Happy Hog Rot

15 June 2023 3:44am

I awoke in the darkness this morning from a dream.  Two dreams, actually.  But in the last dream I was seeing a vivid musical performance with stage sets evoking and reminiscent of the photographs of Lee Friedlander.  The music I was hearing was very Philip Glass-like. 

Earlier in the waking day, I had been looking at the Joel Coen curation of archetypal Friedlander imagery at the Luhring Augustine gallery site.  Even earlier that day, I had been searching my 300,000-plus image archive for examples of my own early photographs that had been influenced and inspired by Friedlander, this as part of a project running over the past year or so to pay tribute to some artists I have known.  One such example would be this 1974 photograph I made from inside a bus, looking out to Santa Monica’s Palisades Park:

Palisades Park, Santa Monica, CA 1974 (© lawrence hathaway)

And this points us to some of my photographs from 1972, when I first met and talked with Friedlander at a Friends of Photography gathering in Carmel.

The first dream?  This one found me lying on my back watching clouds, much as in childhood.  One small cloud seemed to drift downwards and appeared only a few feet away from me before evaporating when I stood up to put my hand to it.