Figure 1. A still from Frampton’s Drafts & Fragments (1974) and Zorns Lemma (1970) astride an image from Duane Michals’s The Lost Shoe (1969).
Strides might glide on strolls, but rambles are best with wobbling folds. Rock, bend, reach out for balance; attention below…collapses and curves forward’s flow. The art of Hollis Frampton pulls at the threads of treads: sneaking, skipping and leaping, through burrows.
Figure 2. Identificatory chart of Frampton’s Drafts & Fragments made by the author.
The loose collation of short films, Straits of Magellan: Drafts & Fragments (1974), provides a primer for this idea with its imagery of path, bridge, grounded legs, worm’s-eye view, and, especially, glowing shoe [Fig. 2]. The “Neon Boot Buffalo 1/74” entry, as it was labeled by Frampton for storage (not release), can be taken as a sign of how prevalent route-making is for this artist, on land as well as by voyaged sea, at night and by light.[1] The outlined footwear depicted in D&F#15 floats above the passing street traffic that will, by film’s end, blot out heel, arch, and sole to give us the contradictory senses of walking on air, and getting worn down [Fig. 3]. As one of the forty-nine “one-minute pieces” that Drafts & Fragments collects, this not-so-simple film was itself meant as a stepping stone, providing passage through the main pass of Frampton’s calendrical Magellan cycle (1972 – unfinished).[2] The filmmaker’s late 1978 “CLNDR” plan, available courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art, shows, for example, on its first full page of the Straits subsection, that only two days between January 7 and February 9 were not completely composed of a pair of “Pan[s].”[3] D&F holds a small (and silent) fraction of what was eventually going to be seven hundred and twenty “‘daylights’” dotting the epic three hundred and seventy one day-long film.[4] Any determination of the final placement for these “Lumière bits” (yet another moniker) remains unsettled.[5] The Criterion Collection has released nine of D&F’s “Panopticons,” assigning hypothetical numbers and slottings on specific dates. That three hundred and sixty, half of the Pan total, were going to have sound (so that each day’s pair would be split between silent and not) leaves us further in the dark; quite quiet.
Figure 3. Two stills from D&F#15.
Like the young boy who spends the second half of D&F#42 running in circles in a grassy field, round and round was part of Frampton’s modus operandi. Alongside his attraction to Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation, was an emphasis on taking multiple passes, on returns and revisitings, on ritualistic repetitions. It comes as no surprise then that the batch of entries in D&F contains not only on-ramps into the Magellan cycle (say, D&F#21’s smearing of grass and flowers as conduit to similar camera movements over similar ground in Summer Solstice [1974], or D&F#35’s “home butchering” in relation to Autumnal Equinox [1974]), but also flashes back to earlier Frampton films via allusion and duplicated or alternate-take footage. As Bruce Jenkins has sketched: Zorns Lemma (1970) is reignited by its fire (replacement image for X) being flipped left-right in D&F#5, and is rewintered by the snowy treescape of D&F#27 (akin to replacement image for F); Travelling Matte (1971) is given another whirl with the spin over hexagon tiles in D&F#48, pointing to the less dynamically shot, but all important, central appearance of such hardscaping in the earlier film; and, in a wild shoestring catch by Jenkins, Snowblind (1968) is re-entertained in D&F#2 with a found approximation of the Michael Snow sculpture at that film’s center.[6] Michael Zryd has added D&F#1 as a reference to Frampton’s Clouds Like White Sheep (1962), which gets listed as his very first film on his 1981 c.v. (after having been asked to discuss his “earlier-than-early” films by Scott MacDonald in a 1976-78 interview).[7] To these backward-facing five, we can add any number of others metaphorically (our neon kick ties into Zorns Lemma too [replacement image for P] [Fig. 1, right], the gas burner in D&F#12 relates to the hot plate’s heating coil in (nostalgia) [1971], the fish tank of D&F#25 to the one in Surface Tension [1968]), but only a few others are as direct as the bonfire of D&F#5. As Jenkins further elaborated on a second run with Drafts & Fragments, D&F#6 contains the dripping milk from States (1967/1970), and D&F#7 the rushing corn of Ordinary Matter (1972), albeit in color – was this printed to black-and-white for that fifth part of Hapax Legomena (1971-72); was there a thought of Ordinary Matter having the “‘surprise’” color section given to Remote Control (1972)?[8] Interestingly, these three most concrete links to previous Frampton films come back to back to back as D&F#s5-6-7 as if they were a cohesive and completed grouping. Their ordering even accounts for the remake date of States.[9] But there are at least two or three others that seem to share their circumstances of origin: D&F#3 looks very much like the frenetic material intercut with scenes in an artist’s studio in Process Red (1966), and this paragraph’s opener, D&F#42, might be a different take from the same roll and same day as the opening shot of Tiger Balm (1972) [Fig. 4, top]. There we begin with a cluster of small branches and leaves intriguingly and intricately lit by the sun, and tilt down to follow the shoulders and head of a boy as he runs rounds in front of some taller floral growth. Here it starts with Will Faller (son of Marion Faller) sitting, playing with clumps of grass, about to look right at us before rising (is he directed to?) to run laps (note the same overalls, that higher background vegetation, and the darker far right edge of his track [the shade from that small tree?]). But in D&F#42 the camera stays on the young legs and the grass, and also allows a brighter exposure [Fig. 4, bottom].
Figure 4. Stills from Frampton’s Tiger Balm (1972) (top) and D&F#42 (bottom).
Tiger Balm was the first completed stand-alone film of Magellan and it would later find its place as one of the last components of the final interlude, Mens Magelani (The Mind of Magellan), on the penultimate day of the cycle’s epilogue.[10] Frampton’s rental catalog note is touching:
“My clock seems to be running backwards: after two years of massive didacticism in black-and-white [Hapax Legomena], I am surprised by TIGER BALM, lyrical, in color, a celebration of generative humors and principles, in hommage [sic] to the green of England, the light in my dooryard…and consecutive matters.”[11]
Figure 5. Stills from Frampton’s Tiger Balm.
