pt at large

Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light

“Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light”
A traveling exhibition featuring the large-format, richly detailed images of distinguished landscape photographer Robert Turner.
Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (617) 495-3045
Through March 26, 2006.

Going to a photography exhibit like “Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light” makes me feel like I spend days with my eyes wide open but see nothing. I don’t have to drive 40,000 miles a year in a pickup truck like Turner does to find places to photograph. I don’t have to surf weather service web sites like he does to find storms that I think will produce ideal light conditions in which to take pictures. But I do have to pay more attention to the quality of light around me. A walk through 43 of Turner's images on display at the venerable Harvard Museum of Natural History is a good reason to see why.

You can practically hear Pete Seeger singing “This land is your land, this land is my land…” as you gape at Turner’s large format photographs taken in the Pacific Northwest, the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, the canyons of the Colorado Plateau, and the forests of Maine.

Turner is a poet with a camera. His credo is simple. “I want to create individual pieces of art that will endure well and create uplift for people. I want to show the value of wild places, and the feeling of awe, peace, drama, that an interaction with the environment can stimulate.”

Like the 19th century world-class English landscape painter JMW Turner (no relation), he’s fascinated with the quality of light. Unlike his predecessor, who treated light romantically, Robert Turner faithfully reproduces the light he captures on his 4x5 inch transparencies, then meticulously prints them.

The results are jaw-dropping operas on the chromatic scale of light. Storms produce the intense color and soft light that are Turner’s Holy Grail. For the series in Utah, Turner zeroed in on the weather service web site and watched the progression of storms across the country. When he found one that he liked and could get to in a day and a half, he jumped in his truck and drove there. And waited for moments “at the edge of a storm, after a rain, in the afterglow of sunset - when light upon the land intensifies color to almost magical proportions. The effect is other-worldly and profoundly evocative.”

“Storm Over The Green River”, Canyonlands National Park (attached), Utah, is a stunning example of one of those moments. Turner found a spot he liked and waited. He was hunkered down with a garbage bag over him and his camera when a shaft of light moved over the park’s terrain and spilled onto a spot that portrayed a nearly surreal moment of peace in that wild place. The colors in his images are so rich that you can practically feel the early morning mist evaporating from your skin or smell the musk of decaying ferns underfoot in a mountain pass.

Photo courtesy of Robert Turner's web site

Turner’s art is his pulpit. He’s preaching especially to city dwellers, those of us whose idea of wilderness is a walk on the nearest Audubon Trail. He intends that his permanent images of “rare places in a rare light” awaken an appreciation of nature’s grandeur and the need for us to conserve it. If the Wilderness Society had membership forms outside the exhibit, their membership would soar as people filed out of Turner’s exhibit.

Is there something in the American culture that values communing with nature as a solitary experience? If Henry Thoreau had a camera, he’d probably take photos like this. There are no people in Turner’s photographs. In his mind, we viewers provide the human presence and peering into Turner’s images, the viewer can easily feel not only solitary but also diminutive in scale. Think about the everyday beauty around us the next time you see a magic moment in a shaft of morning light. And think about ways to keep images like Turner’s a part of our wilderness environment for a long time to come.

IN the meantime, “Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light” is an opportunity to commune with nature without having to drive a day and a half in a truck to see the action.

http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/exhibitions/index.html
http://www.robertturnerphoto.com/default.htm

jennifer Kimball CD Release Party

Jennifer Kimball
CD Release party at the Lizard Lounge
Cambridge Common 1667 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA
January 25, 2006
By 8:30 the Liz was standing room only, conversations over the house music were loud, and laughter was abundant. A buzz of anticipation, as warm as the red filtered lights that illuminate the cave-like Lizard Lounge, animated the crowd. The bon vivants came from near and far to hear Cambridge based Jennifer Kimball sing her heart out in the second night of a two-night CD release party hosted in the downstairs of the popular Mass. Ave pub Cambridge Common.

The nearly two-hour set that ensued was almost too much of a good thing but Kimball’s fans gobbled it up as if it were manna from heaven. Kimball’s second CD, “O Hear Us”, has just been released and she and the musicians who’ve been her band in residence during her regular Wednesday night gig at the Liz responded with a shoot-the-light’s-out set that unleashed the new songs.

A singer-songwriter, Kimball sings her own songs with conviction and unique voice phrasings that are at home in minor keys, a signature style. As a writer, she finds kernels of truth in her lyrics, keenly observed small details that illuminate entire relationships or states of emotion. And then sweetly sings them into life with a veteran performer’s sense of melancholy, longing, loss, camp, or jaunty humor. The new CD “O Hear Us” has it all.

