I wish I wish I wish in vain ... (Dylan)

With colleagues and students in La Tartine, Paris, on barricade and revolution tracking visit circa 1979, in the context of a history course on European Revolutions at Portsmouth Poly- wonderful, long pre-modular course over three terms, time to think, time to do, days to track the barricades of 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871 - political and psycho geography as historical method. So this is now an allegory of the time for thinking. My head from behind, right hand edge: forgive the sepia, it gives an idea of the tobacco effect of the pre-gentrified Tartine

 

Below is a part of my pseudo-Atget series that I did while Molly Nesbit was working in Paris on her miraculously good Atget's Seven Albums, not only one of the best books on photography ever written, but one of the finest of the whole so called Social History of Art movement. I did a series on the Hotel de Beauvais in the rue François Miron, when it was still grim and unrestored and tnemented. But I was also doing a series on Parisian gay masculinities and guys on the streets, as well as in mural paintings of religious and military scenes. So in this rather simplistic collage I began a cruising-Atget series, now it would be called queering Atget. By the early 80s this was influenced by the late Nicholas Green, my first PhD student, but maître ès drague gaie, and author of The Spectacle of Nature. Somewhere I have negatives of Beauvais with him rather than this boy imported from the quais, and I will look for them.