When I approached the Warhol retrospective, “From A to B and Back Again” at the SFMOMA, I wondered what new things I would notice. Warhol was the first artist I became really interested in, back when I was 16. Since then I’ve seen his work in museums around the world, read countless books and articles, and viewed a number of documentaries — I even dressed like him for Halloween one year. So what new thing would I notice in the work of an artist that even I had to admit was suffering from over-exposure? Had the repetition of his repetition finally got the best of him?

The answer came in the room devoted to his Flower paintings. Hung against the Cow Wallpaper, while strains of the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” blared, they were impressive all over again, huge and glaringly bright. But it was a vitrine along one wall that showed me something new. I’d seen Warhol’s source material many times, Patricia Caulfield’s photo of hibiscus flowers, and read about the law suite. Yet I had never seen the original film that Warhol had used to make the silkscreen. After experiencing the thrill of seeing something genuinely touched by the artist’s hand, I saw something else.

Warhol made a number of alterations to the original photographs, including cropping. He also manipulated the stigma — the flower’s sex organs — by duplicating one of each of them. Looking at the original film, I saw how purposeful this pairing was. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized that this wasn’t about Warhol’s love of duplication, it was about signifying the importance of these parts. While I’d long noticed that center of two of the flowers looked remarkably like an anus, I hadn’t noticed how much the other two looked like a cock and balls.

The story behind Warhol’s Flowers series is that it was an ironic reaction to criticism that his Death and Disaster series was so dark. In response, Warhol would give people pretty flowers and cow wallpaper. What I’ve never seen discussed is that the flowers are a homoerotic statement of the highest order — both subtle and in-your-face. Of course flowers are so often employed as a sexual metaphor, going back to the birds and the bees, it’s barely worth mentioning in art criticism. Except Warhol has inverted the notion of flowers as symbols of reproductive sex. What’s more, he managed to get this image of gay sex on the walls and coffee cups in respectable homes all over the world.

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Homoeroticism had certainly been a subject of Warhol’s early work. There’s a whole section of the exhibition devoted to it. But by the mid-sixties, Warhol had moved more explicit homoeroticism into his films. His art was dealing with electric chairs and car crashes — a whole lot of death. So sex couldn’t be too far away. With the flowers, he took an image that’s so identified with sex that, through repetition, we barely think of it that way anymore, and pulled a fast one on us. Almost as if he was saying, “gay sex has always been here — people just pretend not to notice.”

I didn’t think I could be the only person with this observation. But a search through my Warhol books (the catalog from the show notes, without apparent irony, that Warhol “altered the orientation” of the flowers) and the internet (“Warhol homoerotic Flowers” and all other variants brought zero relevant results). So I’m either completely wrong or it’s so obvious that no one is discussing it.

But it’s not too obvious, apparently. When I went back to the show with some co-workers, I shared this insight. One of my companions was contemplating the purchase of tchotchke imprinted with an image from the Flowers series. She was, until I mentioned this. What had been a “nice, pretty image” was now something else. Proof that Warhol’s impish, sly sense of humor still has the power to shock.

 I will admit one thing right off the top: I only watched one episode of the Netflix Series The Tiger King. 

Because coming out of that first episode I only felt relief that I didn't have to spend any more time in the caustic shit-show world of Joe, Carol, or the producers and directors that cobbled the show together.

I won't return to the show for a number of reasons (the homophobia, exploitation of animal suffering, cultural tourism), but mostly it's this: sensationalism and truth are mutually exclusive. And The Tiger King, from the outset, traffics in both. Viewers are compelled to keep going because it's all so unbelievable — and yet it's all (apparently) true. It's been widely viewed that its success is due to our unbelievable times. But it's not enjoyable to me because the that first episode left me feeling hollow at best and dirty at worst. In other words, I wasn't amused.

Because I love the documentaries and filmic essays of Errol Morris, the Maysles Brothers, Trinh T. Min-hah, Holis Frampton, and Jonas Mekas. These are directors whose works are about their subject but they also meditate on the truth. They turn the very documentary form back on itself. That is what drives forward the narrative.

And you may argue, as many have, that The Tiger King isn't supposed to be viewed like that. You may say, "lighten up — it's not meant to be The Thin Blue Line or Salesman. It's supposed to be a ride." True, it is, after all, the strange chimera known as the docuseries. But it's the "docu" (truth) that clashes with the way a "series" works -- get-to-the-next episode antics that are meant to drive binge viewings, ratings, and shareholder value.