Much of the film is shot in Kew Gardens at a low camera height with slow, slight tilts up and then down as if the image is being taken in by something stretching its eye out of the ground [Fig. 5]. These are alternated with close-up shots of grass which seem to be on a different, less bluish, color stock than the material from England, and which look like the framing found in yet another D&F: #46 [Fig. 6, top]. Are these from Frampton’s dooryard too, like the opening shot of Will? Does the final D&F, #49, give us an affirmative answer? Unlike the contiguous grouping of D&F#s5-6-7 (so close to adding D&F#3, but instead admitting a separated sowing), we have, as a finale cemented by the concluding Pan, a slightly spaced out Tiger Balm band in the lasts of the D&F layout. [N.B. While I was cautious above about not locking Pans into numbers or dates, the ordering of D&F is a deliberate miniature version of how Straits of Magellan would play with different models of connecting (cf. the above with, e.g., the act of painting, seen only in D&F#16 and D&F#17)]. While definitely not from the same camera roll as material used in Tiger Balm, D&F#49 (labeled “Dandelion Seedhead 5/73”) remakes the child’s game in a different portion of field, with an older person marching/pacing back and forth across the frame. Looking like much less fun, the halo of Will’s backlit hair is now transferred over to a little fairyish flock [Fig. 6, bottom]. Clouds Like White Sheep held D&F’s first position. Tiger Balm-ish not only holds the last, but also the most, a frequency garnered by these three in the forties, but also by D&F#6, since the drippings from States also appear in Tiger Balm; by D&F#39, D&F#11 and D&F#21 since colorful plants and flowers (hothoused and outdoor) also decorate Tiger Balm; and, with D&F#21 right next to the low camera height in the grass of D&F#22, this latter to boot.
Figure 6. Stills from Frampton’s D&F#46 (top) and D&F#49 (bottom).
Though Frampton’s note on Tiger Balm distinguishes its tone from that of Hapax, there is one way that the newer film from Frampton’s largest cycle is tightly knotted to part of the older, smaller one. The UK footage shot at Salisbury Cathedral’s cloister and Stonehenge, on the same summer 1972 overseas trip as Kew, is arrived at in Ordinary Matterwith the kind of cross-Atlantic back and forth found in Tiger Balm’s England/dooryard alternation, but more forcefully. Instead of calm extensions up from the ground that then relax, Ordinary Matter goes full bore from rural New York State to Salisbury to the Brooklyn Bridge to farmland with tractor prints to Stonehenge to cornfields all through a set of lo-fi special effects, most of which rattle and shake, or fade out the ground as if drilling, tunneling, or zapping through terrestrial wormholes. This getting down in and through the earth recalls a favorite line of Zryd’s (Frampton talking about the difference between the chemistry of cobalt and the chemistry of dirt) and also inspired the inflection on burrowing that I began with.[12] Of course, Frampton’s films perambulate variously, mostly on land’s surface, with the interrupted “walking a block” (replacement image for H) from Zorns Lemma and the pixilated hikes of Surface Tension (1968) and Ordinary Matter; or just above it, with an elevated train lending mechanized movement in Ten Mile Poem (1964). There are also the plain, unmapped, gathering wanders that yielded Zorns Lemma’s word-images, and the earlier (pinned) photographic series Ways to Purity (1959), which hunted for its haul of images of art through fewer, more discretely parceled blocks of Manhattan.[13] And add in the admired footwork in the victory garden footage of Works and Days(1969). And…the barely edited real time walk of Travelling Matte, which, in an unpublished interview with Mitch Tuchman, Frampton compared to the 1886 Leo Tolstoy short story, “How Much Land Does A Man Need?,” a tale that hinges on the act and costs of getting one’s steps in.[14]
The motif of walking is explicitly invoked by Frampton in his catalog note for Hapax as a whole, which reads in part:
“HAPAX LEGOMENA incorporates what I could learn along the way of making it, and includes my own false starts and blind alleys…what T.E. Hulme once called ‘the cold walks, and the lines that lead nowhere.’”[15]
Given that Frampton called SUNY Binghamton’s campus “about as uningratiating a landscape as you can find anywhere,” and Travelling Matte “the pivot upon which the whole of Hapax Legomena turns,” that winter walk recorded on half-inch videotape for Hapax Legomena IV sounds like the main course that had to be retread in order to regain warmth, sight, and truth.[16] This adds great intrigue to, and hope for the discovery of, a 1976 film that Frampton seems to have completed called, “Cold Walks (16mm, 7:30 min., color, silent, unreleased).”[17] From the heart of his working period on Magellan, what cul-de-sac might it dig up, if not illuminate?
Now, one may have felt that my convolutions through Drafts & Fragments were also going nowhere, but I hope you’ll indulge one more observation that we can use as a fulcrum to get to the parallel I want to make between the preparatory pre-dispersal holding-pattern we see with the Pans on the D&F distribution reel, and the sets (cf. Zorns Lemma) of photographs used to illustrate Frampton’s essays on photography for Artforum in the first half of the 1970s. If we bring our Tiger Balm pair, D&F#s21 + 22, into contact with D&F#s19 + 20, we get something remarkably close to the title of the barely known, maybe never begun, Magellan entity from the Straits – the epicycle Path/Bridge/Garden – Garden/Bridge/Path [Fig. 7]. “Snowflake Light Pully [sic] NYC 1/74” (D&F#20) is one of two elements interfering with the trio existing as D&F#s22-19-21 or 21-19-22 (P/B/G or G/B/P). The other is that the bridge, instead of being centered between two shores, stands at the head. But then D&F#19 is the most immediately recognizable of the three terms, thus a great cue. Its perfect bookending with its own pictorial match to the path cradles the graphic link between the two inner ornamentals. Take the pull’s medallion as frozen cousin to flower, and the distinction between winter and warm seasons melts enough to put a positive valence on cold walks. Can’t we spin those so that their lines in and out of center reach peripheral points instead of being trails to nowhere? If this play with quartet emblematizes a new and future synthesis of Frampton’s ideas around routing, then it is an example that agrees with Susan Krane’s discussion of the artist’s
“metamorphoses…shifts…[that] are in no sense linear…[that are] worked on…often over long periods of time. Each realm of his work reverberated constantly with his activity in the others…Like a spider’s web, his work crosses back and forth on itself, interweaving previous structures and strands of thought, all the while spreading to new points of contact.”[18]
Figure 7. A still from each of Frampton’s D&Fs#19-22.
