Semi-Finals

The Hood Residency at Allerton Park and Retreat Center asked some further questions. Here are excerpts from my response.

Can you give us a little more background on you and your work?

I actively explore the world and I need quiet time to process it. I use photography as a tool that holds the fleeting moments which catch my attention. My own and others’ archives provide material to look at closely, find patterns, and explore further.

I work from my identity as a white gay male. In my twenties, I was out and proud, a participant in the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979. As I’ve matured, my inner queer perspective informs every photograph regardless of its subject. It’s a more subtle telling, inviting the viewer into a conversation beyond labels about the core of our  lives.

I find deep peace in Buddhist meditation and was a meditation instructor and retreat leader for many years. My photography is in dialogue with meditation: holding a camera shifts my perception into a visual mode; making images before there is language to name them, discovering myself in the photograph..

I make objects to be held; small prints, zines, fortune tellers. My zines are tightly structured objects though the form itself is casual. They tell personal stories, hold layers of meaning, hide and reveal information, lean into the informality of a printed page passed from friend to friend. They lead to conversations.

What do you know about Allerton Park?

I first learned of the Park and Robert Allerton through the portrait, Man in Black, painted by Glyn Philpot while he was Robert’s guest at The Farms. The wall text described Robert as a patron of the arts who had a long relationship with Glyn. I wanted to know more.

Reading biographies of Robert and The Farms, three things jumped out as he turned twenty-five in 1898: 

• he burned his art work before leaving Europe; 
• he decorated his outhouse at The Farms with Toulouse-Lautrec posters; 
• by the end of the summer, he was heading back to Europe with an architect friend to find inspiration for his home in Piatt County.

What passion and determination, a whirlwind of change! 

Robert imposed a formal order, in the house and in the gardens which interacts with the untamed as we move through the landscape, the woods and fields, and come upon sculptures and open spaces. He created a structure which protected his guests, within which they could relax, take off their starched collars and corsets, put on kimonos and togas. Robert messed with form, designing even the kitchen garden, making the practical, beautiful. He was constantly navigating public and private.

My research has shown me Robert’s gifts to the Art Institute, his embrace of a range of masculinity, from Donoghue’s lithe, youthful Sophocles Leading the Chorus of Victory to Rodin’s muscular, mature, contorted Adam; the miniature porcelain Monkey Band from eighteenth-century Germany perhaps bridges Robert’s time studying in Munich to the Chinese Musicians at Allerton Park. 

I journeyed to the Allerton Public Library to study their early Piatt County atlases and to hold their cabinet cards from the 1890s, and then walked some of the trails at Allerton Park to have a beginning feel for the land. I have scheduled a day at the University of Illinois library to study the photographs in their archives.

What is the project you hope to accomplish during the residency at Allerton?

What does Robert Allerton have to say to me, 128 years after he began what is now Allerton Park? He navigated the constraints of his time to create a secure intimate space where he could more fully live his life. 

What of those initial few months from 1898 is still present, held in the land, in the prairie, in the river flood plain, in the upland woods, in the sunlight and the dark shadows? What is in the old photographs? 

Having done much research, the residency is a time to let it go. To be there, as a practice retreat, a concentrated time to make art, for the magic of walking with a camera to create a portal into the past.

I will take early morning walks, as Robert did with his dogs, dogs that were also his ears, compensating for his hearing loss. 

What will I hear? How will I communicate that in photographs? 

Out of this questioning will come cabinet cards that can be held, shuffled, studied; concrete manifestations of living at The Farms.

How do you envision Allerton influencing your area of focus? 

Allerton Park is very much Robert Allerton’s creation. Trained as an artist, a world traveler, he brought a cultured sophistication to his home far from an urban center, hosted artists to live and work, invited friends from Chicago to visit, managed the many farms, and took quiet walks alone. He embodied a strength and a vulnerability, attributes needed to make art. 

