Intro: Photography Presentation: Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum: October 6, 2006: Olde City Philadelphia
Imagine a man. He dips a finger into the filthy Schuylkill & comes up Adonis. Or, a Manayunk side
street finds him staring Acteon-like at some omnipotent Diana, teeth gleaming
in the crepuscular atmosphere.
Imagine a man. He is the heart & soul of the soulful,
beer-soaked bar, reveling in quips his wits are too fast for, taking in bitter,
ham-fisted stories of love lost, found & regained. This is a man who can
listen.
Jeremy. Imagine a Jeremy. This man for whom art is like air,
for whom humanity is beyond cruelty & joking, for whom the savor of the
gold-speckled past is equaled only by future nights staring at diaphanously
gowned girls.
Imagine Jeremy with a camera. This is a kind of sex for him,
a kind of yoga, a yoking of the creative imagination to the fact of our flesh,
that may sag, or glisten, or sag and glisten, or, having sagged, suddenly
glisten under the camera’s eye.
Imagine pictures. They are limned with the light of
soul-baring honesty, the rawest form of candor, the privileged position of an
unprivileged spectator—that is, a sensitive spectator sans imposing ego. These
are pictures of people, unmediated by art.
Only it is art. The artifice is all in the angles—how a
smile reveals a desire to be fondled, how a pose means such-and-such knows
everything there is to know about Siouxsie & the Banshees, or the Cure, or
the Fixx.
Get a fix here. A fix of real human beings being real in
real pictures taken by a real man at the height of his “seeing” power; a fix of
sensuality for people with brains, who can unite the signifier, in all its’
nuanced glory, with the signified.
There is no disjuncture here between sign and meaning. These
people speak for themselves, just by being naked, or half-naked, or a bit
naked. It is the dialect of desire that powers streetcars & other vehicles.
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