nation name for the specific area now known as Greater Melbourne.

In addition to studies in classical piano and composition, Bebe Oliver began writing at an early age,. His initial work was creative stories and, later, poetry and memoir-based journal-format stories. These written works served as an outlet for all the challenges he experienced as a young Aboriginal boy with a suppressed identity. Oliver’s first published work was a 2018 story he submitted for entry in author Anita Heiss’s biographical anthology entitled “Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia”.

Oliver relocated to Melbourne to study at the Victorian College of the Arts. After returning from a period of travel overseas, he became established as a producer and director of theater, festivals, and public art projects across Australia, New Zealand, France and Belgium. A leading designer of projects for diverse communities, Oliver is a co-chairperson of Melbourne’s biannual Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival; he is also a Board Director of the publishing house Magabala Books. Through his senior leadership positions, Oliver has fostered many opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists to showcase their work, thus allowing Traditional Culture to publicly thrive.

In March of 2023, Magabala Books published “More Than These Bones”, Oliver’s debut collection of poems that details his journal through both heartbreak and self-discovery. Each poem is set in a different location and, often accompanied by a photograph or drawing, adds another dimension to his life story. Oliver’s writing is also featured in the anthology “Nangamay Mana Djurali”, a collection of voices from the Australian black queer community. Edited by Alison Whittaker and Steven Lindsay Ross, the anthology shows the diverse perspectives of life experienced by Aboriginal queer people in contemporary Australia.

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver’s website is located at: https://www.bebeoliver.com

Notes Magabala Books is Australia’s leading Indigenous publisher. Committed to nurturing the talent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytellers, the publishing house offers awards, creative grants and scholarships. Magabala Books also sponsors cultural projects including audio-visual installations, recordings of elders’ stories, and developing the book illustration skills of Kimberley Aboriginal artists. The Magabala Books website is located at: https://magabala.com.au

“Tadra / Buar (To Dream)”, a poem by Bebe Oliver and Fiji poet Daniel Sipeli, can be found, with a video recitation by Oliver, at the Red Room Poetry website: https://redroompoetry.org/poets/bebe-backhouse/tadra-buar-dream/

Patrick Anderson: “With a Harsher Cry Birds Bury My Stolen Heart”

Photographers Unknown, My Bird-Wrung Youth

My bird-wrung youth began with the quick naked
voice in the morning, the crooked calling,
and closed in the quiet wave of the falling
wing, dropping down like an eyelid–
O syringing liquid
song on the bough of flight and at night, light falling,
the nested
kiss of the breasted

ones floating out to sleep in a cup of colours:
wren’s flit and dimple, the shadowy wing of the curlew
spent between stone and fern in the hollow,
the barn-raftered swallow and far at sea the rider
gull on the billow
all night, all night kept sleep till steeply
the pillow
threw morning cockcrow

up in a column of straw and blood. In childhood
days opened like that, whistled and winked away,
but now with a harsher cry birds bury
my stolen heart deep in the wild orchard,
and whether they prettily
play with the plucked bud here or marry
a cloud, I
am lost, am emptied

between two sizes of success. For, clocking
past ceiling and dream sailing, they drop down
to pick apart in a nimble and needed rain
my limbs in love with longing, yet till I long
for my twin in the sun
they rise, they almost form, to be born
with a song
in a seventh heaven!

And I alone in the ambivalence
of April’s green and evil see them still
colonizing the intricately small
or flashing off into a wishing distance–
their nearer syllables
peck through the webs of every loosening sense
and in their tall
flight’s my betrayal.

Patrick Anderson, My Bird-Wrung Youth

Born in the village of Ashtead, Surrey, in August of 1915, Patrick John MacAllister Anderson was an English-born Canadian poet, journalist, travel writer and autobiographer. Influenced by the works of Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, his poetic work, which became a major force in shaping Canadian poetry, was distinctive for its rapid juxtaposition of contrasting images.

Patrick Anderson was educated at the University of Oxford where he earned both his Bachelor and Master of Arts. In 1938 with a Commonwealth Fellowship, he studied at New York’s Columbia University. While in New York, Anderson met Marguerite ‘Peggy’ Doernbach, who became his wife; together they relocated to Montreal in September of 1940. Anderson taught at Montreal’s Selwyn House School, an English-language independent boys’ school, from 1940 to 1946. After receiving his professorship, he taught at McGill University in Montreal between 1948 and 1950.

Anderson quickly became part of Montreal’s artistic life and, due to his wife’s interest, became a member of the Labor-Progressive Party. In March of 1942 he, along with poets Francis Reginald Scott, Abraham Moses Klein, and Patricia Kathleen Page, founded Montreal’s literary magazine, “Preview”, a socially and politically committed literary journal inspired by the work of the 1930s English poets. In 1943, critic John Sutherland, owner of the rival magazine “First Statement”, published a review of Anderson’s poetry that suggested homoerotic themes in the writing. Anderson, married at that time to Doernbach, threatened to sue, an action which resulted in Sutherland printing a retraction.

Patrick Anderson was still an influential editor at the “Preview” during its merger with Sutherland’s “First Statement” in 1946. However, he resigned in 1948 when Sutherland viciously attacked poet F. R. Scott’s 1946 collection “Poems”. Anderson had privately published in England two collections of his juvenile poetry: the 1929 “Poems” and the 1932 “On This Side of Nothing”. In 1945, John Sutherland’s First Statement Press published Anderson’s first Canadian chapbook of poems “A Tent for April”. The poems in this collection contain lush, often metaphysical imagery that contained an undertone of sublime sexuality. Anderson’s 1946 “The White Centre” continued the style and themes of his previous volume. The speaker, now in adulthood, looks back on his childhood and also ponders what it means to be Canadian, particularly in a time of war.

