Frank O´Hara reads 'Having a coke with you'

Frank O´Hara reads his poem 'Having a coke with you' in his New York flat, shortly before his death in 1966. Found via litherland's twitter.

"Frank O´Hara reading his poem 'Having a coke with you' in his flat in New York in 1966, shortly before his accidental death.

Taken from - 'USA: Poetry: Frank O'Hara' produced and directed by Richard Moore, for KQED and WNET. Originally aired on September 1, 1966."

More videos can be viewed here.


"Francis Russell O'Hara (March 27, 1926 - July 25, 1966) was an American poet who, along with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest and Kenneth Koch, was a key member of the New York School of poetry.

[...]

O'Hara's poetry is generally autobiographical, much of it based on observations on what is happening to him in the moment.

Donald Allen says in his introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, 'That Frank O’Hara tended to think of his poems as a record of his life is apparent in much of his work'.

O'Hara discusses this aspect of his poetry in a statement for Donald Allen's New American Poetry: 'What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else, they are just there in whatever form I can find them'. He goes on to say, 'My formal 'stance' is found at the crossroads where what I know and can't get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred'. He then says, 'It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time'.

[...]

O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art.

He was also friends with the artists Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell.

He died following an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and injured by a man speeding in a beach vehicle during the early morning hours of July 24, 1966. He died the next day of a ruptured liver at the age of 40 and was buried in the Green River Cemetery on Long Island."

-- read further here.

Lee Friedlander: Self-Portrait.

Self-Portrait. Photographs by Lee Friedlander. Haywire Press, New York, 1970. Unpaged. Small quarto. Black-and-white reproductions printed by Meriden Gravure. First edition currently auctioned at photo-eye. (Top image: cover of re-print, bottom: cover of first edition).

"Lee Friedlander's surreal sensibility is on full display in this set of photographs, originally published in 1970.

Here Friedlander focuses on how his physical presence impacts his photographs.

Known for capturing subjects outside of himself - nudes, landscapes - Friedlander writes: 'At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings'.

Readers can witness this progression through the images here as Friedlander appears in shadow, reflected in windows and mirrors, and, only occasionally, fully visible through his own camera.

In some photos he visibly struggles with the notion of self-portraiture, desultorily shooting himself in household mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Soon, though, he begins to toy with the pictures, almost teasingly inserting his shadow into them to amusing and provocative effect - elongated and trailing a group of women seen only from the knees down; cast and bent over a chair as if seated in it; mirroring the silhouette of someone walking down the street ahead of him; or falling on the desert ground, a large bush standing in for hair.

These uncanny self-portraits evoke a surprisingly full landscape of the artist's life and mind."


The book details above are of the first edition. The re-print is published by Distributed Art Publishers, has a dimension of 10.1 x 9.4 x 0.4" and comprises 96 pages. It has 50 duotone images, and includes an afterword about the work written by John Szarkowski.

Optics. Compression. Propaganda..

Optics. Compression. Propaganda.. By Sean Snyder, edited by Silvia Sgualdini. Distributed Art Publishers, 2008. 96 pp., 88 color illustrations., 9x11".

"The words 'optics', 'compression' and 'propaganda' form the subtext for this monograph by Sean Snyder, who lives between Kiev and Berlin.

Using archival and media resources, as well historical cinema, photography and art references, Snyder is engaged in ongoing experiments concerning the malleability of images and the mechanics of their production."


Read Sean Snyder's piece on 'Optics. Compression. Propaganda.' in Art & Research journal.

Transitions: The Dresden Project.

Transitions. The Dresden Project. Photographs by Fredrik Marsh. Essays by Andreas Krase, Rod Slemmons and Holger Starke. Technische Sammlungen Dresden, Dresden, 2009. 104 pp., 72 color and black & white illustrations, 12x9".

"American photographer Fredrik Marsh’s images tell the story of the great societal upheaval at the end of the twentieth century from an unusual perspective. The project deals in general with the passing of time and with change.

Marsh came to Dresden for the first time in 2002 and the idea for the 'Transitions: The Dresden Project', which would not be finally completed until 2006, came to the photographer in a process that can only be described as possessing its own momentum.

Marsh had started to focus on German history in a downright unconventional manner. He developed quite a distinct and unusual interest in the remnants of recent, specifically East German history as well as in the changes wrought by the rebuilding and the renewal of Dresden following the peaceful revolution of 1989.

