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| August Sander Farm Girl ca. 1910 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander The Fighter or Revolutionary 1912 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
What Kind of Times Are These
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light –
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
– Adrienne Rich (1995)
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| August Sander Artists' Party ca. 1930 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Gypsies ca. 1930 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne 1931 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| Man Ray Gertrude Stein ca. 1920-29 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
To Gertrude Stein
White, blandly isolated on the ground
Where slaughters, thievings, contradictions pour,
You twirl umbrellas, cryptograms of sound,
Like some old princess on a wistful tour,
Abhorring nakedness and common stress,
Ignoring uproars in the ruined yards,
And fingering an old, brocaded dress
In corners of deserted boulevards.
Your mannerisms, sensitively curled,
Involved and sighing curiosities
Implore us – in the unrelenting world
Of bedlams, plottings and monstrosities –
To leave our hatreds, make the earth again
An aproned inn where subtleties can reign.
– Maxwell Bodenheim (1940)
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| Albert Renger-Patzsch Gemäldegalerie, Dresden ca. 1928-29 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| Albert Renger-Patzsch Paderborn, Westphalia, Jesuit Church ca. 1945-48 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| John Piper Tomb of John Thornycroft at the Church of Our Lady of Bloxham, Oxfordshire ca. 1930-80 photograph Tate Gallery |
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| René Burri Former Summer Palace - Dead Lotus Flowers on Kunming Lake - Beijing, China, 1964 1964 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
Forbidden City
Asleep until noon, I'm dreaming
we've been granted another year.
You're here with me, healthy.
Then, half-awake, the half-truth –
this is our last day. Life's leaking
away again, and this time, we know it.
Dear body, I told you, pleading,
Don't Leave! but I understand you
can't say anything. Who are we?
Are we fictional? We don't look
like our pictures, don't look like
anyone I know. Daylight
flickers through a bamboo grove,
we approach the Forbidden City,
Looking together for the Hall
of Fulfilling Original Wishes.
Time is the treasure, you tell me,
and the past is its hiding place.
I instruct our fictional children,
The past is the treasure, time
is its hiding place. If we told him
how much we love him, how much
we miss him, he could stay.
But now you've taken me back
to Luoyang, to the Garden of Solitary Joy,
over a thousand years old –
I wake, I hold your hand, you let me go.
– Gail Mazur (2016)
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| René Burri France, 1975 1975 C-print Tate Gallery |
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| René Burri New York City, USA, 1988 1988 C-print Tate Gallery |
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| René Burri Beijing, China, 1989 1989 C-print Tate Gallery |
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| Cornelia Parker The Spider that Died in the Tower of London 2000 digital print Tate Gallery |
Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)