Three songs into the set and it was clear that Kimball and company were in the zone. Kimball’s “band in residence” knew how to take solos that bored deep into and then eased out of the emotional core of her songs. Kevin Barry on laptop pedal steel guitar and Duke Levine on guitar and laptop synthesizer, reeled off several riffs so poignant that the bartenders didn’t dare open a bottle let alone shake a margarita during their solos. Richard Gates on bass and Billy Beard on percussion built foundations for each song that could hold the weight of Yankee Stadium. Once the critical mass was established, we were all in collusion to make the moments last as long as we could.

Kimball can mix two parts melancholy and one part loss and end up with a ballad as elemental as water. I’ve been humming the words to “Don’t Take Your Love Away From Me” all week. “Wrap your troubles in dreams” was a delightfully rendered Bing Crosby tune featuring over the top solo work by Barry and Levine, suggestive scat singing by Kimball, drums and bass fills from the rhythm section. The sheer fun they had as they skipped through this chestnut was worth the price of admission. One of the only other covers of the night, a lustily gritty “You really got a hold on me” made you want to pull your love interest onto a dance floor, maybe elsewhere, and groove to this deliciously rendered song. In the end, it’s Kimball’s singing and writing that sticks with you. She called upon “my wasp past” to compose “Eternal Father”, part Episcopal hymn, part navy hymn. Haunting ballads like “East of Indiana” and “Last Ride Home” are ethereal meldings of vocal and narrative skill in which she scales notes that only an accomplished voice can reach.
Boston is blessed with talented singers and songwriters. Jennifer Kimball just happens to be one of the best of them.

http://www.jenniferkimball.com
http://lizardloungeclub.com/main.html
Top photo by Rose Polenzani

Charlotte the Destroyer

Charlotte the Destroyer
A Dark Comedy by Megan O'Leary
Directed by Janet Bobcean
My Fair Heathen Productions
Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatre, 536 Tremont St, Boston 617.933.8600
January 11-21 | Curtain 8 pm Wed-Fri | 2 + 8 pm Sat
$20; $15 students
Running time approx 80 minutes with no intermission

The Boston theater scene occasionally appears to be one big psychiatrist's couch, a place where writers come to grips with their inner demons. The results can be uneven, unfocused, and occasionally cathartic, but I suppose the same is true of a session on "the couch".

My Fair Heathen Productions touts this play as "a dark comedy about a washed-up children's-book author whose drinking problem and death anxiety sabotage her ability to be a writer." It's not clear in the play that this author (played by the playwright O'Leary) ever had enough of a career to be called 'washed up' but her drinking and anxieties are both pervasive and self-destructive. The effects of being abused as a child contaminate relationships as the adult attempts intimacy. It's hard to find humor, however dark, as she alienates her lover and sends him packing, and attempts to grapple with her demons alone.

The set, a squalid, one room apartment festers with filth and failure. The crumpled papers, beer cans and whiskey bottles littering the floor mirror the litter in the woman's emotional life. As the author attempts to write her next book, she creates the character of Charlotte the Great who lives in an ideal nuclear family world. In a clever flashback, her childhood is played out at as her alcoholic father, her emotionally disconnected mother, and an actress playing the writer as a budding teenager enter from backstage to reprise the sordid events that have scarred her.

The book author's fictional child hero Charlotte the Great morphs into Charlotte the Destroyer, with dire results for the overwhelmed author. The acting ensemble is earnest but we can see where this play is heading.

An emotionally charred past has the power to kill spiritually, perhaps even physically. There are parts of our pasts that I'm certain we'd like to rewrite. Do most of us live our lives somewhere between the spiritedness of Charlotte the Great and the negation of Charlotte the Destroyer? The mystery is how some of us can rise from the ashes of early hurts, cope with life and stay within the bounds of emotional health. Perhaps in her next play O'Leary will probe that mystery.

Westport whalers practiced the art of scrimshaw

East Bay, RI
East Bay Newspapers
Thursday, January 12, 2006

Westport whalers practiced the art of scrimshaw

The origin of the term scrimshaw remains a mystery but nearly everyone around New England seaports knows what scrimshaw looks like. By the time Dr. Stuart Frank, senior curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, completed his talk to members of the Westport Historical Society on Sunday, Nov. 6, they knew the names of 16 Westport whalemen who practiced this art form.