One of Krane’s examples in the full version of the above passage is the appearance of the muse from the photo series A Visitation of Insomnia (1970-73) at the conclusion of Frampton’s first Artforum essay, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” (1971).[19] I’d like to mimic her gluing by putting the edge terms of Garden/Bridge/Path not only alongside Drafts & Fragments, but also in concert with Frampton’s second Artforum essay, “Meditations Around Paul Strand” (1972).
Frampton was taken with the installation of the late 1971 Strand show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the impetus for his review. He describes its layout thoroughly as a way to understand this youngest of the “three grandmasters” of American 20th-century photography (of the other two, Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz, he would write a 1978 essay for October, and sketch a film idea [Fig. 8]).[20] The surprisingly circuitous criss-crossing that the exhibition’s galleries inspired (in order to shun) is related this way:
“the photographs are hung, in single or double rows, at about eye level…there are no captions or dates, but only the most unobtrusive small numbers, and these do not run serially. The prints are not arranged chronologically…the small numbers on the mattes refer us to placards, posted occasionally throughout the exhibition space, which describe each image by title (when there is one) and always by date and locale…The barest attempt to reconstruct a diachrony meets with the photographer’s implicit reproof: information is never withheld, but it is made effectively inaccessible, since its pursuit necessitates endless trips from photograph to identifying legend and back again.”[21]
Figure 8. Frampton’s note for an Alfred Stieglitz inspired film (in Anthology Film Archives’s Books & Paper Materials Collection).
This effective inaccessibility was carried over into the “strictly parallel monograph” which “Strand himself [also] supervised in detail,” making both show and catalog variants “from ordinary expectation” since things are so hard to track.[22] The separation between sub-table of contents pages in the book’s sections and their uncaptioned images forces a ton of page flipping (plus the every-other-page numbers are unusually small and tucked deeply into the gutter). Furthermore, three amazing interludes (prologue, excursus, and epilogue) momentarily disappear from the catalog when they are left off of the main table of contents pages (at least in the two volume edition).[23] The punchline that Frampton was getting to was this:
“Nonetheless, there is a principle of organization…It is by locale, in fact, that the prints are sorted. Strand has returned often to his accustomed sites, and two adjacent photographs from Vermont, for example, may be dated 30 or 40 years apart.) [sic] (Predictably, they differ from one another no more than they might if made on consecutive days.)…The meaning is quite clear. Still photography has, through one and another stratagem, learned to suspend or encode all but one of our incessant intuitions: I refer to what we call time.”[24]
Thus, we have “Gaspé,” “Colorado and New Mexico,” “Mexico,” and “New England” (in the second half of vol. 1), followed by “France,” “Italy,” “Outer Hebrides,” “French Personalities,” “Egypt,” “Ghana,” “Morocco,” and “Rumania” (in vol. 2). Certain destinations were only visited once by Strand in his travels (Outer Hebrides, Egypt, Ghana, Morocco), but their placements in the itinerary can subtly bend time (Egypt 1959, Ghana 1963-64, Morocco 1962, Rumania 1960 and 1967). A more extreme warp hits with a 1947 and five 1966 images found in the generally earlier Western Hemisphere regions (transgressing the 1946 end date of vol. 1), all of which had included many slight achronological steps, photo by photo.
Figure 9The photographic sets that form the prologue, excurses, and epilogue in Paul Strand: A Retrospective Monograph (1971).
“French Personalities” probably jumps out as odd. Why aren’t those just in the section for that nation, or a subsection of it? Odder still is that there is an excursion after that batch (mainly of artists) to three unpopulated images from Orgeval: The Vine (1964), Bachelor Buttons (1963), and The Garden (1964) [Fig. 9, bottom left]. Strand’s home in later life, this town in north-central France was, with one (therefore telling) exception, completely left out of the earlier “France” section. Instead of messy mistake, we get the marking of a maze, for Orgeval dominates this excursus as well as the epilogue – Driveway (1957) and Leaves (1965) [Fig. 9, right] – and is the destination of the prologue [Fig. 9, top left]: Girl (Tenancingo, Mexico, 1933) to The White Road (Moldavia, Rumania, 1960) to The Happy Family (Orgeval, France, 1958) [these last two add to the post-1946 list for vol. 1]. I’m walking you through Strand’s games (and there are others, like “French Personalities” echoing vol. 1’s first sections [the multi-locale “Camera Work, Early Personalities” and “Machine and Nature Forms”], and additional complex insertions [e.g. Ship (1921)]), because they must have appealed to Frampton. His inclusion of Strand’s final catalog image as the conclusion to his first pairing for the Artforum essay suggests a recognition of, and willingness to play along on, the paths to Orgeval’s gardens [Fig. 10].
Figure 10. Map of Frampton’s “Strand” essay in Artforum (February 1972).