During the post-war years, Anderson returned occasionally to England and continued his connections with several of its literary circles. During his professorship at McGill University’s Dawson College, Anderson’s marriage finally disintegrated and he decided to accept a lectureship at the University of Malaya. Anderson’s poetic account of those years, the 1953 biographical “The Colour as Naked”, opened with poems of his British childhood and youth, continued through his life in Quebec, Malaysia and New York, and ended with the poem “Leaving Canada”, a farewell to his home for a decade.

Patrick Anderson returned to his home country of England where he remained for the rest of his life, except for a few guest lectures in Canada during the 1970s. He worked as a teacher and entered into a same-sex relationship with Orlando Gearing. During the period between 1955 and 1972, Anderson published five works of prose of which parts of three dealt with his experiences in Canada: the 1955 “Snake Wine: A Singapore Experience”, the 1957 “Search Me, Autobiography-The Black Country, Canada, and Spain”, and “The Character Ball: Chapters of Autobiography” published in 1963.

Literary context, eccentric character and exotic experience were central concerns in Anderson’s prose works. The overtly homosexual experience became an important focus in his later poetry. This interest was further manifested in Anderson’s editing, a collaboration with Alistair Sutherland, of the 1961 “Eros: An Anthology of Male Friendship”, a collection of excerpts from novels, journals, poems and essays on the friendship between men that is sexual in some way. This volume was published by New York’s Arno Press as part of a series entitled “Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature”.

In 1964 and 1969, Patrick Anderson published two travel accounts, “The Smile of Apollo: A Literary Companion to Greek Travel” and “Over the Alps: Reflections on Travel and Travel Writing”, which covered the grand tours of Scottish biographer James Boswell, Lord Byron and author William Beckford. Anderson continued to write poetry even as he wrote his prose and travel works. In 1976, he published “A Visiting Distance—Poems; New Revised and Selected”. Anderson’s final volume of poetry and last published work was the 1977 “Return to Canada: Selected Poems”.

Patrick Anderson died in March of 1979 at the age of sixty-three in the civil parish of Halstead, Essex, England. Despite his published memoirs and travel writing, he treated his sexual identity as a private matter and declined the inclusion of his work in a 1972 anthology of gay- male literature.

Notes: There was some discrepancy about Patrick Anderson’s same-sex partner in the researched articles; the name of Alistair Sutherland was mentioned in several. For this posting, I am referencing Canadian writer Blaine Marchand’s August 2015 article of an interview with Patricia Kathleen Page, a close early friend of Anderson and a co-founder of the 1942 “Preview” literary journal. She stated in 1976 that Patrick eventually left Doernbach and lived for the rest of his life with Orlando Gearing. The Blaine Marchand article for Plentide Magazine is located at: https://plenitudemagazine.ca/query-project-blaine-marchand/

All twenty-three issues of the “Preview” literary journal from 1942 to 1945 are available to read online or as downloads at the Canadian Modernist Magazines Project’s website at: https://www.modernistmags.ca/mags/preview/

William Gedney

The Photography of William Gedney

Born at Greenville, New York in October of 1932, William Gale Gedney was an American documentary and street photographer. Intensely dedicated to his work, he was interested in street and night photography, portraiture, creative composition, and the study of human nature. Gedney’s work took him across the United States several times and overseas to England, India, Ireland, France, and the Netherlands.

William Gedney spent his early years in upstate New York. At the age of nineteen, he relocated to New York City and attended Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute where he became interested in photography. Gedney graduated in 1955 with a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design. He worked for two years at the global mass-media company Condé Nast Publications before deciding to pursue a freelance career. After several years of freelance work and part-time employment, Gedney was hired in 1961 for the graphic department of Time, Inc. where he primarily did photographic layouts.

With the money he saved, Gedney traveled in 1964 to Kentucky and ended his journey at a coal-mining town in Perry County. For a period of two weeks, he stayed at the Leatherwood home of Willie and Vivian Cornett and their twelve children. The family was struggling due to Willie Cornett having just recently lost his job at the mines. Gedney photographed the daily activities of the family members during this stay and a later one in 1972. The Corbett Family series eventually contained nine hundred twenty-one images in total. For the following twelve years, Gedney remained in touch with the family and exchanged letters.

In 1966, William Gedney was recommended by photojournalist Walker Evans for a one-year fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Through this fellowship, Gedney settled in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco where he began photographing its residents and drifters who passed through the neighborhood. Between October 1966 and January 1967, Gedney shot twenty-one hundred 35 mm photographs that chronicled San Fransisco culture. Upon his return to New York, Gedney organized a maquette for a photography book of his stay in San Francisco; however the book was not published in his lifetime.

In 1968, John Szarkowski, photography director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, curated Gedney’s only solo exhibition in his lifetime, a MOMA show that presented twenty-two images of the Kentucky series and twenty-one of the San Francisco series. Shortly after the exhibition, Gedney was offered teaching positions for photography at the Pratt Institute and Manhattan’s Cooper Union; he would remain a member of both faculties for the rest of his working life.

In 1969, William Gedney received a two-year Fulbright Fellowship for photography in India. His photographs of India were taken over two extensive stays during this fellowship and during a later trip in 1972. On his initial visit, Gedney lived a year and a half in Varanasi at the home of a local family; in 1972, his four-month visit focused on the city of Calcutta. The big overseas adventure in Gedney’s life was India: though the trip wearied him, Gedney particularly cherished the work from this period.

