The Polaroids of the Cowboy Poet
January 19, 2016 10:00 AM   Subscribe

 
I worked with Chris Earnshaw at the doomed DC City Museum a decade ago, and saw some of his Polaroids then. Most were cramped compositions that only showed a small "artistic" portion of the subject (read: not useful for documentation), and many of them were damaged. I'm curious to see the Historical Society show, but skeptical that this is a landmark find in terms of the photographic record of 60s-80s Washington (happily, some fantastic stuff has come out of the woodwork in the last decade or so, like Michael Horsley's 1980s photos.)
posted by ryanshepard at 10:34 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


This loaded horribly on my phone (come on Wapo) and I'll read the rest later but it struck me this weekend as I was back in my hometown for the first time in several years that DC is an unbelievably beautiful American city. It's so graceful, the row houses. The stone. Even the decay and neglect is picturesque. Only white plastic gentrification could stop DC and hopefully the bald mall of Columbia Heights will be the last Bloombergian white corpuscle to stain the mossy green bark of this gorgeous tangled structure. Point being, I feel like you could fall over on some exposed film in DC and make incredible photographs, especially in the 70s and 80s. But maybe that's just because it is my home, and my idea of home.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:28 PM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


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