![]() ![]() At a time when many of his filmmaking colleagues still kept their distance from newer electronic media, he not only embraced and wrote about video but also delved into xerography and computer programming. By the end of his career, he had completed close to one hundred films (including the individual one-minute Pans for Magellan) and numerous photographic series helped establish the pioneering Digital Arts Laboratory at the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1977 published Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video-Texts 1968–1980, his influential collection of theoretical essays and other writings that had originally run in Artforum, October, and elsewhere and been honored with retrospectives at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the time between these two photographs, Frampton had established himself as one of the foremost members of the American avant-garde, part of a new generation of artists who came to fruition in the late 1960s, dramatically shifting the terms of both experimental film and the intellectual thinking on cinema as a whole. But here, at age thirty-nine, he stares as if into a vision, ready to walk forward into the unknown, ecstatic. In the earlier self-portrait, Frampton seems relatively staid, as if looking toward the past, trying to emulate an early twentieth-century poise. It almost appears as if the light is not so much being thrown on him as projected outward from his eyes and hands. The setup cannily alludes to the mechanics of both photography and cinema, of light projected and recorded, but in its alien strangeness resembles a promotional still from a science-fiction movie. His hair is wilder than at age twenty-three-the light beam illuminates shaggy bits jutting out from his temples-and his beard is fuller, now flecked with white. In the darkness, a horizontal slit of light draws a line across his eyes and onto the middle of both of his hands. The picture shows him staring, eyes wide and pupils contracted, almost into the lens of the camera, his hands raised beside his head, palms outward. It was taken in 1975 by Faller, the photographer with whom Frampton lived during the last thirteen years of his life. Ironically, Frampton, too, would embark upon an ambitious, large-scale project-the proposed thirty-six-hour film cycle Magellan-that would be cut short by his death from cancer in 1984, at age forty-eight.Īnother oft reproduced image of Frampton is entitled Portrait of Hollis Frampton by Marion Faller, Directed by H. Pound’s high modernism would serve as a touchstone for Frampton, as would the parallel modernisms of Marcel Duchamp, Jorge Luis Borges, and James Joyce. Frampton-who was writing poetry at the time-left Cleveland to move near Pound, visiting him daily in the hospital, while the older poet continued to compose The Cantos, his sprawling epic, dense with reference and allusion, which would remain unfinished at his demise. While there, he struck up a correspondence with Ezra Pound, who was then a mental patient at St. ![]() Due to his dispute over the necessity of a required history course, Frampton had failed to graduate from Andover, thus forfeiting a scholarship to Harvard and instead attending Western Reserve College in Cleveland. When he took this photo, Frampton was working as an assistant in a commercial photography studio in New York, where he had moved the previous year, and was sharing an apartment with sculptor Carl Andre, who had been his high school classmate at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (as had painter Frank Stella, with whom they would share studio space). ![]() “I focused the camera, sat on a stool in front of it, and made the exposures by squeezing a rubber bulb with my right foot.” “As you see, I was thoroughly pleased with myself at the time, presumably for having survived to such ripeness and wisdom, since it was my twenty-third birthday,” the narrator says in (nostalgia). His shoulders press forward, suggesting that his unseen hands are resting crossed in his lap, and he sports a neat dark jacket and tie, their conservatism offset by a beatniky beard and hair that would have been considered longish in the 1950s, combed back into a Victorian wave. In the image, Frampton sits against a neutral backdrop, looking to his right, as if intently scrutinizing something just outside the frame. Among the most widely seen photographs of Hollis Frampton is one of him as a young man, a self-portrait taken in 1959, if we are to trust the narration he composed to accompany its inclusion in his 1971 film (nostalgia). ![]()
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