I took several hundred self-portraits with the Polaroid One-Step SX-70 camera in 1978. The artists whose work at the time captivated me were Lucas Samaras, Egon Schiele, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. To document my life as a 21-year-old queer art punk, I used the Polaroid, multiple journals and performance. I posed, like any good punk, to put you off and to attract you just the same; its all the same.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
First Half of 1978
Using a Polaroid camera to document myself, my actions, and my transformations, instead of a Kodak Instamatic or more rarely a 35mm camera, as i had used previously, began in the fall of 1977 in Florence, Massachusetts. Living with Mark Massi and Tom Joslin [see "Silverlake Life"] that fall, I first used a Polaroid Land camera then a One-Step SX-70 to capture my ManicPanic 'Peacock Blue' color hair. Mark shot the Land camera images and I took the One-Step shots, using a ten-second self-timer. the Land camera shots are the upper top left of the left-hand image. "Look, I was already a pillow biter!" These Land camera images began a year-plus of performances for the camera, steps for the One-Step, about two hundred in these four snaps.
The One-Step SX-70s continued with my move back to San Francisco, arriving "home" on New Year's Eve, 1977/78. While New Year's Eve was spent at a friend's apartment above 18th & Castro, by the end of January I was on Pierce Street, just off Duboce Park. 1978 is the first time in 4 or 5 years I live one full year in one place; not just one city, but one place, apartment...flats, as we call them in SF. One year + one flat = 1978.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment