Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs at The Photographers' Gallery
'Where do we start? Asked LJ as we entered the 4th floor gallery.
'Start? Anywhere! In honour of Bill's cut-up time/space reconfiguration we should jump from place to place in a non-linear fashion!'
Yes, so whilst the sheep queue viewed in a very orderly English fashion, we who truly understand the man simply chose photos that were uncluttered by human debris and proceeded to squint at what were mostly small images. This made them all the more appealing, having to truly look rather than stand off, glance from afar and walk on.
'The goddam queer, ' I said in my best Bill voice whilst looking at the sequence that makes up What Was, What Isn't. It's six shots of a bed, made and unmade, complete with soiled sheets, and I don't mean cocoa stains. That was good, but I don't think the man who was also looking got my joke because he gave me a suspicious glance.
They were showing Towers Open Fire in the little side room...
I soon homed in on one of the two cabinets in the centre of the room...
So close and yet so far! Frustrating...it was as much as I could do to refrain from smashing the glass...
There lay the Time project...
There were Tangier photos, St Louis shots, self-portraits (especially good), photo collages and a brilliant shot of Kerouac. All a bit much, really. I needed a lie down. Or at least a photo of myself to prove I was there (it doesn't prove I was there to anyone but me)...
your enthusiasm deserves a PaC.... especially as you drilled down to the bestest's vitrine in the building with the paraphernalia from the printers who did TIME.This context was not noted in the 'captions'... in fact a lot of the gallery's contexts and comments in both captions, blurbs and catalogue were off target... it would be kind to say they were out of their depth, it would be paranoid to say they are cultural vampires, angry for an easy fix ...
ReplyDeleteThanks, Alice. I don't recall the nature of the captions and didn't read many - they couldn't tell me much that I didn't already know. I'm not adverse to enjoying an easy fix of Burroughs.
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