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| Marketa Luskacova Edward with Clock off Cheshire Street Market, London 1983 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| Gilles Peress Catholic Schoolgirls Smoking during Lunch Break Ardoyne, Belfast 1984 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Gary Sutton Nude 1983 C-print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Jay Maisel Man and Yellow Wall with Drawings 1984 dye imbibition print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Jay Maisel Black Granite Wall with Flowers 1984 dye imbibition print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Jay Maisel First Snow, Elizabeth Street 1984 dye imbibition print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Jay Maisel Sheet Metal House at Sunset 1984 dye imbibition print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Richard Misrach Desert Fire #81 1984 C-print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| William Clift A Stenciled Passage, Framingham, Massachusetts 1984 platinum-palladium print Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Jeff Rosenheim New York City 1983 gelatin silver print Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Sandra Russell Clark Nude Wrapped 1984 gelatin silver print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Michael Kenna River Thames, London (Homage to Brassaï) 1983 gelatin silver print Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Doug Dubois My Brother Luke, Christmas Eve 1984 C-print Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Jerome Liebling Morning, Monessen, Pennsylvania 1983 C-print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Lynn Geesaman Topiary, Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania 1984 gelatin silver print Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Allen Hess St Ann's Church, Jerusalem 1983 gelatin silver print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
from After the Stravinsky Concert
i
One day the pier glass in the entrance hall
swayed slightly, shuddered, and slid down the wall.
Just so an aunt of mine
was found once, sitting on the parquetry
in the same house near dawn, her wreath awry
and roses on her breath; but that perhaps
is neither here nor there, the glass uniting both
having long since been carried to the lumber-room,
leaving us nothing to reflect upon. The gilded frame
was loosened and the mirror cracked. A cherub lost
a flying ribbon and whatever
had been underneath was only plaster.
ii
Fell of its own weight was the verdict I know better
girl though I was then not yet risen
from the kitchen where that afternoon
the dishes rattled like the bowels
of a starving man they said along the gallery
the pictures swung as if freshly hanged
and in the drawing-room the vases chattered
like nervous women in a thunderstorm –
it was the boys
old men now stuffed with honors till their eyes
bulge out as if already marble
noble this and noble that on Sundays
glossy in the sups you might have seen
my photo too last birthday toothless I looked
but at least alive – I was saying
the nephews jumping on the beds upstairs
that was the cause. Your grandmother
was fond of them Lord alone knows why fond-
foolish if you ask me or else proud
to be bewildered so.
They should never have been invited at all.
iii
Not half an hour before the fall, my grandmother
had stood impaling with the perfect calm
of confidence in time and place her floating hat
upon a pin; perfectly gentle, perfectly good,
pierced thus the instant, crowned herself
innocent patroness of place and time.
This was her afternoon to call.
The mirror gave her back her face
wondrously like: she knew
exactly where she was within the frame,
could lift a gloved finger if she wished
to touch the earlobe where the pearldrop sprung
chaste fruit of gold, and what she saw
she touched could feel, by sense and reason
mirror-assured that touch and sight were one,
aspects of distance and the moment joined
in a grave image of reality, as if she had been swan
and glass the stilled
water she moved on, making a single silvered self
(liable, however, to current and the wind
shaking the silvered surface of the dream).
When she came back, here the great boys had been
and had their game. She did not scold; said merely
she had been fond of it; had it put away.
The frame, she said, might someday be of use.
– Constance Hunting (1960)