Frampton’s layout for the “Strand” essay extends his point about returns by organizing four pairs of similar subjects (plants, machines, architecture, people). The captions, conveniently placed directly under the images in the magazine, indicate the stretching of dates that Frampton remarked upon with his Vermont example: 1928 + 1965, 1923 + 1967, 1924 + 1964, 1916 + 1954. But there is an extremely elegant catch. Frampton pushes the idea of “return[ing]…on consecutive days” to the same place, by adding geographical shifts between the photographs – Maine + France, New York + Rumania, New York + Ghana, New York + Scotland – making twins twined from the northeast U.S. and Europe/Africa.[25] This elaboration of the conceit about time comes with other layers. Of all the plant pictures to open with, Frampton uses Iris (1928), bringing eye and lens in, echoing Strand’s own evocation of vision with his prominent catalog placement of Blind Woman (1916) (the first post-prologue image). The essay’s text has an anchor too. Its opening scene of a dialog between Frampton and a student contains a line that reaches right across the crease to Iris + Leaves: “Master and journeyman alike had to face down, in a kind of frozen Gethsemane, the specter of the plastic arts.”[26] Doesn’t that blanching in the Orgeval sample summon frost? A cold walk with camera? A path driving the way into a strangely weathered Mediterranean garden?
If Strand’s incredible efforts inspired Frampton in his first published essay on photography, we should not forget that it was his second Artforum entry. “Metahistory” is illustrated by three kinds of things: single frames of word-images (five in all) from Zorns Lemma, a filmstrip (five frames in length) of a single word-image from Zorns Lemma, and incongruously, a frame from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) [Fig. 11]. There is a connection to be made between the Vertov still and the one that announces Annette Michelson’s role as “organize[r] and edit[or]” of the September, 1971 “Special Film Issue” on the contents page; but staying within “Metahistory,” the circularity of Vertov’s lens (or lenses) nearly sheds its box, making for a strong contrast with the facing page’s four small rectangular stills under a larger one.[27] Why the two different scales, and why does “Pipe” get the XL [Fig. 12]? The essay’s distinction between Kleio’s “verbal artifacts” and Dean Swift’s “facts” is distilled in the difference between these five separated “compact” frames and the five connected frames on the “concatenated” filmstrip that follow.[28] The internal rectangles in “Pipe” create five frames (one already filled with a word in red, plus two blanks and two partials ready to take in the four others below), challenging the “fact [as] the indivisible module out of which systematic substitutes for experience are built.”[29] Riffing on the René Magritte reference made palpable by the fencing’s decorative shape in “Pipe,” this single frame is not a fact. But what of the selections “Land,” “Zest,” “Temple,” “Create,” and the “Lotus” strip? Could they have been any old words, or a lower four reading “Swift,” “Fact,” and the two nouns from Frampton’s criticism of closed off circularity (the phenakistiscope’s “hurdling horses and bouncing balls”) vs. the “open set” [Fig. 13]?[30] Admittedly, “concatenated” would have been tough.
Figure 11. Map of Frampton’s “Metahistory” essay in Artforum (September 1971).
Figure 12. Stills from the Criterion Collection’s release of Zorns Lemma replicating part of the “Metahistory” layout.
Figure 13. Stills from the Criterion Collection’s release of Zorns Lemma creating an imaginary alternative layout to Fig. 12.
Figure 14. Image included in Visual Studies Workshop Press’s “blue print” for the “Plates” in Circles of Confusion (1983) (in Anthology Film Archives’s Books & Paper Materials Collection).
The bond between Frampton and Michelson was just beginning to formalize with “Metahistory,” and solidified quickly. As early as July of 1977, she was in touch with Urizen Books trying to put a collection of Frampton’s writing together.[31] This had to wait about five more years for Circles of Confusion, where Frampton gives
“thanks to Annette Michelson, whose generosity and gracious persistence as my editor, first at Artforum and now at October, is matched only by the warmth and exhilarating precision of her own writing.”[32]
The question of how much control Frampton, or Michelson for that matter, had at Artforum is a good one (raised by Anne Breimaier in this issue of LFU’s roundtable). In a germane example from a post-screening discussion at Millennium Film Workshop in 1976, Frampton praised Michelson’s selection for the cover of Artforum’s January 1973 issue on “Eisenstein Brakhage.” Exploring the various possibilities of legibility (or lack thereof) for a static frame pulled from projected movement, Frampton states:
“it took at least quite some time to identify what the image was…I gradually identified it, only very gradually, and yet at the same time I had to reflect that I had seen that frame many times and had felt it to be perfectly intelligible…That frame was chosen by the guest editor of that issue, who was Annette Michelson, as I felt, with intent, out of all the frames of film that have ever been made.”[33]
I take this “with intent,” as well as Frampton’s stress on Strand’s supervisory roles, as indications of what Frampton was himself doing. While I have not yet found a letter or remark directly clarifying Frampton’s level of oversight on the Artforum layouts, there is a telling trace in his correspondence with Joan Lyons, founding director of Visual Studies Workshop Press. In the months before the February, 3, 1983 publication of Circles of Confusion, there are two Lyons letters that let us in on the involved process of illustrating Frampton/Frampton’s illustrating. Attempts to locate photographic prints from scholars like Estelle Jussim, and places like the George Eastman House, came with problems, failures, and requests for flexibility. An image of F. Holland Day’s was secured from Jussim (or with her help), but was “the wrong version”; nevertheless, Boy Embracing the Herm of Pan (c. 1905) was included in a “blue print” for the book’s “picture section,” sent to Frampton by VSWP’s Ed Reed [Fig. 14].[34] With time getting tight, Lyons wrote to Frampton:
“Marion indicated that you still wish to use the Marey. It is really quite late for that at this time. Getting the Holland Day was a major saga. Can you go with it? My plan was to put the book on the press tomorrow, picture section first.”[35]
Since Marey, not Day, is in Circles (page 45), Frampton’s answer must have been “no.”[36] But we’ve jumped ahead a little too quickly. The Strand essay, on a single photographer, launched one vein of writing and picturing for Frampton that went through “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract” (March 1973) and, with fewer, but no less potent illustration choices for October 5, “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place” (Summer 1978). There was also a second stream covering photography in general, where Frampton had much wider swaths to choose from in “Digressions on the Photographic Agony” (November 1972), “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity” (October 1974), and, finally, as the copyright paperwork from VSWP calls it, the “picture sequence” in Circles.
Figure 15. Map of Frampton’s “Digressions” essay in Artforum (November 1972).
Figure 16. Map of Frampton’s “Incisions” essay in Artforum (October 1974).