In June of 1989, William Gedney died in New York City, at the age of fifty six, of complications from AIDS. He left photographs and writings to his lifelong friend Lee Friedlander and requested that his books and cameras be given to one of India’s colleges. His brother, Richard Gedney, donated them to the Chitrabani Art College in Calcutta. Gedney’s photographs, sketchbooks, diaries and papers are housed in the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library of Duke University. Its digital collection contains finished prints and contact sheets created by Gedney between 1955 and 1989.

Margaret Sartor, a photographer, writer, and teacher at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, was approached by the university’s Special Collections Library for the curation of an exhibition of Gedney’s work. In 2000, Sartor and English author Geoff Dyer coedited “What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney”, which quickly sold out.

Notes: William Gedney’s photographic book of his work in San Francisco was published posthumously in February of 2021 by Duke University Press under the title “William Gedney: A Time of Youth-Sam Francisco, 1966-1967”.

An article written by Samanth Subramanian, entitled “William Gedney’s Travels in India” for The New Yorker can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/william-gedneys-travels-in-india

Author Rebecca Bengal wrote an article entitled “William Gedney’s Timelessly Intimate Photographs of San Francisco in the 1960s” for the June 2021 issue of “Aperture”. This article, with images and quotes by Gedney’s friends as well as his onetime lover writer Joseph Caldwell, can be found at: https://aperture.org/editorial/william-gedney-timelessly-intimate-photographs-of-san-francisco-in-the-1960s/

The Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhattan, New York had an exhibition of William Gedney’s work in February to March of 2016. Thumbnail images of the exhibition’s photos can be located at: https://www.howardgreenberg.com/exhibitions/william-gedney-all-facts-eventually-lead-to-mysteries

Second Insert Image: William Gedney, “Cornett Sisters”, 1965, Kentucky Cornett Family Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Duke University

Third Insert Image: William Gedney, “Calcutta”, circa 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, 27.3 x 18.4 cm, Duke University

Bottom Insert Image: William Gedney, “Kentucky, 1972”, Kentucky Cornett Family Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Duke University

Elliott Erwitt

The Photography of Elliot Erwitt

Born Elio Romano Erwitz in July of 1928, Elliott Erwitt was a French-American documentary and commercial photographer as well as a film director. Born to Jewish-Russian parents in Paris, he spent his early years in Milan, Italy, The Erwitz family emigrated in 1939 to the United States where they settled in the Los Angeles area of California.

After securing a position at a commercial darkroom, Erwitt studied photography and film making at the Los Angeles City College. In 1948, he relocated to New York City where he continued his studies at the New School for Social Research. Among the photographers Erwitt met in New York were Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker who had founded the photo-documentary project for the Farm Security Administration.

During 1949, Erwitt traveled throughout France and Italy where he shot a series of images with his Rolleiflex camera. Upon his return, Roy Stryker hired Erwitt to build a photographic library for the public relations department of the Standard Oil Company. In collaboration with other photographers, Erwitt next worked on Stryker’s project to establish the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, a depository of prints and negatives relating to the history of Pittsburgh that was incorporated into the city’s Carnegie Library.

Elliott Erwitt was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and served as a photographer for the Army Signal Corps in Germany and France until his discharge from duty in 1953. Returning to civilian life, he joined photojournalist Robert Capa’s Magnum Photos, the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. Erwitt began a freelance photographer career and created work for “Life”, “Holiday, “Collier’s”, “Look”, and other illustrated publications of the period.

In addition to his commercial work, Erwitt documented social and political events in his photographs. He covered, among others, the tenth anniversary in 1957 of Russia’s October Revolution, President Nixon’s 1959 visit to the Soviet Union, the funeral service for President Kennedy in 1963, and the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama. Through Magnum Photos, Erwitt was hired to document film production on several movie sets. He captured iconic images of Marlon Brando on the set of “On the Waterfront” and Marilyn Monroe during filming of “The Seven Year Itch”. Throughout his career, Erwitt continued to have access to the world’s notable figures and shot portraits of Fidel Castro, Jacqueline Kennedy, Che Guevara and Jack Kerouac among others.

Elliott Erwitt was known for his warm, wry sense of humor in the depiction of everyday scenes. He took many black and white candid images of ironic or absurd situations that occurred in ordinary settings. Dogs were also a regular motif in Erwitt’s work. Although he never specifically set out to take dog pictures, dogs appeared in substantial numbers on his contact sheets. Among Erwitt’s twenty-seven volumes of published work, five of them are collections whose focus is exclusive to dogs. Two of these volumes are the 1974 “Son of Bitch”, his first collection, and 1998 “Dog Dogs”, a series taken during Erwitt’s world travels.

Elliott Erwitt devoted his attention towards film making during the 1970s and 1980s. He produced feature films, television commercials and several notable documentaries. Among Erwitt’s documentaries are the 1970 “Arthur Penn: The Director”, “Red, White and Bluegrass” in 1973, and the award-winning 1977 “Glassmakers of Herat, Afghanistan”. He produced numerous programs and movies for HBO in the 1980s, including “The Great Pleasure Hunt”, a series of comedic travel documentaries. Erwitt is credited as camera operator for the 1970 “Gimme Shelter” and still photographer for the 2005 “Bob Dylan: No Direction Home”.

A large-scale retrospective of Erwitt’s work, “Elliot Erwitt: Personal Best”, was held in 2011 at the International Center for Photography in New York City. In the same year, he received the ICP’s Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement. Elliott Erwitt died at his New York home at the age of ninety-five on the twenty-ninth of November in 2023 while sleeping.