Nothing I've read by fans or detractors has lead me to believe the show gets any less sensationalistic. And when you deal with "you won't believe this" you stray far from truth, which is where I start feeling really sick.

Because laughing, cringing, and memeing our way through an off-kilter, reality-show star's self promotion at the expense of the truth, is exactly how we got our current president. And our own complicity in giving that showman so much attention for our own entertainment is something we should all look at.

Later in her career she worked with slates and chalk boards. She would acquire the kind of slate that a turn-of-the-century school child would use for copying exercises and do her own copying exercise: namely reproducing the slate down to the tiniest detail. Every crack, nail, scratch, and ghostly chalky palimpsest is reproduced. It’s incredible. You’ll find yourself scrutinizing each pairing, looking for the fake.


One of the biggest tropes in art writing is “so-and-so makes us question the relationship between the object and the thing that represents it.” It’s almost cringe-worthy in its repetition on wall plaques, and I don’t want to repeat it here. Anyway, I’m not sure that’s what she was doing. Celmins was focused on execution, on duplicating every single artifact of the photographic source. While she certainly played games with the viewer, I don’t think she was grandly conceptual. As much as she was playing with the universal, her work always came from the personal.

Which is all a lot of readily available art history gossip. The point is: Babitz. Tobacco Rhoda. They’re the same woman: The body position, the drape of the breasts, the head position, the hair. It’s no coincidence. Babitz’s face is entirely different; you can see that in the other versions of this photo. Ramos puts a cup in her hands and replaces her table and chair with cigarette cartons. He also trims her stomach and has her facing the viewer. All standard fair for the voyueristic pin-up style that Ramos utilized.

​Ramos was a descendant of Duchamp. Duchamp himself referenced the works of artists that came before (Renoir, Michaelangelo) and was a practitioner of appropriation par excellence. Duchamp’s work engaged with sex, voyeurism, and popular culture. He muddled them. Coffee grinders and sex (The Large Glass lurks in the background) vs cigarettes and sex. So it’s not at all strange that Ramos would reference Duchamp here.

​The quirk is that, in Ramos’s “Tobacco Rhoda,” Duchamp is referenced obliquely but is not actually present. Because “Tobacco Rhoda” is based not on a Duchamp work but on Wasser’s photograph — Wasser’s construct, of which Duchamp is but a part. In effect, Ramos is referencing a reference to the godfather of reference. Or so it seems to me. It’s also possible Ramos just needed a body and he opened a magazine and there she was. But Babitz wasn’t just any body. She was playing chess, naked, against Duchamp. Looking away. Your move. Ramos took it and she was looking at him — not Duchamp (or Hopps).

Of course we’re all looking at Babitz.

Is this a novel set of scattered observations I’ve made? Probably not. I’m familiar with Ramos, but not as well-versed as I should be. But a reasonably capable Internet search returns nothing of the sort (which is fine for a blog post). The point is, for me, that my curiosity stems from books that are on opposite sides of my studio. And they were calling me, in their magnetic pull, until I sat down in a chair, in between them, and put the images side by side. And there they were. The same woman. One with chess, and the other with cigarettes.

Last week I was procrastinating, going through a box of vintage postcards at Owl and Company, a used bookstore in Oakland. And in the pile of paper, this little beauty caught my eye. I couldn’t leave it there — and at fifty cents, why would I? I have an apartment to decorate.

I’ve always had the ability to become utterly obsessed with old postcards. It’s a weakness. One of many. Like when I come across a western shirt in my size. I buy. One thing I like about vintage postcards is that they are sent, not just across space, but through time. They traverse in four dimensions.

But why did this particular one catch my eye? Because I am who I am, I can’t just collect. I have to analyze why I love a thing:

1. There’s Picasso and Chicago: I’ve seen it in person — in fact, it’s one of the first things I saw in Chicago as I came up out of a train station. I’ve always had a deep attachment to Chicago since first visiting. So there’s that.
   
