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These pictures by photographer Larry Keenan serve as a personal memorial to a
community of faces that have fallen away into invisible skin -- tributes to
fallen friends in ink and paper, these portraits find their subject matter in
the pioneers of the Beat Generation literary movement that extends back to the
middle 1950s. Like all transcendental art, these pictures do not need any
explanation or introduction. Instead, they move by themselves: animal-like and
slow, moving through the misty evening across the cool diamond rivers of dusk.
And like the very best photographs, they subsist on the sweet blood of memory,
finding sustenance in the thirsty eye of each viewer, moving now on delicate
deer hooves, moving into the flower garden where God sleeps. And in the end, we
are there, too: finding a renewed faith in the ash of what once was.
A FACE IN A PHOTOGRAPH
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And these
Are the dead
Who have sacrificed
Living bone
(un)
To the echo
Of words
(men)
Gone back
(in)
To half
Asphyxiated shadows
(forced)
To live
(in)
The thick
Gray silence
(no)
More tongue
To twist
(echo)
Into song
(and)
These are
The dead
Who have
Passed away
(Gone)
Into groans
(these)
Are the ghosts
(memory)
Pools splash
(A face)
In a photograph
(this)
Is all
We have
To hold
(graves)
Gone numb
(framed)
In electric bone
(A face)
In a picture
(instinctual)
Blind soft raw
(the milk)
Of you
(spills)
Over the
Dusty boulders
Of dreams
(hollow)
Reborn new
(never)
Ending in
Perfect pools
(of)
Black and white--
-John Aiello 2003
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All photos Larry Keenan. All Rights Reserved.
Reproduction
expressly prohibited without written permission from Larry Keenan.
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