Notes: A documentary film by Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu entitled “Elliott Erwitt: Silence Sounds Good” by Camera Lurid Productions is located at: http://www.cameralucida.fr/en/Documentaries/elliott-erwitt

Top Insert Image: Betina La Plante, “Elliott Erwitt”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Elliot Erwitt, “USA, Times Square, New York City”, 1950, Gelatin silver Print, Magnum Photos

Third Insert Image: Elliot Erwitt, “Cuba, Havana, Che Guevara”, 1964, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Elliot Erwitt, “USA, New York City, Marlene Dietrich”, 1959, Gelatin Silver Print

Terence Winch: “We Have Judged Our World”

Photographers Unknown, We Have Judged Our World

Small green couch in the living room. I come home at night and sit in it.
‘Law & Order’ is on TV. I have a glass of cheap cabernet and make eggs
for dinner. It gets later and later. I hit the mute button and listen
to the old clock on the piano tick, then tock. I wash my dishes.
I choose tomorrow’s work clothes.

I said to my barber, ‘Give me a haircut that looks exactly
like Frank Sinatra’s wig,’ and he did. My barber is a very nice, gay Egyptian.
I take a hot bath and listen to right-wing talk radio, which I find very relaxing.
I keep wondering where everyone went.

The dog was just here, I’m positive. I can smell dog. There’s another
strange odor in the bathroom. Perfumey. Or maybe it’s Lysol or 409.
The toothpaste is cinnamon flavored.
I spray a ‘Fresh Outdoors’ scent throughout the house.

Maybe I am all alone. Which is not what I really want. I want a party
going on in every room. I want guests in the guest room. I want people taking baths in the bathroom. I consult Each Day a New Beginning for today:
‘We have judged our world and all the situations and people in it
in terms of how their existence affects our own.’

I remember a conversation I had this afternoon with a colleague
about urban turtles. Could they really survive in the fast-paced city? Sure, he
said.
I don’t really care. A friend of mine died in November and I think about him
all the time. I stopped calling him because he never initiated contact with me
and I didn’t like that. But a week or so before he died, he said to me:
‘I always loved seeing you. I loved being in your presence.’
Now he is always talking to me from the beyond, as he had threatened to.
It’s his voice, then the tick tock of the clock, then his voice again.

Terence Winch, Urban Turtles, 2008, PoemHunter Archive

Born in the Bronx section of New York City in November of 1945, Terence Patrick Winch is an Irish-American poet, author and musician. His work frequently focuses on his early experiences in the Bronx, his Irish-American identity, and his interests in music.

The son of Irish immigrants, Terence Winch spent his early years in the Irish neighborhood of the Bronx. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at Iona University in New Rochelle, New York, and received his Master of Arts in English from Fordham University in 1969. Just before completing his doctorate dissertation, Winch relocated to Washington D.C. in 1971. Iona College later awarded him a honorary doctorate degree in 2014.

In the early 1970s, Winch joined a group of poets that met above the Community Book Shop in the Dupont Circle area of Washington D.C. Known as Mass Transit or the Dupont Circle School, this group included such writers and poets as Ed Cox, Tim Dlugos, Michael Lally, Tina Darragh, and Doug Lang, among others. The Mass Transit group published its own magazine, Mass Transit, and engaged in both public poetry readings and discussions on civil and gay rights, gender equality and civil activism. After the Community Book Shop closed in 1974, members met at other venues and some organized their own publishing press. Winch, along with Michael Lally and others, co-founded their publishing imprint, Some of Us Press.

Although primarily a poet, Terence Winch has also published both fiction and non-fiction works. He has to date published nine volumes of poetry and two story collections, the 1989 collection of short stories “Contenders” and 2004 collection of non-fiction stories “That Special Place”. Winch’s first volume of poetry, the 1985 “Irish Musicians/American Friends”, won an American Book Award. His second poetry collection, the 1994 “The Great Indoors”, was chosen by poet Barbara Guest, a Robert Frost Medal winner, for the 1996 Columbia Book Award. Winch’s most recent poetry collections include the 2018 “The Known Universe” and the 2023 “The Ship Has Sailed” published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

For twenty-four years, Winch worked for the Smithsonian Institute, a U.S. government complex of museums and both educational and research centers. For the majority of his time at the Smithsonian, Winch was Head of Publications at the National Museum of the American Indian. Between 1994 and 2008, he produced five recordings for the Smithsonian Institute that focused on Native American literature and music. Among these were “Creation’s Journey: Native American Music” and “Wood That Sings; Indian Fiddle Music of the Americas”.

As a musician, Terence Winch played traditional Irish music from childhood. In 1977, he co-founded, along with his brother Jesse and his own son Michael, the band “Celtic Thunder” which plays both traditional and original Irish music. Winch wrote much of the band’s material for its three albums, the latest album being “This Day Too: Music from Irish America” on the Free Dirt label. The best known and most covered of Terence Winch’s compositions is the song “When New York Was Irish” from the Free Dirt-produced album of the same name.

Winch received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry and was named the winner of a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He was a regular book reviewer for the Washington Post from 1975 to 1981 and has contributed work to such publications as The Dictionary of Irish Literature, The Oxford Companion to American Poetry, and New York City’s The Village Voice. Winch has also interviewed many leading Irish authors for the cable television series “The Writing Life”; he was himself interviewed for the series in 1998 by poet and Georgetown University’s Professor of English Roland Flint.

Notes: Terence Winch’s website, which covers his poetry, prose and music, can be found at: https://www.terencewinch.com/index.html

A short 2017 interview with Terence Winch conducted by Carolyn Farrar for Fordham University’s online Fordham News can be found at: https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/seven-questions-with-terence-winch-musician-songwriter-poet-author/

Karlheinz Weinberger

The Photography of Karlheinz Weinberger

Born in Zürich in June of 1921, Karlheinz Weinberger was a self-taught Swiss photographer who over his sixty year career documented the outsider culture of rebellious male youths and working-class men. He used the pseudonym “Jim”, taken from a popular 1930 song written by German-Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, for his photographic work from 1948 to 2000.

