Happy Birthday Minor White

Larry Wolf, Minor White 118th Birthday (2026)

Studio Day 50

Larry Wolf, Head Scan (2026)

Me and Rimbaud

Larry Wolf, Arthur and Larry and Larry and Arthur (2025)

Arthur and Larry and Larry and Arthur

Many

Generations apart

Continents apart

Connected

In his web

Paul

David

Patti

Gay Sunshine chapbook - A Lover’s Cock

Collected poems and poems and poems and letters

Imaginings of Java and Abyssinia

Fragments

David made a mask

From a photograph

Friends wore it

He photographed

The mask became a pin

Souvenir from an exhibition

Rebel artists brought into the canon

I wear it

Explaining, always explaining

A zine of explanation

Grit became polished

Raw edges still present

Almost twice Arthur’s age

Almost twice David’s age

Patti recites the poems

I look over my shoulder

At sixteen

Burst on the scene

At twenty one

A last poem

Yet

A century later

Here I am

His descendant

-- Larry Wolf, 28 July 2025

[Index of Poems]

[Photo at The First Homosexuals exhibition. See also Two Bad Boy Artists and At 17 and 170.]

In a Mirror - 2025

Larry Wolf, Photographer (2025)

In a Mirror - 1978

Larry Wolf, Photographer (1978)

Me and Coffee

Larry Wolf, Micro Espresso Montreal (2025)

Three times during our visit to Montreal to sip espresso at the counter, to buy some dark roast Brazilian beans to bring home. Savoring that coffee now. 

Micro Espresso

Yesterday they were fire bombed. I'm devastated even at this distance. Humans sowing chaos. And rebuilding. Otherwise moving on. Us and all our addictions, all our love. Alive in our memories, living as phoenix, death and birth in flames.

Ink and Water, Again

Larry Wolf, Body as Landscape (2025)

On A Walk Today

Larry Wolf, Roots and Rocks (2025)

Larry Wolf, Reflections (2025)

Larry Wolf, Reflections (2025)

Larry Wolf, Reflections (2025)

Leather Archive - February 2024

Larry Wolf, Circling (2024)

Larry Wolf, With Dan Foley Projection (2024)

Leather Archive and Museum, Chicago Illinois

The Bitterweed Path

Larry Wolf (2004)

En Route

Larry Wolf (2023)

Larry Wolf (2023)

Larry Wolf (2023)

Larry Wolf (2023)

Zines Saved My Life

Larry Wolf, First Zine (2021)

Zines became a source of joy for me in the middle days of the COVID pandemic when it looked like this would go on forever. January 2021. The depths of winter. My photo buddy Shawn Rowe was teaching an online class on making photo zines. Other photo friends were going to be there. I was psyched. Little did I know it would be more than just another photo class. It would change my life.

Zines answered that impossibly awkward question: “What do I do with my photographs?” Frame them and put on a wall? In an album to be forgotten on a shelf? A few more bits of flotsam and jetsam in the flood of social media? 

The thrill of something to hold. Something to pass around. Very tangible. A great way to connect with one Forever stamp during the isolation of COVID. Something beyond the virtual. No big deal. Just do it.

The whole thing engaged me. The challenge of the layout and folding. The challenge of what images to use. The constraints of working with a single sheet. The challenge of the printer not always printing the same (color shifts, front-back alignment). Challenges and constraints that resonated with how I think and how I work.

Sojourner Truth,
I Sell the Shadow (1864-65)

One of my art buddies started saying that the single-sheet mini-zines I make are my calling card, that everyone should have a zine calling card. What an idea! It echoes to the early days of photography when cartes de visite were all the rage, some personal, some political (check out Sojourner Truth and her phrase “I sell the shadow to support the substance” -- including filing for copyright to protect her sales, though now public domain).

And then finding other zine makers!!! Chicago Zine Club, Zine Party, Quimby’s and Zine Mercado became my opening to others, people I exchange with, people I’ve become friends with. Now, as the in-person indoor events pick up, a whole world.

Zines are how I express the random movements that catch my eye, the deep grief of a friend whose wife has died or the life-affirming energy that my cancer diagnosis and treatment unleashed. Conceptual. Emotional. Rough and ready.

I am drawn into the magic of these paper objects, learning from origami, from mathematics (hyperbolic paraboloids are nested squares), from my childhood (fortune tellers/cootie catchers), and from other artists. It’s all marvelous and amazing. 

Things I love to make and love to share.

