Word: photographic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...little from Woody Allen disease (a coquettish tendency to place oneself in optimum paparazzi zones and then act surprised when the flash goes off). Kennedy also has something of his mother's gift for the sly Cheshire's disappearance before your eyes. Some primitives have believed that every photograph taken of a man peels off a layer of his soul. If that were so, nothing would be left of John Kennedy Jr. without his mother's trick of metaphysically absenting herself from the frame--a way of ghost dancing with both gawkers and the jackals of the press...
...Practice and Performance," OFA's "Guide to the Arts at Harvard and Radcliffe," is a fine showcase for what's happening on campus. But the groups detailed in the brochure actually have very little to do with the OFA. Like the cover photograph of an ancient bas relief from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the organizations included in "Practice and Performance" have only the vaguest correlation to the OFA. They are ordinarily self-sufficient entities which would not have existed except for student initiative and would just as easily pass from the scene without it. Take, for example...
...took Beckwith and Fisher 19 years to win permission to photograph the six-week-long Dogon Dama funeral ceremony in Mali, in which bodies are wrapped in cloths and hauled 300 ft. up a sheer cliff face to burial caves that have been in use since the 15th century. To get a shot of the interior of one of those caves, the duo had to be lowered from the top of the cliff by means of ropes and handmade ladders...
...and/or a 212 area code. Do they work as albums in their own right? Noise/Funk at first would seem unrecordable--the show, which stars tap-dancing whiz Savion Glover, is about dance, about movement, about flashing, stomping, whirling feet. A recording of a dance seems as useful as a photograph of a symphony. But tap dancing is percussive, rhythmic, noisy. To hear Glover's feet banging away is to feel his passion, his intent; visuals would be nice but aren't necessary. Noise/Funk is a historical work, tracing the black experience from slave times to the present through tap dancing...
Grief, and nothing but grief, remains after the loss of someone who was gentle, friendly and always encouraging others to further efforts to do better. Such a person was Arthur Benjamin, my teacher in Philadelphia, where I stayed in 1991. I was paralyzed upon seeing his photograph in Time among the victims of the 747 crash. I will never forget his wonderful teaching and paternal support. The greatest loss to humanity is the loss of people like him. RAFAL ZYGMUNT Lublin, Poland Via E-mail...