At the 2010 University of Chicago Film Studies Center conference, “Critical Mass: The Legacy of Hollis Frampton,” coordinated by Tom Gunning, Bruce Jenkins, and Matt Hauske, Gerald O’Grady tacked on a postscript to his presentation. He wanted to point out how little had ever been said about the “Plates” that intercede between the front matter (Frampton’s preface plus Annette Michelson’s foreword) of Circles, and the twelve collected, previously published “Texts” that make up the body of the book. O’Grady claimed that neither Frampton nor Michelson addressed this new “visual essay” in the pages immediately preceding the thirty-one images, and that reviewers of the book (including P. Adams Sitney, R. Bruce Elder and Simon Field) had also failed to comment on what he takes to be a thirteenth circle.[37] He only had time to show the opening non-photograph, Honoré Daumier’s caricature of Nadar in a hot air balloon (also the only recto facing a blank verso), in relation to the final duo of Nadar’s photograph The Paris Catacombs(1861) on the left, with Talbot/Bridges’ Salt Beds (1846) on the right. O’Grady emphasized an arc for Nadar (the only personage repeated within the “Plates”): up in the air to start, and down underground by end. And stressed how the human skulls and bones interfaced with the final subject of salt, a preserver, an element in Talbot’s salted paper prints. “Salt could enliven images, bring them back to life,” O’Grady said, quoting (or paraphrasing) Talbot. We were all invited to help revivify this “astoundingly erudite essay done in pictures;” for, O’Grady admitted, “I haven’t solved a couple of pages yet.”
I don’t think O’Grady could have known about Bill Judson’s unpublished review of Circles, which foregrounds, in its opening paragraph,
“an intriguing group of 31 photographs [sic], mostly famous images from the history of photography. These are not illustrations of the essays. Rather, they are found objects arranged in a way that constitutes a thirteenth essay, interweaving amusing autobiographical references with a discourse on the nature of photography.”[38]
While Judson doesn’t provide specifics, we are encouraged to ferret out multiple reasonings, first, for any one image’s inclusion, and second, for its positioning (to follow parts of Frampton’s breakdown of the “second stage…usually called editing” in his model of analysis based on the “activity of film-making” discussed in the unillustrated October essay, “Notes on Composing in Film”).[39] To start with the last, the caption for Salt Beds in Circles reads: “Formerly attributed to W.H. Fox-Talbot, probably George Bridges. Collection, Royal Photographic Society, Great Britain” (page 55). The image is one of only two “Plates” that get repeated from any of Frampton’s Artforum (or the “Weston”) spreads. In “Digressions,” Frampton’s review of two exhibitions in Britain (“Masterpiece: Treasures from the Collection of the Royal Photographic Society” and “‘From Today Painting is Dead’: The Beginnings of Photography”), the caption had read “W. H. Fox Talbot, Salt Beds, Possibly at Malta.”[40] In the catalog of the second of those shows, we see listed, but not illustrated, “Saltbeds at Malta” in a grouping of calotypes “taken by William Henry Fox Talbot or his close friends and associates.”[41] So, in addition to O’Grady’s notion of enlivening, we also have an example of what Frampton’s preface put as “scattered surreptitious corrections in matters of fact” in relation to a former misattribution.[42] Another more major correction takes us back to Strand. Frampton had “record[ed] [his] absolute astonishment” that there was a “single exception” to the traditional categories of painting in those photographs in Philadelphia.[43] “Portrait, landscape, still life, abstraction” are there, but “there is one category entirely missing: the nude.” Frampton is shocked “that anything under the sun might be exempt from the scrutiny of [Strand’s] lens.” All of these words remain intact in the “Strand” essay in Circles, but at some point in the intervening decade, Frampton made a discovery that he tucks away in the “Plates” without tipping its revisionary power: Torso, Taos, New Mexico (1930) (page 28).[44]
Frampton had been asked by Lyons to “say a word or two about the picture section.”[45] Since that is about how many he ultimately used, O’Grady’s perception of Frampton’s silence on the subject is understandable. However, there is something to pull out from Frampton’s statement that, “Fictions excepted, this book collects all the pieces I care to keep, from the interval of their composition. That is not intended to mean that I think it complete.”[46] This seeming contradiction between “all” and completion gets resolved in the next paragraph, where we learn of intrapiece holes. For instance, “circumstances never properly allowed anatomisation…of Edward Weston’s…unacknowledged debts to Margrethe Mather, Tina Modotti, and Sonya Noskowiak.”[47] Well…all three of these photographers hold slots in “Plates” (pages 29, 57, 58 [note pagination of 50s!]), gesturing toward just such extension. These asterisk-like entries are weightier than a different kind of rewrap that “Plates” makes when it swaps specific examples used in Artforum for others. Simultaneously contra and co- Judson’s claim of non-illustration, the photographs sometimes are, but also bring more than that with them. In Artforum’s “Digressions” we get to see the Descendants of the mutineers of H.M.S. Bounty(1862) and Julia Margaret Cameron’s Sir John F.W. Herschel (1867), both mentioned in Frampton’s text (as follows: “But here too are anonymous images of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers” and “the eyes of Herschel”) [Fig. 15].[48]In Circles, neither of these appear, but we get different images called out by Frampton in the same essay: Robert Howlett’s Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the steamship Great Eastern (1857) and Frederick H. Evans’s Aubrey Beardsley (1895). Both are replacements with new additional purpose in their respective pairings (machine vs. nature, and profile vs. full face [doubled by superimposition] [pages 30 + 31 and 40 + 41]).[49]
Larger and more intricate pattern-building abounds within and across these portfolios. To mention just a few examples briefly and partially (before ending with a more in-depth treatment), is of course to remain in process, awaiting both the re-readings and re-tallyings one does oneself, and what one learns about from others. In two post-O’Grady encouragements, John Klacsmann alerts us to the “playful series of historical photographic plates highlighting the subjects [Frampton] references” in Circles, and Érik Bullot ran some of Circles’ “Plates” through his matrix of “speculation, erudition, and enigma” at the 2026 Paris conference, “Hollis Frampton: From Form to Idea to Form of Idea.”[50] Bringing the “Plates” in touch with their Artforum predecessors should become easier now with Artforum’s digital access.