From 1936 to 1939, Karlheinz Weinberger attended Zürich’s grammar school and began taking photographs with his first camera. He became a member of the Bund der Nuturfreunde (Association of Nature Enthusiasts) photography club where he developed greater skills in both photographing and processing. In 1942, Weinberger was called for military training after which he served a period of active military service. At the end of the Second World War, he gained temporary employment as a carpet and furniture salesman but also endured periods of unemployment.

Beginning in 1948, Weinberger became an active member of Zürich’s famous underground gay club “Der Kreis (The Circle)”. He began in the mid-1950s to publish his photos in the underground gay journals “Der Kreis”, printed through the club, and “Club68” founded by a small team of former Kreis members. Weinberger published more than eighty photographs though “Der Kreis” until the journal’s last issue in 1967. It should be noted that “Der Kreis”, besides being the only gay publication to include editorial content in three languages, was the most important European journal promoting the legal and social rights of gay men at that time.

During the 1950s, Karlheinz Weinberger spent his summer holidays in the Mediterranean area where he took portraits on the coasts and islands of Italy and during later excursions into Morocco. Weinberger’s images of sailors, fishermen, beach goers, and dockworkers were later published in “Mediterranean”, a 2021 posthumous volume, the third of a series through the Swiss publisher Sturm & Drang.

From 1955 to his retirement in 1986, Weinberger was employed in the warehouse department of the Siemens-Albis factory in Zürich; this day-time position provided the finances for his off hours’ photographic work. In 1958, Weinberger met and photographed the young rocker Jimmy Oechslin in the streets of Zürich. Oechslin introduced him to Switzerland’s growing gang culture known by the German term Halbstarker, meaning ‘half-strong’. Groups of Zürich’s young people, influenced by the many aspects of American culture, were looking for an identity of their own. They established an antiauthoritarian subculture based on American film, rock music, customized jean clothing and the riding of motorcycles.

Intrigued by the teenagers’ edgy look as well as their attitude towards authority, Karlheinz Weinberger began documenting this post-war generation on Zürich’s streets and at local festivals. He later established an improvised portrait studio at the apartment shared with his mother. During this period, Weinberger became the one of the first photographers granted permission to document the local chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle club. Between 1964 and 1976, he worked as a freelancer for various sports magazines and specialized in sports reporting in Switzerland and East Germany.

Since 1963, Weinberger presented his work in various group exhibitions in Zürich, Israel, Italy, Canada and the United States. In 1968, he won a prize for his sports photographs at the NIVON Holland competition. Weinberger’s first solo exhibition, entitled “The Hooligans 1955-1960” was held in 1980 at Zürich’s Migros Club School, a recreation and education center. The first institutional exhibition of Weinberger’s work to a wider audience was a major retrospective entitled “Intimate Stranger” held in 2000 at Zürich’s Design Museum. Consisting exclusively of vintage prints mostly developed in Weinberger’s home lab, the show documented his close, but still outsider, view of the Halbstarker gangs. This exhibition later traveled to Vancouver, Canada.

Karlheinz Weinberger passed away in December of 2006 in Zürich at the age of eighty-five. The Galerie Esther Woerdehoff is the owner of the Weinberger Estate which is housed in the Swiss Social Archives in Zürich. In February and March of 2011, the Swiss Institute at St. Marks Place in New York City held an exhibition of Weinberger’s vintage prints curated through the collaboration of the Karlheinz Weinberger Estate and Gianni Jetzer, Curator-at-large at Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Swiss Institute published a portfolio of fifty-four images entitled “Karlheinz Weinberger: Jeans”.

In August of 2017 in conjunction with a large retrospective exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the German publisher Steidl released French and English editions of “Swiss Rebels”, a collection of Weinberger’s homoerotic images of rockers, bikers, construction workers and athletes. In 2018, publisher Starm & Drang released “Karlheinz Weinberger: Sports” , a collection of work discovered after the artist’s death in 2006. The volume, the second in its series, included one hundred-thirty images taken from thousands of negatives, slides and prints that documented bike races, wrestling matches and weight-lifting events.

Notes: The online magazine on contemporary culture Kvadrat Interwoven has an excellent article on Karlheinz Weinberger’s early career written by Larissa Kasper. This article can be located at: http://kvadratinterwoven.com/foto-jim-zurich

A timeline of Karlheinz Weinberger’s life is available at the Gallery Esther Woerdehoff site, the executor of his estate. This information is located at: https://ewgalerie.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Weinberger_en-2022.pdf

Second Insert Image: Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled Portrait, Zürich, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print, Karlheinz Weinberger Estate

Fourth Insert Image: Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled, Portrait from 2011 “Jeans”, Swiss Institute, New York City

John Keene: “Murmurs Linger After the Blue Frost”

Photographers Unknown, Murmurs Linger After the Blue Frost

when night hovers in the square
moon sheets the avenues and glare
from headlights glaze the lone chestnut
murmurs linger after the blue
frost and subdivisions arriving
in crates like tangerines from the ghost
orchards of Chile
beauty is especially dangerous under pressure
to feel your lips on my throat like a wire
or a Beretta slowing firing under water

remember what I cannot bear the leaving
lost hours the embarrassed fragrance of surrender
like a midnight novena on November first
still standing on the naked slopes after dynamite
shears away bedrock and rangers sweep over
brush searching for missed embers and clues
whatever you find there pocket for yourself
keep the lock of my hair sulphur tang of my skin

still burning on your tongue a signal fire
black as your fingers on a compass I turn
on and on never ceasing to ponder the strange
economy of ladders or breakdancers
men’s eyes when they lie writhing
like dolphins through a narrow strait
out into the broad way of a bay the sound
of phosphorous as it catches fire
which is the soul rising into the air without
fear; you, your eyes or dawn, opening

John Keene, The Soul is Always Beautiful, Punks: New and Selected Poems, 2021, The Song Cave Press

Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1965, John R. Keene Jr. is an American poet, writer, translator, educator and artist. Born into a Catholic family, he attended parochial schools and graduated from the Saint Louis Priory School, ministered by the Benedictine monks of Saint Louis Abbey.