I imagine myself as Robert’s guest, the latest in a long line of artists at The Farms, a place of creative refuge. I will seek “desire lines” in the landscape, paths made across the meadows, through the woods; lines that connect me to cultural forebearers, like Robert; desires that run through me, that are revealed in the flights of birds, the eddies in a river, the wind rustling the leaves of grass.

From my time in residence, my art will offer others an entry to living at The Farms, to the rich world that Robert built.

What dates work for your schedule?

The Sangamon River is at maximum flow in April and May. I would like to experience being “on the banks of the raging Sangamon” as the Piatt County Republican described the river when Robert arrived in May of 1898. That word, raging, embodies what I imagine Robert was experiencing, the vibrancy of his youth and the opportunity to create what he wants of the land. I want to metaphorically step into that river, feel its force, see where it takes me.

[My earlier post from my applicatoin to the residency.]

Robert Allerton and architect John Borie stand on the porch of Allerton's cottage, ca 1899
University of Illinois Archives, Box 31/13/5 Allerton Park Collection 1848-2003

View Finder

View Finder : Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape (2001) by William L. Fox

Cover Photos: Largest photograph: Timothy O'Sullivan, Crab's Claw Peak, western Nevada, 1867. Collection of the United States Geological Survey;

Middle photograph: Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe for Third View, Byron checking his blister, Karnak Ridge, Nevada, 1998;

Small photograph: Mark Klett, Artifacts left at Karnak Ridge: Polaroid print, compass, note. 7/9/98.

Selected Quotes

… we still think of a camera, even if unconsciously, as a miniaturized room wherein we seek the truth. The camera is the vaulted chamber of a judge -- our eye -- which is attempting to discern reality. It is wise to remember however, that the root means “curved,” that light can bend and that our perceptions of reality tend to be refracted through our individual viewpoints. Also bear in mind that the camera “obscures” that which is outside its angle of view. [page 30]

William Henry Fox Talbot … the first photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, in 1844-46. [page 32]

1851 - Frederick Scott Archer…. invented a process using a sticky liquid called collodion … could fix images on glass plates. Blanquart-Evrard… coating paper with egg whites, producing “albumen paper” [page 32]

Wet-plate glass negatives … exposure times … thirty seconds or so for landscapes [page 33]

The camera will obscure a large part of the world at any moment, given its narrow field of vision, but it also thoroughly reveals its subjects by freezing a moment in time and space for our extended contemplation. [page 37]

Clarence King … What he saw during his exploits, from the glaciers of the Sierra to the crater of Mt. Lassen and the deeply eroded riverbeds of the Southwest, led him to hypothesize that both the gradual forces of nature and its violent upheavals formed the geology he had surveyed. Years later, in 1877, he would present a controversial graduation address at the Sheffield School [of Science at Yale] entitled “Catastrophism and the Evolution of Environment.” This was to be a direct challenge to the strictly uniformitarian viewpoint held by many leading scientists, with King proposing an early version of what scientists now refer to as “punctuated equilibria." … a chaotic place where change is inevitable but sometimes violent and unpredictable. … King’s corollary belief, however, even though perhaps only a politically motivated one, that catastrophe was God’s way of kicking evolution into successively higher levels of achievement, would raise an eyebrow. [page 39]

Timothy O’Sullivan… turned that dispassionate gaze, which had served him so well to document and perhaps even survive the horrors of the Civil War, upon a land that Americans considered the most barren and godforsaken in the country, yet one that O’Sullivan found visually inviting [page 40-41]

O’Sullivan descended nine hundred feet down into the mines of Virginia City and made the first underground photographs of miners at work. He lit magnesium ribbons in order to get his exposure -- a somewhat hazardous practice given the known pockets of inflammable gas nearby, but typical of O’Sullivan’s determination to push the boundaries of his medium to its technological limits. He climbed up the five-hundred-foot-high Sand Mountain east of present-day Fallon and made one of the most well-known images of the West ever taken, his wagon and four mules standing patiently in the landscape so barren that it is with actual relieve we see the footprints of the photographer leading from the wagon into the immediate foreground [page 41]