I had mentioned that Salt Beds was one of only two images repeated between the earlier venues and what gets served up in the 1983 collection. The other, which did not need to correct its attribution from “Incisions,” is Alvin Langdon Coburn’s Ezra Pound (1916) (page 38). This may be telling enough on its own, but what should we make of Pound being paired, not with Bernice Abbott’s James Joyce (1928) (page 36), but with Cameron’s Alice Liddell (1872) (page 39) (and did Frampton know that this was Liddell as Pomona?)?[51] The Richard Polak that starts the parade in “Digressions,” The Little Golf Player (1913), is mentioned in the text right next to it/left of it, but also needs to be grasped as the only 20th-century image in that whole lot. Cameron had been featured in both “Digressions” and then “Incisions” with similar images of Sir John F.W. Herschel [Fig. 16]. Both seem to be from the same sitting, but were dated 1867 and 1869 in their respective Artforum captions. Is this near repetition tied to the critique of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “‘decisive moment’” in “Incisions”?[52] For his part, Herschel, instead of being the subject of an image, as he is twice in the original publications, becomes author with one of his own cyanotypes presented in Circles (page 26). And there is the red-brown printing of Talbot’s The Open Door (1844) (as well as Cameron’s Herschel to a lesser extent on the facing page) in Artforum’s “Incisions” after Henry Peach Robinson’s Little Red Riding Hood (1858) – all also suggestive of the “Muybridge” essay’s discussion of “tonality” in 19th-century photography (“a range of sumptuous reds, browns, sepias; they were almost never black-and-white”).[53] And, sadly (?), Circles’ inclusion of an Atget (page 35), the one who got away from Frampton, as October twice hoped for his “Atget at MoMA” (listed as forthcoming for October 19, 20, or 21 on the back covers of 18 [Fall 1981] and 19 [Winter 1981]).
The final section of “Incisions” centers on Diane Arbus. It includes direct mention of the essay’s closing illustration (“or a standing naked man, his genitals tucked away between his thighs, ‘being’ a woman as if the verb to bewere somehow made transitive”), amongst others of hers that are described but not shown.[54] The penultimate photograph, also Arbus’s (Girl in a shiny dress, N.Y.C. [1967]), is not tagged in the text, and appears just before the page on which the Arbus discussion begins, let alone starts to set sail into its beautiful tribute:
“should we ever find and utter a name for what these images mean to us, we would so profane them that they might vanish like Eurydice, or fall to dust. Now, in this moment, as I see, once again, the photographs of Diane Arbus, these words that I drop behind me consume themselves as if by fire.”[55]
Girl in a shiny dress is the only single image given full page status in the layout, and it sits recto across from a very mysterious three-quarter verso: Nickolas Muray’s Ruth Draper (1922). Neither of those names are inscribed in “Incisions,” but the portion of the essay squeezed under the Muray/Draper portrait of an androgynous, mostly cloaked face does something to bind it to A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. (1968). It introduces the recent trend of “making sequences of images,” exemplified by Leslie Krims and Duane Michals, who are both illustrated on the previous pair of pages (AF 46 + 47), recalling the very first page of the essay (AF 39), bounded at the bottom by Robinson’s “jammed…stor[y]…in four installments” which is not discussed until later.[56] The activity of linking, in all of its de-, mis-, and re-, tinkerings is what Frampton is forging here when the eleventh written segment of “Incisions” traverses, and so cups, its three final photographic examples. After having given us Michals’s nine-image Things are Queer (1973), and six out of ten of the images comprising Krims’s unordered set, The Incredible Case of the Stack O’Wheats Murders (c. 1972) (the caption reads “(detail)”) [also note how many bathrooms and other household areas with sinks are included so as to rhyme with the Michals]), Frampton creates his own sequence across the last three pages by splicing the Muray into two by Arbus. The close-up of a modest and mournful Draper enacting a solemn character has its covering cloth pulled back from head and neck, down below the shoulders in the medium-long shot of a 1960s celebrant whose smile and skin electrify gloss into her own dress, charging Draper’s matte material. Then, all clothing gets removed for the long shot’s foregrounding of male/female fusion instead of inconclusiveness. What we are left with is another pun on a name like the one Lisa Zaher uncovered in Frampton’s walking work, Ways to Purity (1959). In that case, Zaher unraveled Frampton’s inclusion of a reference to photographer Siegfried Lauterwasser (via reflections off an aluminum door) as an “‘impur[ity],’” since Lauterwasser (which Zaher translates from German as “Pure Water”) had frozen such patterns off of his namesake’s liquid surface.[57] In this one, at the end of “Incisions,” Draper is undraped, disrobed by Hollis through Diane. The final naked subject flanked by drapes, even.
In addition to all these sets of images in Artforum (and then Circles), Frampton logged a grouping of Borges epigraphs. The “Strand” essay ends with
“a man [who] peoples a space with images of provinces…mountains…ships…tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”[58]
These patterns are pierced by the heavy wrinkles of the weathered human specimens Frampton selected from/for Strand on this epigraph’s facing Artforum page [Fig. 10]. The “Muybridge,” whose illustrations I haven’t been able to touch on (and there may be much to make of one of them and the etymological paragraph on Muggeridge’s new name), concludes with
“The steps a man takes, from the day of his birth to the day of his death, trace an inconceivable figure in time…perceiv[ed]…at once [by]…The Divine Intelligence.”[59]
Lastly, the “Incisions” epigraph flares the flames of Frampton’s trail of Arbus words like a bellows, conflagrating it, making it reach back to the essay’s earlier Breedlove section which ends with the racecar driver’s post-crash words, “‘For my next act, I’ll set myself on fire’”:
“Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that bears me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges.”[60]
Dare I offer that all three of these attackers/devourers appear in Drafts & Fragments (#19 + 23, #14, #5 + 11 + 12 + 47)? In the more immediate context of Frampton’s burning breadcrumbed phrases, Borges’s “I am the fire” calls out for another Michals series to be swapped into our eternal segmenting: The Lost Shoe (1969) [Fig. 1, center].[61] Its final image found its way, patiently, a few years after “Incisions,” along a labyrinthian path, into Frampton and Faller’s “A general theory of reversed photographic influence” from False Impressions (1979) [Fig. 17]. Look at that heel of fire in its top right corner. Let us hope to hell its torch is healing.