2. There’s the reproduction: The bold yellow border caught my eye. But there’s also the peculiar, painterly reproduction of the photo itself. There’s a lack of sharpness too. And deep shadows. It’s all rather harsh. That’s one of the great things about collecting old postcards: You’re seeing the history of photomechanical reproduction technology.
3. There’s the people: The sculpture is the highlight, but there are also six figures, dwarfed by the sculpture. But they are important. They provide scale and context. But also mystery. A child in white is blurred as she crosses in front of the sculpture. Two other people are obscured. Another child looks off camera. One man has his arm raised towards his face — I like to imagine he’s holding a camera. There’s a quality that suggests a Gerhard Richter painting. But who are these people? Where are they now? One minute they’re looking at a Picasso sculpture (or looking away from it), and then next they are photographed, reproduced, and sent to strangers around the world.

​There’s no grand revelation. After buying the postcard, I went out and bought a frame and a rust-colored backing for it. It hangs by my fireplace where it will continue to obsess me. It’s a moment trapped in amber.

If you look through my Instagram feed you'll likely see a lot of signs and walls. You'll see stuff influenced clearly by Walker Evans, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan, amongst others. You'll see pop-inspired Polaroids and lots of geometry. Abstracts galore. There are instax grids of depopulated neighborhoods. But you won't see a lot of people. When there are people, they're usually looking away from the camera.

Well, until recently. About a month ago I made a couple of changes. First, I started shooting more with my Pentax ME Super, my dad's old camera that I've used on and off over the years, and less with my Olympus XA. Second, I started developing my own film at home.

I was scrolling through Instagram yesterday when I came upon an altered version of Norman Rockwell's humorous and meta Triple Self-Portrait, and it made cringe—but not for the intended reason.

Rockwell is replaced by a man in a KKK hood—or rather cloaked in it. He is painting not his own hooded likeness but an image of Marvel comics hero Captain America. There are other alterations too: Rockwell's studies of himself are replaced by an image of Hitler. A Rembrandt self-portrait is replaced by the confederate flag. The Roman helmet is inexplicably missing.

It's a skillfully drafted layering of symbols executed by the artist, one Mr. Fish. The message is that when racist America looks at itself, it sees a hero. Which is all rather true. But the pastiche is convoluted, and it all starts with using Norman Rockwell as KKK stand-in.

It's hard to write a review of the Polaroid Originals instant film without being tempted to recount the birth of Polaroid's instant film, its demise, its rebirth as the Impossible Project, and the purchase of the Polaroid brand by Impossible's biggest shareholder. But I assume if you're here reading this, you know all that. If not, read Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos, and then read the endless threads on Flickr about the various Impossible Project film formulations.

My favorite Impossible film was made in 2014—it was just beautiful, if a little slow to develop. I haven't been thrilled with batches produced starting in 2016. A dodgy opacity layer meant white streaks (even if you covered the film as it ejected) and the color seemed lifeless. I couldn't rely on it unless I was shooting inside. And the packs leaked blue goo frequently. Beta film that I tested earlier this year gave me hope, however. 

Today I shot my first pack marketed under Polaroid Originals—so now when people ask if Polaroid still makes film you can say "yes" and just leave it at that. Fortunately that's not all that happened.

When a man who has photographed Andy Warhol asks if he can photograph you and your rabbit, you're going to say yes (even if photographing Warhol is the least of his accomplishments). And that's how it happened, nine months ago. My friend, Arthur Tress, brough his Hasselblad over. He had some ideas about photographing me with my fourteen-year-old rabbit, Celeste—a rabbit of incredible spirit who had been fighting seizures and a brain tumor. I didn't know how much time she had left.

The best light was in the apartment stairwell, down half a flight, where a skylight acts as a soft box. Arthur tried a lot of different shots, following his trademark surrealist approach. There were props from my apartment. He would ask me to "look" a certain way, hold the rabbit while holding a book about magicians. In between these I would clutch Celeste close, kiss her head. I was stubborn. These were the shots I wanted. He would relent.

Every Tuesday, I take MUNI to the Tenderloin and climb three flights of stairs to a small room with a light table, boxes of slides, archival pens, loupes, numerical stamps, and plastic sleeves. This is my volunteer archiving gig while I’m unemployed. I join the other archivists, grab a stack of negatives, take off the rubber band, spray canned air on the negatives, and transfer the information from the enclosed roll marker to the plastic sleeves. I then order the slides by frame number, rewriting the number on the slide holder so it’s easier to see. Often the frame numbers are marred by other information stamped on the holder, or simply mis-stamped. Once the sleeve is full, it goes into a binder. Rinse and repeat.


Sometimes, though, there are no frame numbers so it’s a more investigative process. I have to look at the lighting, the background, the camera axis, the state of of the model’s undress, and then reconstruct the sequence.