William Henry Jackson … A close friend [of Jackson’s] and fellow expeditionary artist was the painter Thomas Moran, who inculcated in him the romantic creed of the great English painter J. M. W. Turner: what was important was the essence of the reality, and not its literal appearance. Jackson would go so far as to alter his negatives in order to heighten the drama of geological features -- so it would appear not as it was, necessarily, but as he thought it should be. … Science had taken a back seat to scenic manipulation in the supposedly objective chamber of the camera. [page 43]

With O'Sullivan we walk steadily through a landscape that has no pretense to being pretty or romantic, an aesthetic already well established in his Civil War work. When a figure appears in one of his photographs, he is often beneath and dominated by the view, sometimes even partially hidden or hard to find. Furthermore, Clarence King was a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art and proselytized the viewpoint that images of nature made by artists should be free of manipulation. O’Sullivan took his photographs under the direction of the geologist with an eye fixed firmly on the underlying forces and structure of the regions -- whether he was literally crawling underground with miners or climbing obscure ridges to document the unusual fracturing of rocks. … he was not above tilting his camera to isolate the evidence of geological process -- but always seems to be in service of the land itself, and not of a romantic creed. [page 43-44]

There’s a reason that in his own work Klett often deliberately lets his shadow appear in the frame of the photograph, as did O’Sullivan occasionally. It’s his way of saying: Don’t take a photographer’s frame of reference for granted. A photograph might look objective, even scientific, but it might not be the same picture you would make. … As a contemporary photographer, Klett is always aware that our presence in notating the earth changes its reality, a postmodern sensibility that has roots as deep in quantum physics as in the classrooms of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, where Klett received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977. [page 45]

Klett… for my own work I want an empirical basis, not an ideological one, something I can use my intuition with [page 53]

Helen and Newton Harrison… former artists turned environmental engineers, who often propose modification in the landscape as urban reclamation projects. Their work, as both conceptual documents to be exhibited and working plans for construction, include unearthing historical land-use patterns, conduction research into local environmental conditions, and restoring the land as sculptural earthworks. Using photographs, text, cartographic overlays, and bulldozers, they create farms and wetlands as metaphorical settings where the collision of nature and culture can be made visible. They are neither exactly artists nor scientists -- their works are both experiment and gesture. [page 53] 

[see also https://www.theharrisonstudio.net/ 

Helen Mayer Harrison (1927–2018) and Newton Harrison (1932–2022)]

… The longer I work, the more important it is to me to make photographs that tell my story as a participant, and not just an observer of the land. [page 198]

… an intuitive photographer who lets meaning arise out of being in a place and working [page 202]

… there's no judgement here, no advocacy for anything other than paying attention [page 203]

The difference between being a detached documentarian suffering the illusion of objectivity, and an engaged artist falling prey to sentimentality and political correctness, is exactly one of the reasons Klett inserts his shadow into the frame. It's not from a sense of ego to declare himself part of the picture, but to let the viewer acknowledge the presence of the photographer on the scene, then mentally subtract him. It keeps both Klett and the viewer mindful of the fact that there is no such thing as "just a picture," but rather a complex relationship among subject, photographer, viewers, and history. The picture isn't a monologue, but a multilogue. [page 214]

… this idea of serial photography… It's related to how O'Sullivan would take multiple views to investigate a site instead of a singular dominating view attempting to define it. [page 293]

… He's taking a journey of rediscovery, of personal re photography done in the mind, as well as sharing it with us.He's mining the historical past not only for images, ideas, and inspiration, but for his own memories, the deepest mediation of experience we have. [page 293]

Selections from the Bibliography

Fox, William L. 2001. View Finder : Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape. 1st ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/44066888

Armstrong, Carol M. 1998. Scenes in a Library : Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. https://search.worldcat.org/title/45727985