Figure 17. Marion Faller and Frampton’s “A general theory of reversed photographic influence” from False Impressions (1979).
Ken Eisenstein
[1] Anthology Film Archives’ Books & Paper Materials Collection contains a set of Frampton’s card labels for most ofDrafts & Fragments. While I will occasionally mention these by name, Frampton was hesitant to do so at a 1974 screening:
I have very carefully not titled them because I really think at this point, having been teaching for some time, that I don’t have to be a teacher all the time anymore. It’d be better, perhaps, for people to make their own titles. I have my own list of titles, even those which are explanatory, helpful, clever, and all sorts of things like that.
See “Hollis Frampton: Three Talks at Millennium,” Millennium Film Journal nos. 16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 1986-87), 283.
[2] At Millennium, Frampton had called these “one-minute segments” (note 1). In a 1976 interview, he called them “one-minute pieces.” See Deke Dusinberre and Ian Christie’s “Episodes from a Lost History of Movie Serialism: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Film Studies 4 (Summer 2004), 106.
[3] The “CLNDR” is at https://records.cmoa.org/things/dafba4b6-3107-4199-b6d6-d21661d1cc3b/ . I refer to page 3. Brian Henderson counted 327 days of Magellan that looked like most of January’s in his “Propositions for the Exploration of Frampton’s Magellan,” October 32 (Spring 1985), 133.
[4] In his interview with Simon Field and Peter Sainsbury from May of 1972, Frampton referred to “those one minute Lumières” as “‘daylights’” and “one minute anti-extravaganzas.” See “Zorns Lemma and Hapax Legomena: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Afterimage 4 (Autumn 1972), 74.
[5] Screening Room with Robert Gardner DVD, recorded December 9, 1976 (aired January 13, 1977). Quotation about D&F#35 in the next paragraph comes from same.
[6] Bruce Jenkins, “The Films of Hollis Frampton: A Critical Study” (Dissertation, Northwestern University, 1984), 304. Jenkins’s language in this paragraph on “films that refer to earlier works” is left open. When he writes of “direct quotations” and “returns to the same locale” the extents remain unresolved. The fire shot literally looks to be from Zorns Lemma footage. The hexagon shot would probably be impossible to judge even in a side-by-side comparison with Travelling Matte; however, Frampton’s D&F labels identify the location as Amherst, MA (not Binghamton, NY [see below]).
[7] Michael Zryd, Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), 200-01 [note Zryd’s use of “fittingly,” “first,” “last,” and “lost”]. Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 27. For a copy of the c.v. see https://records.cmoa.org/things/30e3a1d0-cbbb-48c1-b0f6-bd34e67dac26/ .
[8] Bruce Jenkins, “The Red and the Green,” October 32 (Spring 1985), 88. Here Jenkins seems to pull back the tree example from being a “quotation” (in the direct sense of coming from the same footage?). Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue no. 6 (New York: The New American Cinema Group, Inc., 1975), 91.
[9] MacDonald, Critical Cinema, 32.
[10] For a January 1980 presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s New American Filmmakers Series, Tiger Balm was listed as such. In the filmography in MacDonald, Critical Cinema it is listed as (Memoranda Magelani: #1)(page 381). There are other discrepancies between the Whitney’s program and MacDonald; perhaps they depend on non-Whitney source material. A copy of the Whitney document is in Anthology Film Archives’ Books & Paper Materials Collection. On the non-stand-alone nature of Apparatus Sum (1972), see MacDonald, Critical Cinema, 72.
[11] Catalogue no. 6, 92 [ellipsis in original].
[12] Zryd, Navigating, 18. Speaking of my beginning, “Lacing a Terrain” comes from Frampton’s preface, “Ox House Camel Rivermouth” in Circles of Confusion: Film. Photography. Video. Texts 1968-1980 (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983), 7.
[13] For the very few word-images that Frampton trapped outside Manhattan see his “Notes on Zorns Lemma” in Scott MacDonald, Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 57. The quote in the previous sentence comes from page 62 of same.
[14] Mitch Tuchman, November 22, 1971 Interview Typescript, 5 in Anthology Film Archives’ Books & Paper Materials Collection.
[15] Catalogue no. 6, 90 [ellipsis in original].
[16] MacDonald, Critical Cinema, 67 and Catalogue no. 6, 91. On the same page in MacDonald, Frampton discusses practicing making it to the hexagons and back to his starting point against the known length of the reel.
[17] See Stephen Gallagher, “Hollis Frampton: A Film Retrospective, Selected Bibliography and Filmography,” 14 in Anthology Film Archives’ Books & Paper Materials Collection. Its title sheet states: “based on the artist’s resumes and archives.”
[18] Susan Krane, “Introduction” in Krane and Bruce Jenkins, Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1984), 9 [ellipses mine].
[19] The Krane “Chronology” in Recollections/Recreations mentions the shoot for the series in 1970 (page 114) and its revision for exhibition in 1973 (page 70), but Molly Nesbit has established an earlier 1970 show date, and has been interviewing the model, Alice Weiner.
[20] Hollis Frampton, “Meditations Around Paul Strand,” Artforum (February 1972), 52.
[21] “Strand,” AF 57 [ellipses mine].
[22] “Strand,” AF 57 + 52.