Dr. Frank has written extensively about whaling and is a leading authority on maritime history. His power point presentation, with lots of scrimshaw photos and captions, sped along like a fully canvassed Westport whaler captained by an experienced skipper with a good sense of humor.

Scrimshaw refers to the carving or engraving of sperm whale ivory, baleen, or skeletal whalebone. These materials had less commercial value than spermaceti or whale oil and were given to the seamen to do with as they pleased. The most recognized form of scrimshaw is probably the sperm whale tooth that could be polished to a high gloss then engraved with a whale hunting scene or a whaling ship.

Baleen (sometimes called whale bone) was derived from the boney plate in the mouths of certain kinds of whales (not including sperm whales) and was used to make corset stays, hoops for women's skirts, frames for hats, fans, umbrella ribs, swifts, fishing rods, and more.

"Scrimshaw was a characteristic occupational interest of most of the men who went whaling, men who tried it at one time or another, of course with varying degrees of talent," Dr. Frank said.

The rise and fall of the era of scrimshaw parallels the rise and decline of the American whaling industry and spans from the early to late 1800. "There are about 25 great scrimshaw artists we know by name or by reputation, and none of them, at least so far, are known to be from Westport," Dr. Frank said.

Entry into these hallowed ranks requires that a man have several excellent examples of scrimshaw attributed to him. Although Westport men authored some fine examples, as of now they have only one or two outstanding objects apiece attributed to them.

Whaling voyages were generally measured in years. No matter how many whales the ship could harvest, and how many times the deck could be swabbed, the sails mended, the rigging set or furled, there were thousands of hours where nothing else happened. Scrimshaw was a good remedy for boredom. Michael Cumiskey, of Westport by way of Charlestown, went a-whaling from 1835 to 1859.

Aboard the bark Abigail in the 1830s, he wrote in his journal, "I am unsettled for the want of work, saw nothing, and work all done. An idle head is the workshop for the devil, employed scrimsham."

Researching the identity of scrimshaw artists is as challenging a task as harpooning a whale. "Only about one percent of scrimshaw is signed and maybe up to five percent can be reasonably attributed to a named person," Dr. Frank said.

"We don't always know the names of the master scrimshaw artists, but we identify them by stylistic characteristics, the same way one would identify an unsigned Rembrandt," he said. And since the work was often undated, "We can identify the period the piece was illustrated by observing the clothing the people were wearing."

According to Dr. Frank, the first American whose great scrimshaw is positively identified is that of Edward Burdett of Nantucket. Ironically, both the beauty of the art and the danger of the occupation are evident in Burdett's story. At the age of 27, he was dragged to his death when he was caught up in a harpoon line. From 1825 until 1833 he made nearly 40 beautifully engraved sperm whale teeth, some of which are in the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection.

Several outstanding pieces made by Westport men stood out in the show. One was a double -cage swift (yarn winder) with beautifully crafted slats, fastened with handmade brass rivets and probably made by Peleg Sanford between 1828 and 1850. An extraordinarily elaborate device, it could have taken three years to make. Other examples were two inlaid cribbage-board boxes, one decorated with horseshoes and the suits of cards, the other with geometrical figures most likely made at the tail end of the whaling era by Andrew Corey sometime between 1888 and 1916.

Alexander Augustus Tripp, born and bred in Westport, made his first voyage on the frigate Elizabeth as cabin boy in 1840. He was reported as fashioning water dippers with whalebone handles attached to coconut shell ladles but theyâve never come to light.

Seamen's journals in the whaling museum are full of accounts of on-board scrimshaw activity. Dr. Frank, ever the optimist, thinks it's possible that scrimshaw items like Tripp's water dipper are gathering dust in attics or closets in homes on the southeast coast.

"Keep your eyes open for these dippers because we'd like to see them," he said.

Dr. Frank has been cataloguing the New Bedford Whaling Museums scrimshaw collection in preparation for a major permanent scrimshaw exhibit. Examples of scrimshaw from the museum's collection may be viewed at www.whalingmuseum.org.

Westporters who made scrimshaw...

Dr. Stuart Frank's research revealed the following facts about Westport men who are believed to have made scrimshaw.