He concentrated on the overlapping of different historical layers which he discovered in empty factory buildings, barracks and deserted old historic Dresden residences. He proceeded like an archaeologist who enters a new territory and secures evidence of former life without influencing it in any way.

With his pictures, Fredrik Marsh pays reverence to the important, but also tragic past of this city.

Marsh received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Transitions: The Dresden Project."


Deluxe Limited Edition:

"The Deluxe Limited Edition of 'Transitions: The Dresden Project' comes with a choice of one of four archival pigment prints and a signed book.

All prints made by the artist are from scans of his original negatives.

Three options are 9 x 11 inches in image size, printed on an 11 x 14 sheet of 300 gsm, 100% cotton & acid-free paper. Prints are mounted on 2-ply archival board and matted in a 14 x 17 inch 4-ply archival window matte. The fourth option measure 5 1/2 x 14 inches in image size, printed on a 8 x 17 inch sheet of 300 gsm, 100% cotton & acid-free paper. Prints are mounted on 2-ply archival board and matted in a 12 x 20 inch 4-ply archival window matte.

The prints are numbered, signed, and dated on verso. This edition is limited to 15 copies per image - 60 in total."

Snowbound.

Snowbound. Photographs by Lisa M. Robinson. Text by Mark Strand. Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2007. 112 pp., 50 color illustrations, 11¾x9¾".

"Five winters long, the young American photographer Lisa M. Robinson took pictures in the snow. Snowbound shows landscapes in which everyday objects - alienated and sunken in snow - civilize the natural surroundings.

Traces of human existence set accents in the white landscape, delimiting it and often popping up in an amusing or incongruous way. A lonely hammock, a trampoline or a swimming pool are both echoes of the summer past and of personal memories. But Lisa M. Robinson is not interested in showing the obvious; instead, the photographer makes use of the many aggregate states of water - ice, snow, fog, water - as metaphors for life and transience."


About the Limited Edition:

"Limited to 75 signed and numbered copies. A custom white full cloth binding is the ground for an original tipped in photograph of 'Wish.' This limited edition book cover beautifully complements that of the trade edition.

The book is Presented in a hand-made white clamshell box with a blue ultrasuede interior, and is accompanied by an original signed 8 x 10 c-print by the artist."


Only on a gloriously sunny day like today could I post a book like this!


UPDATE: Also available through Klompching Gallery as they kindly told me, where you can also read more about Lisa M. Robinson as well as view more of her work.

Other Nature.

Other Nature. Photography by Ron Jude. The Ice Plant, 2008. 80 pp., 39 color illustrations., 10½x7¾". Signed copies available from photo-eye.

"In his previous book, Alpine Star, photographer and publisher Ron Jude appropriated and recast a collection of his hometown newspaper photographs as a cryptically humorous meditation on the grey area between personal history and collective memory. Jude’s latest series of photographs, Other Nature, adds a more intimate, diaristic strain to this line of inquiry.

In this handsome volume, two separate sets of his own 4 x 5 color pictures (made between 2001 and 2008) combine to create a subtle and uncanny instance of what Jude has called the 'slippery threshold of narrative' in still images.

Drawing on the concerns of the New Topographics photographers, Jude’s accounts of anonymous motel rooms and the stranger regions of the American landscape could, on first glance, be mistaken for an ecological critique. But as the exterior and interior details of these environments (floral patterns, wood grain, sunlight) begin to merge, interrupt and inform each other, the book shifts into a more abstract, subjective register, provoking reflections on photography, the visible world and the things hovering just outside our physical perception."

Liquid Chain Into the Vapor Wall.

Liquid Chain Into the Vapor Wall. The Fall. By FOS (alias Thomas Poulsen); Pernille Albrethsen, ed.; Text by Cecilie Ostergaard Hogsboro, Claus Heinberg, Claus Emmeche, Jason Dodge. Distributed Art Publishers, 2008. 207 pp., 234 color, 13 duotone and 60 black & white illustrations., 6¾x9¾".

"This artist's book is based on the concept of 'social design' developed by the artist FOS (alias Thomas Poulsen) since 1999.

It is an environmental tool that can be used to examine the character and potential of the physical space of contemporary exhibitions and more permanent redesigns of public space."


For more information read here about the exhibition of the same name.