[23] Paul Strand: A Retrospective Monograph (Millerton, New York: Aperture, Inc. 1971). The copyright page states: “The photographs were selected, sequenced, and sized by Paul Strand, Hazel Strand, and Michael Hoffman. An edition bound as one volume has been produced by Aperture, Inc. and published to accompany a major retrospective…An edition bound in two volumes is published by Aperture, Inc. for general distribution” [ellipsis mine]. Frampton was using “a large quarto volume of nearly 400 pages” (“Strand,” AF 52). I have not yet been able to see the single volume edition; instead, I’ve been studying the two volume one, which breaks along The Years 1915-1946 (vol. 1) and The Years 1950-1968 (vol. 2), an overall yet illusory chronology. The pagination is continuous for a total of 382 pages.
[24] “Strand,” AF 57 [ellipses mine].
[25] “Strand,” AF 57 [ellipsis mine].
[26] “Strand,” AF 52.
[27] Artforum (September, 1971), 7 + 32. I had discussed this once before without having realized that the open-eye Vertov still is something Michelson also used to mark both her “Eisenstein Brakhage” special issue of Artforum (January 1973) and the back cover of the inaugural issue of October 1 (Spring 1976). See Ken Eisenstein, “‘Disembering’: The Activity of the Archive in Hollis Frampton” (Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2016), 63-64 + 206.
[28] Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypothesis,” Artforum (September 1971), 32.
[29] “Metahistory,” AF 32.
[30] “Metahistory,” AF 34 and 32.
[31] Annette Michelson, July 5, 1977 letter to Frampton, Anthology Film Archives’ Books & Paper Materials Collection.
[32] “Ox,” 11.
[33] “Three Talks at Millennium,” 294 [ellipses mine].
[34] Joan Lyons, August 9 [1982?] letter to Frampton and Ed Reed, Thursday, October 21 [1982?] letter to Frampton, Anthology Film Archives’ Books & Paper Materials Collection. The “blue print” is also at Anthology.
[35] Joan Lyons, “Monday” letter to Frampton, Anthology Film Archives’ Books & Paper Materials Collection. The extent of the “saga” is a little unclear since the August letter refers to “the print we have from Estelle Jussim” without naming it. The August letter also has a chunk on the George Eastman House and Oscar Gustave Rejlander ripe for further study.
[36] Circles is available here https://monoskop.org/images/0/0f/Frampton_Hollis_Circles_of_Confusion_Film_Photography_Video_Texts_1968-1980.pdf . When I refer to the page numbers of certain “Plates,” I use the original pagination, not that of the pdf.
[37] A video recording of the entire conference is held at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center (beginning with call numbers FSC.DV.0024 [Mini-DV] and DVD003363). I am grateful to film programmer Hannah Yang for helping me access the O’Grady more than a decade after having been at it. I have only checked the Sitney.
[38] See Judson’s review here https://records.cmoa.org/things/ad5e7dc0-7d1d-422d-aea2-e84343f59886/ .
[39] Hollis Frampton, “Notes on Composing in Film,” October 1 (Spring 1976), 109 [ellipsis and slight reordering mine].
[40] Hollis Frampton, “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” Artforum (November 1972), 49.
[41] ‘From today painting is dead’: The Beginnings of Photography catalog published by The Arts Council of Great Britain for an exhibit at The Victoria & Albert Museum 16 March – 14 May 1972, 28-29.
[42] “Ox,” 11.
[43] All remaining quotations in this paragraph are from “Strand,” AF 57.
[44] I mentioned this “Plate” vs. text interaction parenthetically in Eisenstein, “Disembering,” 173 + 289.
[45] Lyons, “Monday” letter to Frampton. Lyons has continued to try to call attention to the “new visual essay – thirty-one images culled from the history of photography and titled simply, ‘Plates,’” in Joan Lyons, ed. Artists’ Books: Visual Studies Workshop Press 1971-2008 (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 2009), 126.
[46] “Ox,” 10.
[47] “Ox,” 10 [ellipses mine].
[48] “Digressions,” AF 46 + 48.
[49] Brunel and his ship are referenced in the opening fable, but this particular image in Circles is also described (“and tiny I.K. Brunel in top hat, standing beside the surrealistically enormous anchor-chains of the Great Eastern” [AF page 46]). As for the other: “One questions, ritually, the inclusion of Evans, whose oeuvre is small and specialized (cathedrals, plus Aubrey Beardsley) in a notably copious and variegated company” (AF page 44). Also see the Nadar paragraph (on AF page 48) in relation to the inclusion of his George Sand (1864) in the original “Digressions” and his place in “Plates.”
[50] John Klacsmann, review of On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009) in The Moving Image vol. 12 no. 1 (Spring 2012), 148. Special thanks to Bullot for sharing an English translation of his “Figures of Speech.” His attention to “resemblance, disparity, and antithesis” in relation to his comparison between Beardsley’s hands and James Broughton’s (in the photograph by Imogen Cunningham) is wonderful (pages 40 + 41). And tremendous thanks to Bruce Jenkins and Olga Kobryn for their help with this essay.
[51] See the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current titling at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/270819 . The caption on page 39 of Circles has Alice Liddell as the title and The Met’s collection as the source.
[52] “Incisions,” AF 45. Cf. The Met’s dates for Cameron’s Herschels here https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/282064 and here https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283097 .
[53] Hollis Frampton, “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract,” Artforum (March 1973), 44-45.
[54] “Incisions,” AF 50.
[55] “Incisions,” AF 50.
[56] “Incisions,” AF 48 + 44.
[57] Lisa Zaher, “By Mind and Hand: Hollis Frampton’s Photographic Modernism” (Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2013), 107.
[58] “Strand,” AF 57.
[59] “Muybridge,” AF 52 [ellipses and slight reordering mine].
[60] “Incisions,” AF 44 + 50. Note how the epigraph had been woven into the last paragraph of the Breedlove section: “Rescuers, expecting to find him mangled as by a tiger…” (AF page 44).
[61] The full Michals series is at https://emuseum.vassar.edu/people/3582/duane-michals/objects .