* Asa Russell Gifford - whaling captain of ships Roscius, Roscoe; whaled between 1829-1856

Scrimshaw - Letter seal with the name of his father-in-law James H. Beetle; sperm whale tooth with pinprick-transfer views of a full-rigged ship under-way and a trotting horse; a large bodkin; a whale ivory needle; and a whale ivory tatting shuttle

*Horace Young - captain of Westport bark President, whaled between 1832-1856

Scrimshaw -- the famous "Hands Box"

*Michael Cumiskey -whaling captain of ships Roman, Lapwing; whaled between 1835-1859

Scrimshaw -Journal entries of his own and his shipmates reveal that he made scrimshaw, but none has come to light.

*Joseph C. Little - whaling captain of ship Marengo, whaled between 1836-1871

Scrimshaw - Pie crimper with a wooden handle and whale ivory jagging wheel; whale ivory butter mold, inscribed backwards "ELIZA D. LITTLE" (his wife)

* Peleg Sanford - whaling captain of ships Herald, Mercator; whaled between 1828-1850

Scrimshaw - attributed to Peleg and kinsman Wm. P. Sanford: canes, fids, sperm whale teeth, double-cage swift (yarn winder) with beautifully crafted slats fastened with handmade brass rivets

* Alexander Augustus Tripp - Westport whaling master, whaled between 1840-1884

Scrimshaw - As master of New Bedford bark Globe during 1869-1872, reported as having made coconut-shell dippers but none have been found.

* Benjamin D. Gifford - Westport whaling master of ships Mattapoissett, Dr. Franklin; whaled between 1839-1879

Scrimshaw - coconut-shell dipper bearing the names of his father and mother, Captain Humphrey A. Gifford and Phebe Davis Gifford

* Charles Williams Chace - Westport whaleman, whaled between 1853-1870

Scrimshaw - Coconut-shell dipper inscribed "Present to Ruth M. Chace" (his wife)

*George L. Manchester - Westport whaling master of ships Mattapoissett, George and Mary, Kate Cory; whaled between 1842-1859

Scrimshaw - As captain of the George & Mary during 1852-54, cut out a cardboard template for a pie crimper (jagging wheel), found in his journal.

*Albert Augustus Gifford - Westport whaleman, whaled between 1842-1857

Scrimshaw - Pair of monochrome-engraved teeth with standing female portraits and spreadeagles and patriotic vignettes; canes, pie crimpers, letter seals, folding knife, double cage swift

*David Green Mosher - Westport whaleman, whaled between 1845-1863

SCRIMSHAW - at least three pictorial sperm whale teeth with unique Bible-era scenes of Pharaohic Egyptian figures

*Andrew A. Corey [Cory] - merchant sea captain of ships Hastings, Frederick Roesser, Richard W. Clark

Scrimshaw -at least two inlaid cribbage-board boxes, one decorated with horseshoes and the suits of cards, the other with geometrical figures and a name (spelled Corey)

*Charles F. Smith - whaleman, whaled between 1846-1861

Scrimshaw - whale ivory and bone double-cage swift with an octagonal wooden base that has a spool rack and drawers for storage

*Frederick H. Tripp ö whaling master, whaled between 1859-1888

Scrimshaw - probably made scrimshaw throughout his 30-year whaling career, and certainly as captain of the New Bedford bark Palmetto during 1880-1884. None have been found.

*Frederick H. Lawrence - whaleman

Scrimshaw - Mentions scrimshaw in his journal on his one and only voyage, as a green hand in the New Bedford ship Gazelle in 1865

*Charles E. Reed - whaleman, whaled between 1866-88

Scrimshaw - sewing box with compass rose inlaid with whale ivory, mother of pearl, tortoise shell; pair of whale ivory bracelets; serpent walking stick.

By Paul Tamburello

shorelines@eastbaynewspapers.com

Read story at
http://www.eastbayri.com/print/346160875463370.php

Copyright © 2003, The East Bay Newspapers

Ansel Adams: Man With A Vision at MFA Boston

Notes from MFA: Ansel Adams 1902-1984
Adams pursued photography from the 1920s to the 1970s.
“No matter how sophisticated you are, a large granite mountain cannot be denied. It speaks to the very core of your being.” AA
“No matter how sophisticated you are, a blonde with cute legs cannot be denied. She speaks to the very core of your being.” PT

AA began his career by making soft focus photos, “pictorialism”. In 1927 he made his first photos of Yosemite. Naturally reflective and inner directed, he was determined to develop a personal credo that would be the lodestone to direct his chosen career in photography. He read works of Emerson, Whitman, and Edward Carpenter to guide his spiritual awakening as he walked into the remote and massive regions in the pristine West.