John Keene earned his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College where he was a staff member of the art and literary magazine, the “Harvard Advocate”, and member of Harvard’s Black Community and Student Theater. Elected a New York Times Foundation Fellow, Keene received his Master of Fine Arts from New York University. He is both a lifelong member of the Dark Room Collective, an influential African-American poetry collective that promotes greater visibility to emerging writers of color, as well as a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, a Brooklyn, New York-based organization that supports MFA programs and writing workshops for African-American poets across the United States.

Keene’s fictional debut was his novel “Annotations” published through New Directions Press in 1995. A fiction work of experimental poetic text, the novel explored those questions that revolve around identity in its forms of race, social class and sexuality, both gay and straight. These issues were examined through a re-creation of Keene’s life as a black youth in St. Louis with references to the historical and cultural events of the 1940s and 1960s.

In May of 2015, John Keene published “Counternarratives”, a collection of thirteen short fiction stories and novellas. This collection, which ranges over five centuries of history, examined lives marked by the pressures of their time. Its stories, drawn from memoirs, detective stories, newspaper accounts and interrogation transcripts, created new perspectives of our past and present. In one story, Huckleberry Finn meets his former raft-mate Jim after an absence of several decades; in another story, Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia meets American poet Langston Hughes in New York during the Depression. In 2016, “Counternarratives” received the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, an organization dedicated to the promotion of multicultural literature.

Keene published his first collection of poems “Seismosis” in 2006. Featuring line drawings by Christopher Stackhouse, this sophisticated conversation between writing and visual art is a cohesive study of abstraction in both mediums. In 2016, Keene published a second art-poetry book “Grind” in a collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner, best known for his two photo art books “In Most Tides an Island” and “The Amnesia Pavilions”. In the same year Keene published “Playland”, a collection of old and new poems.

In December of 2021, John Keene published “Punks: New & Selected Poems”, a seven-section collection containing historic narratives of loss, lust and love. Keene’s poems, whose cast of characters include historic Black personalities as well as friends and lovers, addressed the issues of grief, AIDS, desire and oppression. All the stories are told through a wide range of poetic forms, all of which Keene has mastered. “Punks” was the winner in 2022 of the National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.

Keene was formerly associate professor of English and African-American studies at Illinois’s Northwestern University and has taught at Rhode Island’s Brown University, New York University and at Indiana University’s Writer’s Conference. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the African-American and African Studies Department at Rutgers University-Newark, as well as a teacher in its Masters Creative Writing Program. In addition to all his educational positions, Keene served for several years as an editorial board member of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s African Poetry Book Fund which promotes and publishes African poetry.

Among John Keene’s translation work is the 2014 “Letters from a Seducer”, a translation of Brazilian magic-realist author Hilda Hilst’s novel “Cartas de um Sedutor”, one volume of a tetralogy that tells the story of an amoral, wealthy man who seeks an answer to his incomprehension of life through sex. This translation by Keene was selected for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction long list. He has also translated French, Portuguese and Spanish works by such writers as Jean Wyllys, Alain Mabanckou and Mateo Morrison, among others.

Among Keene’s many awards are the 2000 AGNI John Cheever Short Fiction Prize, the 2005 Whiting Award for Fiction/Poetry, the 2016 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prise for Fiction, and the 2019 Harold D. Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Notes: An extensive interview with John Keene by American poet Jeffery Renard Allen on Keene’s “Annotations” and “Counternarratives” can be found at the online literary site Big Other located at : https://bigother.com/2022/06/18/from-the-archives-an-interview-with-john-keene-by-jeffery-renard-allen/

The Brooklyn Rail has a conversation between John Keene and his fellow professor from Rutgers University, novelist Akil Kumarasamy, in which they discuss each other’s work. This discussion can be found at: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/02/books/John-Keene-in-conversation-with-Akil-Kumarasamy

Photograph Eight of the Header Collection: Romy Maxime, “Brothers James and John, Cape Town”., Brothers and Sisters Series, Gelatin Silver Print, OATH Magazine, South Africa

Romy Maxime is a Swiss South African photographer and videographer known for her enigmatic portraits, fine art prints, lifestyle, advertising and fashion work. She is based between Cape Town, South Africa and Zurich, Switzerland. Maxime’s photo “Brothers James and John” was the winner in 2023’s annual Lensculture Portrait Awards. Her website is located at: https://www.romymaxime.com

Stanley Stellar

Photography by Stanley Stellar

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945, Stanley Stellar is an American photographer whose five decades of work captured the beauty and vitality of the LBGTQ community of New York City. His work followed its life through the 1969 Stonewall Riots, the first Gay Pride Parades and evolving Gay Liberation Movement, as well as the realities of the HIV/AIDs epidemic. As a participant and a documenter, Stellar produced works that have become historic and cultural references for both the young and old.

Stanley Stellar studied photography and graphic design at New York City’s Parsons School of Design, one of the oldest schools of art and design in New York City. Upon graduation, he began work as art director for the advertising agency Art Direction. Stellar’s career during the 1970s included countless book designs as well as editorial design and art direction for numerous magazines and publishing houses.