Barthes, Roland, and Geoff Dyer. 2010. Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography. . Translated by Richard Howard. Pbk. ed. New York: Hill and Wang. https://search.worldcat.org/title/671819280 

Adams, Robert, Lewis Baltz, Harry M. Callahan, Paul Caponigro, Hamish Fulton, William Garnett, Eliot Porter, Art Sinsabaugh, George A. Tice, and Brett Weston. 1980. Landscape, Theory. Edited by Carol Di Grappa. New York, NY: Lustrum Press. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/7083257

Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Picabor, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/3223849

Szarkowski, John, Cleveland Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, J.B. Speed Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Krannert Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Milwaukee Art Center. 1978. Mirrors and Windows : American Photography since 1960. New York: Museum of Modern Art. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/4496739

Raindrops

Gustave Caillebotte, Yerres Effect of Rain (1875)
Photo: Larry Wolf, Art Institute of Chicago (2025)

Walking swiftly through the Art Institute, scanning for landscapes, this one jumped out at me. the mix of created environment (the pavement just barely at our feet, diagonally) and river with woods and rain drops, the boat on the far shore in the shadows at the edge of the river almost hidden in the trees behind it, backlit. And then a chuckle, reading the wall text, that this is another Caillebotte, though one which wasn't in the blockbuster show a month or two ago. Another Caillebotte rainy day painting, larger, urban, is around the corner. A further chuckle looking at this photo, with the painting balancing, a bit askew, on my blurry finger.

Photo Dup

The photo at my doctor's office

Larry Wolf, Photo of Photo, no credit on the framed photo (2025)

My Rephotographed Photo

Larry Wolf, Sunny Chicago Fall (2025)

Application to Allerton/Hood Residency

Proposal

Imagine May of 1898. It was a formative time for Robert Allerton and for what would become The Farms. What is remembered in the land?

This is a photographic project: walking the land, dreaming it is a century ago, what might be developed. This is a modernist look showing the land as it is today, informed by the past.

During the residency I will produce a set of Cabinet Cards, a format popular in the late 1800s, small objects (41⁄2” by 61⁄2”) to hold and display. Similar to cartes de visite, but slightly larger, they were used for landscapes. It is a form to slow us down and appreciate the immediate, to underwhelm our overwhelmed senses, to pay attention to the print we’re holding and what it evokes.

The residency is a retreat. Dawn and dusk are transition times when the sun is slant and the mind is open to feeling what is seemingly hidden; an extended walking meditation, letting mind and body, feet and camera, move through the landscape.

The land was there before Robert. It will be here after we are gone. It has been shaped by ice ages and river floods. It has been inhabited by indigenous people (Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations). The Potawatomi were marched through Monticello in 1838, with treaties broken, they were forcibly relocated to Kansas, on the Trail of Death. The land was collectively managed by the indigenous nations; it was privately owned; it is now held in public trust.

That spring, Robert was 25. He and his childhood friend Frederic Bartlett had spent five years in Europe studying to be artists. Before leaving Paris, Robert had burned his paintings, declaring he would never be more than an amateur artist. [Note: the root of amateur is love, to do something for the love of it.] Robert brought an artist’s eye to Piatt County, treating the land as his canvas.

Robert immediately started shaping things, moving the old Stallcup house to be near a spring. He wallpapered his privy with Toulouse-Lautrec posters, bringing his past into his present. Living on the land, he was imagining what he might build. My mid-20’s were also a time of setting the course of my life.

This project will photograph the land and invite us to envision what might be.

Larry Wolf, Creek Bed, formatted as a Cabinet Card (2025)

[submitted to the Joan and Peter Hood Residency at the Allerton Park and Retreat Center]

Homage to David and Arthur

Larry Wolf, Arthur Rimbaud Enshrined,
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (2025)

Some Earlier Posts

Me and Rimbaud (July 2025)

Arthur Rimbaud at 17 and 170 (October 2024)

Two Bad Boy Artists - Enfants Terribles (July 2024)

Looking Up

Larry Wolf, Looking Up (2025)