Bruce Jenkins’s engagement with the work of Hollis Frampton spans several decades and takes multiple forms, including essays, exhibition catalogues, edited volumes, and interviews. Among the most significant are his role as editor and author of the introduction to On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (MIT Press, 2009), as well as several key essays. These include “The ‘Other Work’ of Hollis Frampton: A Tour,” published in the exhibition catalogue Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1984), an exhibition Jenkins co-curated with Susan Krane. His earlier critical essays include “Hollis Frampton: Approaching the Infinite Cinema” (Film Studies Annual, 1976); “Hollis Frampton’s AUTUMNAL EQUINOX: A Modernist Film and Its Pictorial Past” (1977); “Frampton Unstructured: Notes for a Metacritical History” (1978); and “The Red and the Green,” published in October in 1985 and republished in 2022 in the volume on Frampton edited by Michael Zyrd. Jenkins also presented “Hollis Frampton: Excerpts from the Last Interview,” published in Mousse Magazine in 2012 together with Susan Krane.

Jenkins’s curatorial work and writing have been central to shaping how Frampton’s practice has been understood and exhibited. Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations was a landmark exhibition, among the first to address Frampton’s practice beyond cinema and to present his photography, objects, and works on paper as a coherent body of work rather than as peripheral or preparatory material.

The essay Jenkins published in the exhibition catalogue, “The ‘Other Work’ of Hollis Frampton: A Tour,” functions not only as an academic text but also as a curatorial framework. Written to guide viewers through the exhibition, it proposes a way of seeing Frampton’s non-film work as structurally integral to his artistic project. At the time, Frampton was still widely understood primarily as a filmmaker, and Jenkins’s essay played a decisive role in expanding that perception. The “other work” is framed not as a deviation from cinema but as a parallel laboratory in which Frampton developed ideas that later became central to his films: seriality, systems of classification, appropriation, and the use of language as a structuring device. While structured as a “guided tour” across different media (photography, xerography, collage, and assemblage) the essay simultaneously proposes a unified conceptual logic underlying them.

A distinctive feature of Jenkins’s approach is his insistence that these works provide privileged access to Frampton’s thinking. Because they often appear modest, provisional, or playful, they reveal procedures and decisions that are sometimes obscured by the complexity of the films. In this sense, the exhibition and its catalogue do not simply supplement Frampton’s cinema, they recalibrate how the entire oeuvre is understood.

A central reference point in Jenkins’s curatorial argument is (nostalgia) (1971), the film structured around the destruction of Frampton’s own photographs. Jenkins treats this work as emblematic rather than exceptional: it stages the passage from one medium to another and dramatizes the transformation of photographic objects into temporal and conceptual structures. Within the context of the exhibition, (nostalgia) becomes a hinge between the still works on display and Frampton’s film practice.

Equally significant is the way Jenkins situates Frampton’s portrait photography within a broader cultural and social field. The portraits of artists and peers are presented not merely as documents of a milieu but as elements within a self-conscious mapping of relationships, affiliations, and positions in the New York art world of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Viewed in this light, these works function simultaneously as social archive and conceptual construction.

Overall, Recollections/Recreations and its catalogue marked a turning point. They established a model for approaching Frampton not as a filmmaker with ancillary interests but as an artist whose work unfolds across media according to a coherent conceptual logic. Jenkins’s role as both curator and critic was central to this shift, and his essay remains a foundational reference for subsequent scholarship on Frampton.

This curatorial perspective is extended some twenty-five years later in Jenkins’s introduction to On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (MIT Press, 2009). Titled “Collecting His Thoughts: Remarks on the Writings of Hollis Frampton,” the essay performs a similar operation on a different body of material: Frampton’s critical and theoretical writings.

Here again Jenkins’s aim is not merely to contextualize or summarize but to reframe. He presents Frampton not as an artist who occasionally wrote about his work but as a paradigmatic artist-theorist of the “camera arts,” for whom writing and making were inseparable components of a single aesthetic and intellectual project.

Jenkins emphasizes that Frampton’s writing emerged in response to what the artist perceived as a fundamental inadequacy in mid-twentieth-century criticism of photography and film. Much of that criticism, Frampton argued, lacked both technical understanding and philosophical ambition. His own essays, by contrast, sought to construct a modernist critical discourse capable of standing alongside literature, philosophy, history, and science.

The texts collected in Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video, Texts 1968-1980 by Hollis Frampton, first published in 1983by Visual Studies Workshop Press, with a foreword by Annette Michelson, are presented by Jenkins as provisional articulations of this broader project. Written over many years and in different contexts, the essays do not form a closed system.

This sense of incompletion is crucial. For Jenkins, it is not a weakness but a defining feature of Frampton’s method, mirroring the open-ended and future-oriented logic of his artistic practice. Writing, like filmmaking, operates as a cognitive structure rather than a finished doctrine. Both aspire to the organizing power of natural language and function as tools for thinking through the historical and conceptual conditions of the camera arts.

Jenkins situates Frampton’s theoretical project within a wide intellectual constellation, ranging from Aristotle and Dante to Descartes, Darwin, Helmholtz, Joyce, and Beckett. Within the history of modern art and cinema, however, a structurally decisive role is played by the Soviet avant-garde, particularly the work and writings of Sergei Eisenstein alongside Dziga Vertov. Eisenstein, Jenkins argues, should not be understood merely as an influence but as a methodological precedent: his conception of montage as an intellectual and constructive process becomes a key model for Frampton’s own metahistorical ambitions.

Writing for journals such as Artforum and October, Frampton transformed the art review into a site of theoretical labor, embedding manifestos within historical analysis. Through these texts he sought not only to challenge inherited orthodoxies in photography and experimental film but also to reconnect the radical film theories of the 1920s and 1930s with the experimental practices of the late 1960s and 1970s and with the emerging horizon of digital media.

Bruce Jenkins’s work on Frampton ultimately establishes a model in which Frampton’s images, films and texts are not treated as separate domains but as interconnected components of a single, systemic inquiry into the “camera arts.”

Marie Rebecchi