Stellar’s purchase of a Nikon camera in 1976 began his career as a photographer. Among the artists who influenced him were fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar known for his black and white portraits, and Bruce Davidson, a regular photographer for “Life” and “Look” magazines. Stellar, however, developed his own style and began photographing unequivocally gay images of men that reflected the world he knew.

Stanley Stellar’s work concentrated on the everyday life of gay men in New York City. He initially began taking street photographs of men with tattoos on their arms, as an inquiry about a tattoo made the request for a photograph easier. Stellar shot many images of gay men walking and gathering on Christopher Street as well as meeting at the abandoned warehouses and piers in Manhattan’s West Village.

One of Stellar’s most iconic street photographs, the first to be mass-produced on postcards, was a 1970 photo of a young man, who after having his arm tattoos photographed, lifted his shirt to show two bright bird tattoos on each chest muscle. Taken at a time when tattooing was illegal in New York City, this single shot by Stellar became a homoerotic image nobody had ever made before.

Stanley Stellar’s early design experiences, essentially photo-journalism, are apparent in all of his work; they all display a simplicity of composition, recurrence of themes, and honest unembellished depictions of the subject. Throughout most of Stellar’s years of documentation, homosexuality was still illegal in many states; it was not until 2003 that all laws against same-sex activity were invalidated. Stellar’s photographs captured the confidence, intimacy and the energy of the LBGTQ community through all those difficult years.

Stellar’s photography has been shown in many galleries throughout the United States and Europe and has been featured in many international magazines. From May to July in 2011, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art featured an exhibition of Stellar’s work entitled “Stanley Stellar: Photographer”. This exhibition coincided with the release of Stellar’s 2011 publication “The Beauty of All Men”, curated by author and publisher Peter Weiermair. In 2018, Stellar published a second collection of photographs entitled “Into the Light: Photographs of the NYC Gay Pride Day from the 70s Till Today”, through the Bruno Gmeunder Press.

Represented by the Kapp Kapp Gallery on Manhattan’s Walker Street, Stanley Stellar had three solo exhibitions in the gallery. The first show was the 2019 “Photographs 1979-1992” which was followed in 2020 by “Night Life”, an exhibition of twenty-four images documenting New York’s queer nightlife between 1981 and 1992. Stellar’ third exhibition with Kapp Kapp was the 2022 “Stanley Stellar: The Piers (1976-1983)” which featured a suite of unseen photographs of the Christopher Street Piers. The Piers exhibition was held at the grand opening of Kapp Kapp’s Tribeca gallery.

“When I was an editorial art director in the 70s, I used to think I wanted to design other people’s photographs graphically. Possess them in that way. Then in 1976, it became clear to me that I wanted to take my own images of what I had never freely seen, of who and what I was hungry to see, to record my existence through my individual vision of it.

A combination of masculinity, detail, individuality and human vulnerability catches my eye. Men who are at home within themselves, alive in their ability to share some spark of their humanity with me. Men who have an inner life and an inner light that I recognize within me, within both of us.” —-Stanley Stellar

Notes: Stanley Stellar’s website with archived images and contact information is located at: https://www.stellarnyc.com

Kapp Kapp Gallery’s article on Stanley Stellar’s exhibitions can be found at: https://www.kappkapp.com/artists/stanley-stellar/media

David McGillivray’s 2023 article entitled “Six Pictures by Iconic Photographer Stanley Stellar that Captured Male Beauty in All Its Glory” is located at the Attitude section of Yahoo News: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/6-pictures-iconic-photographer-https://uk.news.yahoo.com/6-pictures-iconic-photographer-stanley-130415741.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIwNAmykxGP71NvJgEczfNbjN6iGpmJ3cDlrIaDDOBhi0Wq4U-

New York-based writer Miss Rosen has written a short article about Stanley Stellar on her photography site Blind located at: https://www.blind-magazine.com/stories/new-york-queer-love-on-the-west-side-piers/

Tony Wilkes’s January 2022 article on Stanley Stellar for the online art magazine AnOther, can be found at: https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/13813/a-lost-utopia-stanley-stellar-s-portraits-at-new-york-s-gay-piers-kapp-kapp

Top Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Portrait of Stanley Stellar”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “Late Afternoon”, 1980, The Piers Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, Untitled, circa 2000s, Color Print

Fourth Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “Danny, September”, 1982, The Piers Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “At a Pay Phone on the Corner of Christopher and Bleecker Streets, NYC”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print

Raymond Carrance

The Artwork of Raymond ‘Czanara’ Carrance

Born in Paris on the twenty-fourth of January in 1921, Raymond Carrance was a French photographer and book illustrator whose work became known under the name Czanara. One of the little-known erotic artists of the twentieth-century, he began his career as a costume and set designer for theatrical companies and as a graphic designer for commercial brands, among which was France’s mineral water company Perrier.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Raymond Carramce was commissioned to create elaborate etchings and lithographs as illustrations for published editions by author Pierre Jules Renard and playwright Cyrano de Bergerac. He also illustrated a 1951 edition of Henry du Montherlant’s classic theatrical play “La Ville Dont le Prince Est un Enfant (The City Whose Prince is a Child)”. Clarrance also received a commission for seventeen copper engravings as signed illustrations for a 1971 limited edition folio which included writer Jean Giono’s “Le Chant du Monde: Bourg-Le-Reine (The Song of the World)”. This folio was a special tribute to Jean Giono who had passed away on the eighth of October in 1970.

As a photographer, Carrance’s private catalogue of homoerotic work is reminiscent of the magical-realist style of his contemporaries, the painters Paul Cadmus and Jared French. His images are simple compositions without extensive detail, distinctly European in style and reverential in nature. Carrance’s unique work contained both simple nude portraits and dreamlike scenes composed with overlaid graphics. The desired atmosphere of these collaged male nude scenes was established by layers of superimposed photographs depicting props, flowers, bodily details, or simple patterns and shadows. Carrance exhibited both his photographic and illustrative work in several venues throughout Paris during the 1960s and 1970s.