In 1927, he marched himself up Half Dome’s 13.600 feet with 30 pounds of camera equipment strapped to his broad shoulders with the aim of photographing not what it looked like in reality but “how it felt.” That must have represented a “born again” moment for Adams as a photographer, as he was baptized not in the waters of the kingdom but in its highlands, bluffs and buttes from which he peered at eternity.

Early in his career, he began the f64 club with fellow photographers with goal of composing images with great detail and wide range of tones black to white.
He first began using a red filter to enhance imaging of textures and deepen the color of the skies.

 A trained pianist as a young man, he called the negative the “score” and the print the “performance”. He referred to his work as “painting with light” and achieved this by using darkroom techniques of “dodging and burning”. Adams refined his intuition over time by his technique of “visualizations”, a pictorial sense of the image he intended to create after squeezing the camera’s shutter. His work, whether of majestic peaks and cloud formations or blades of grass growing in front of charred tree trunks, lifts a veil for the viewer. These subjects, grand and petite, are within out sight every day. If we take a moment, we too can see eternity etched in a grain of sand, or a formation of lenticular clouds.

One of Adam’s favorite quotes: Chance favors the prepared mind.”
I'm sure that applies to pilots as well.

Adams was fascinated by the cloud formations that loomed over the mountains.
Paul Strand, a fellow photographer, said, “There is a certain valid moment for every cloud." I wonder if the same applies to us humans.

Some personal favorites of the show:
Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite, 1944
Winter Sunrise Sierra Nevada from Lone Pines, CA 1944
Grass and Reflections, Lyell Fork of Merced River, Yosemite, 1944
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 11/1/1941

NOTE 
MFA members may go to the Morse Room and ask to see Ansel Adams prints individually, without the glass covering them. There is said to be an astonishing amount of texture and color gradation visible without the glass being over the print.

http://www.artnet.com/artwork/424136486/ansel-adams-winter-sunrise-sierra-nevada-from-lone-pine-ca-1944.html

The Epiphany Jazz Mass,Cambridge, MA

The Epiphany Jazz Mass, January 8, 2006
Old Cambridge Baptist Church
1151 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138

Only in Cambridge would a church service be accompanied by a jazz quartet. And the church, Tiffany stained glass windows and all, also be home base for a progressive ballet company. And within the first minutes of the service, would the minister decry several hot button topics that might make headlines in the real world but are usually tiptoed around in church services.

Ahhh, such was the case at The Old Cambridge Baptist Church in the republic of Cambridge on the January 8 Feast of the Epiphany, also called the Feast of Lights.

The roots of the Epiphany date from the dawn of Christianity in the first few hundred years after Christ, when prayer was conducted in catacombs in secret, illuminated by torches and candles. In one of his sermons, Jesus said, “I am the light.” and today the music and homilies were redolent with metaphors of darkness and light. Ephesians 5:8-20 was cited as an example, “This may be a wicked age but your lives will redeem it.” The sermons from the Baptist pulpit today made it clear the redemption would come about only if each of us sitting in the church lit the way by becoming the agents of positive change.

The Old Cambridge Baptist Church dares to take as many positions as the dancers in the Jose Mateo Ballet Company headquartered under its massive vaulted ceilings. In the first three minutes of the service, the minister lit into the shabby state of health care, the illegitimate prosecution of the war in Iraq, and prayed for the recovery of Ariel Sharon so he could continue to advance the cause of peace. George Bush would squirm in his seat in this activist church.

Just as there are red states and blue states, I’m sure there are “red” churches, synagogues, and mosques, and “blue” ones, liberal pulpits and conservative ones. They all seem pretty confident that the almighty is on their side. Most Christian churches celebrated the Epiphany today and Jesus’ name was probably invoked all day long. When it comes to religious holidays, it’s a given that the names of Jesus, Yaweh, and Allah are referenced with great frequency.

If I were Jesus, Allah, or Yaweh, I’d feel like a piece of taffy, what with my name being pulled right and left. And probably wonder why those people down there couldn’t just get along, which is what I’d been telling them to do for ages. I’d also be chagrined that they were fighting over me and what I stood for. What’s not to get? Haven’t I made it abundantly clear?

I mean, how many ways can I say to them, “Love thy neighbor”?

The Hidden Kitchen

The Hidden Kitchen
535 Albany Street, Boston, MA
Open Monday - Friday 6 A.M. - 2:30 P.M.
617-426-1544

This little slice of a diner will never become a "destination" stop for breakfast or lunch for the rest of us but for the workforce in and around 535 Albany Street, it's friendly confines are a kitchen away from home. I've been in walk in closets that are larger, but none of them serve home made chicken soup loaded with noodles, chunks of white meat, celery, carrots and a spice that I can't identify but has been permanently imprinted on my taste buds.

