Category Archives: Cinematography/Photography

I Know What Love Is

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Ansel Adams letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright, June 19, 1937.

Cedric Wright’s photo of Ansel Adams


A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

Source: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/i-know-what-love-is.html

Barbara Rubin’s “Chistmas on Earth”

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Barbara Rubin’s  twenty nine minute Christmas on Earth is a film of an orgy staged in the Lower East Side apartment of Tony Conrad and John Cale at 56 Ludlow Street in 1963.  She was seventeen at the time.  The double projection of overlapping images of nude men and women clowning and making love is one of the first sexually explicit works of art in the american postwar avant-garde. Rubin spent three months “chopping the hours of film up into a basket” until its contents were ultimately separated onto two different reels, with one reel projected at half size inside the other reel’s full-screen image. In 1966, the film was projected onto the performing Velvet Underground as a part of Andy Warhol Up-Tight (an early incarnation of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events). Rubin, who later introduced Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg (and, according to John Cale, Edie Sedgwick to Andy Warhol), died in 1980 (in childbirth, in France) at the age of thirty five.

Barbara Rubin, "Christmas on Earth" (1963)

Barbara Rubin, “Christmas on Earth” (1963)

An exhibit of her work is currently At Boo-Hooray Gallery (265 Canal St., 6th Fl., btw. Broadway & Lafayette).