Raymond Carrance died in Paris on the fourth of June in 1998 at the age of seventy-seven. He passed in obscurity without heirs; his entire body of work was sold at auction. Carrance’s work was rediscovered by art collector David Deiss who acquired the contents of Carrance’s atelier from a Lyon bookseller upon his death. Focused on the discovery of unknown artists of significance, Deiss is responsible for publishing the 2007 monograph “Czanara: Photographs and Drawings”, an imprint of Carrance’s work through Antinous Press. This imprint was the first book published by creative director Sam Shahid’s new press.

Nicole Canet, publisher and owner of the Parisian gallery “Au Bonheur du Jour”, exhibited her collection of Carrance’s drawings and photographs at her gallery in 2010. The gallery and its publishing arm are known for their focus on early European homoerotic photographers; Canet is recognized for her work as a researcher and archivist of sexual sociology in Paris.

Notes: For those interested, the Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art gallery has an extensive collection of Raymond Carrance’s photographs, drawings and engravings on their site. The gallery also carries the work of such artists as Jim French, Jean Cocteau and Greg Gorman, among others. Their site is located at: https://wesseloconnor.com/exhibits/czanara/index.php

Auteur Shutter: Studies in Photography has an excellent article entitled “Czanara (Raymond Carrance): Homoerotic Surrealist Photography”, including various reference links, on its site: https://auteurshutter.wordpress.com/2025/07/04/czanara-raymond-carrance-exploring-homoerotic-surrealist-photography/

Top Insert Image: Raymond Carrance, “Flanders, Belgium”, circa 1950-1960s, Vintage Print, 24 x 18 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Raymond Carrance, “Venice”, circa 1950-1940s, Vintage Print, 18 x 17 cm, Private Collection

Barry Webster: “The Whole Forest Goes Silent. . “

Photographers Unknown, The Whole forest Goes Silent

In the evenings, Sam performs exercises to prepare his body for love-making with Franz. He practices kissing (something he’d once hated) by smooching deer lips, antelope ears, frog anuses, and the great, whiskered muzzles of sleeping bison. He improves his petting skills by necking with juniper bushes and pine tree trunks with such passion that the bark snaps and sap runs, or with such tenderness that the whole forest goes silent and swallows nest in his hair.

Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones, 2012, Arsenal Pulp Press

Born in Toronto in 1961, Barry Webster is a Canadian musician, translator, and writer of fiction, short stories, and non-fiction. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at the University of Toronto and his Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal. Webster is a classically trained pianist with two Associate Diplomas, ARCTs, from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Fluent in French, English and some German, he has translated some of his novels into French.

Webster’s first book of stories, “The Sound of All Flesh”, published by Porcupine’s Quill, won the 2005 ReLit Award for the best collection of Canadian short fiction; it was also a finalist for that year’s Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction presented by the Quebec Writers’ Foundation. This magic-realist collection of stories follows the lives of such people as a hydrophobic competitive swimmer, an opera singer who bathes in tubs of margarine for inspiration, and a travel writer whose terrified of having his photo taken. Webster’s stories from “The Sound of All Flesh” were short-listed for the National Magazine Award and the Canadian Broadcast Company-Quebec Prize.

Barry Webster’s 2012 novel entitled “The Lava in My Bones” is an ecologically-based novel, written in a magic-realist style, that is narrated from various perspectives. The storyline, divided into elemental sections such as rock, air, and water, follows Sam, a Canadian geologist, who attends an academic conference in Switzerland. There he meets the young, sexually active Franz, a swinger who awakens Sam’s nascent homosexuality. “The Lava in My Bones” is a fantasy story through which the connection between lovers, the dysfunction of families, and personal links to the planet we inhabit are examined. Webster’s novel was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Foundation and Publishing Triangle’s annual Literary Award, and the 2013 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LBGTQ Emerging Writers presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

Barry Webster has participated at numerous literary series, among which were the Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans, Berlin’s Takl Galerie Series, the National Gallery of Ottawa, Vancouver’s Raw Exchange, and muliple literary programs on CBC Radio. Webster’s work has appeared in various publications including The Toronto Star Event, The Washington Post, Fiddlehead Magazine, and The Globe and Mail, Canada’s foremost news media company. After periods in various European cities, Barry Webster currently resides in East Montreal.

“I once attended a panel discussion where the topic was ‘Canadian Literature: Quiet Writing for a Quiet Nation.’ Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers is anything but quiet. It rants, seethes, and uses humor as a machete. The hyper-sensual language and extravagant fantasy of the erotic trysts between the narrator, his lover ‘F,’ and the ghost of saint Catherine Tekakwitha changed my understanding of fiction. I realized that thinking outside traditional heterosexual binaries requires a new template and so-called ‘realism’ can simply reinforce the status quo. Beautiful Losers showed me that literature could re-imagine what sexuality can be rather than merely slavishly reproducing the surface of life.”

—-Barry Webster, Montreal, The Query Project, September 2015, Plenitude Magazine

Note: Barry Webster’s website, which include a list of his published work, can be found at: http://www.barrywebster.ca/index.html

Plenitude Magazine is Canada’s only queer literary magazine. It promotes the development and growth of LGBTQ+ literature through online publication. The magazine can be found at: https://plenitudemagazine.ca

Top Insert Image: Camille Martin, “Barry Webster”, 2018, Color Print, Rogue Embryo Website

Header Photo Set: Fifth Image: Francesco Merlini, “Hua Hin”, The Farang Series, Gelatin Silver Print