If a film crew ventured to Boston in search of a hole-in-the-wall eatery with ethnic overtones and an authentic neighborhood feeling, they'd stop in their tracks when they entered The Hidden Kitchen. The enterprise’s first owner was Lebanese; for the past 14 years it's been a Greek husband and wife operation five days a week for Maria and Nick Koufos. Maria does the talking, Nick makes those home made soups and slings the hash. Maria greets customers by name and even Nick, barely visible behind a cabinet of rolls and pastries, chimes in on the friendly bantering.

To call the place unpretentious would be an overstatement. Every square foot of the place is has a function. Three tiny tables and rickety stools and a tall case for cold beverages take up the front half and the order counter, cooking surfaces, and supply shelves fastened to the olive drab-colored walls in a sort of homey disorder take up the rest. A menu listing about 40 items including breakfasts, salads, hot and cold sandwiches, and side dishes takes up the only wall not occupied by storage shelves.

With the exception of the hearty soups, the food is what it is - good old American diner food. If you ever do find this place, I'd recommend the soup of the day (see below) or one or the daily specials. With prices like $1.65 for a fried egg sandwich to $8.50 for a daily special, you don't need a trip to an ATM to finance your meal. Today's special was Steak tips, rice, and salad for $8.50. I heard that their Friday fish and chips is a big hit. Anyone care to join me some Friday?

This little kitchen is in a nook of a small lobby of a relic of Boston architecture on the corner of Albany and Wareham Streets. Situated on the eastern frontier of the South End, it was built in 1888 as a cold storage building that now houses the usual beehive of creative businesses in the arty district: graphic designers, architects, printing presses, interior designers, upholster shops, multimedia creators and last but not least, the nationally recognized Fiandaca Fashion Studio. If I hadn't been looking for an exhibit at the AA/B Gallery (www.artadvisoryboston.com) on the third floor of the building, I would have never discovered it.

The Hidden Kitchen is an elegy to the kinds of places our grand parents knew well, a kind of eatery that filled a customer's basic needs for comfort and connection: like having a meal in a neighbor's kitchen.
Scores of modern franchises feature reliably fine food and chic interiors that are welcoming and may even have "personality". When it comes to "character", though, The Hidden Kitchen serves it up five days a week.

Soups on…
Monday: Chicken noodle
Tuesday: Minestrone
Wednesday: Corn chowder
Thursday: Beef orzo
Friday: Clam chowder

Herb Greene: Brief encounters with the Dead

Herb Greene: Brief encounters with the Dead
Gallery Kayafas
450 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA 02118
Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 am - 5:30 pm
www.galleryKayafas.com

No, this isn’t a midnight cinema tribute to Lon Chaney or other masters of the macabre. It’s a black and white photographic love fest at the Gallery Kayafas featuring formal and candids of Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, and a few other luminaries who shot across the musical and cultural firmament in the revolutionary meteor shower known as the sixties.

Herb Greene, whose career began as a staff photographer for a San Francisco department store, had a passion for folk music. Giving in to the heady mixture of sounds akin to those of Pan, the archetypal piper, Greene followed his ears to the streets, eventually ending up at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco photographing the boys who would become “The Grateful Dead”. He gained their trust and snapped photos of them for thirty years. Many of these photos are on display at the Gallery Kayafas in the “SoWa” arcade at 450 Harrison Avenue.

One of Greene’s earliest photos of Garcia reveal him as a pimply faced teenager with doe-like eyes and no hint of the bearded icon he’d soon become. Looking now at the photos of musicians whose music is embedded in the DNA that was our youth, did any of us know where we were headed? And could any of us guess how surprised, perhaps alarmed, we’d feel that age has overtaken us? In the reflection of the glass covering those prints, we can see the faces of the adults we’ve become.

Documented in beautifully developed black and white platinum prints, Greene presents us with flower children dressed in pegged pants, flowing cotton skirts, or nothing at all. Gallery owner Kayafas says, “Kids too young to drive and people using walkers have come to see this show.” Greene’s other photos show Carlos Santana, Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Led Zeppelin. Somehow, sex, drugs, and rock and roll seemed so innocent in the sixties, a decade in which we believed ourselves immortal. I wonder if young music enthusiasts will feel the same way about the music of today when their AARP cards arrive.
And the beat goes on…