To be published in Behind the Zines, Billy McCall (Summer 2023)  

My zine related blog posts (includes this one and several others). 

Monday

Larry Wolf (2023)

Self 1978

Larry Wolf (1978/scanned 2023)

Larry Wolf (1978/scanned 2023)

Larry Wolf (1978/scanned 2023)

Coffeehouse Collaboration

Levi Shand & Larry Wolf (2023)

Photoshoot

Larry Wolf & Jasper Goodrich collaboration (2023)

At a Museum

Larry Wolf, At a Museum (2023)

Intensives

Here's what's planned

• Daily - Drawings
• Self-Study - David duChemin - The Visual Voice
• Reading - Tim Carpenter - To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die
• Reading - Mark Sealy - Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time
• March through May - Spring Ango at Zen Mountain Monastery (virtual)
• April - Self-Directed Month at Latitude
• July - Jess T. Dugan - The Intimate Portrait at Anderson Ranch Arts Center
• August - Richard Renaldi - Beyond the Selfie: Representation and Psyche at Maine Media Workshops
• September - Filter Festival Portfolio Review

making love to this emerging tender indestructible being

Making art
Making love
Making life

Coming
One breath
One stroke
Simultaneous

No past
Except 
The vast past
Here
Pregnant 
Now

All identities
All ways of being
Now

No self
No not self
No other
Not one
Not two
Being
Now

As the old ends, 
nothing works
As the new begins, nothing works
In the moment, 
just the moment

The subtle bold exertion of intention

to fail
queerly
tenderly 
lovingly

to make love 
in the moment
to make love 
to the moment
to make love 
to the art as it emerges
to love whatever emerges

coherent thought falls apart
metastatic
no center
no hold

this touch of 

hand 

of body

this touch of 

pen

pencil

marker

brush

And then

water

pigments

All flow and bleed and blend and move
Energy
Alive

Grief and joy in the same breath
Heartbreak in the flowering
To be new is to kill the old

no center
only fringe

passing sucks
pleasing sucks
covering sucks
let go of normal
be divergent

let go of scenery
let go of realism
let go of making sense
let go of a lifetime of becoming

nothing to work
nothing to achieve

desire
objectless hunger for life
breathe
listen
this moment
this experience
let go of the tight shoulders
let go of the crossed knees
let go of the urge for another gulp of water
let go of yet another book
let go of yet another idea
let go of yet another human to connect with
let go of fear of missing out
let go of fear of missing
let go of fear
let go
let
be

-- Larry Wolf, 11 February 2023

[Index of Poems]

Intimate Space

Larry Wolf, Intimate Space (2019)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (1991)
Third Avenue and East 137th Street, Bronx, NY. 

... In 1992 ... [Felix Gonzalez-Torres] exhibited, on twenty-four billboards around New York City, a photograph of an unmade double bed with two pillows bearing what appear to be the impressions of a couple's heads.

"Untitled" (1991) is striking because it makes such an intimate domestic scene so public. ... The all-white image of recent intimacy is soft and inviting, but it takes on a darker shade once we realize that 1991 was the year that Gonzalez-Torres's partner, Ross Laycock, died of AIDS after a long illness. At least retrospectively, then, the piece functions as a memorial, both celebrating their loving relationship and commemorating it. 

Yet this reading may tie the image too closely to autobiography, for the work also has a distinctly political edge. It is a protest and provocation that intervened in what was at the time a highly charged situation. The intimacy of the image and the publicity of its exhibition were particularly transgressive in the context of the hysterical reaction in the United States to the AIDS epidemic, which provoked fierce conservative attacks on homosexuality. 

If the work is viewed as a memorial, it is illuminating to observe how it inverts, point by point, the form of medieval tomb sculpture. Those monuments, made of enduring materials like bronze or marble and sheltered in the sacred space of a church, show royal or aristocratic couples lying in effigy side by side, their heads resting on hard pillows. "Untitled" seems to evoke these tombs but exchanges their features for the ephemerality, profanity, and democracy of the commercial billboard. More over, the couple in Gonzalez-Torres's posters is indicated only negatively, not by statuary but by the impressions left behind on pillows. 

Viewed now, in retrospect, the emptiness of the bed foretells the artist's own tragic death only five years later, in 1996.

from Photography Trace and Trauma - Margaret Iversen (2017)

Contextual Notes

I made the above photograph in 2019 as part of a self-portrait project, showing our bed after my husband and I had been reading in the morning. At the foot of the bed is a book of David Wojnarowicz's Rimbaud in New York photographs. Wojnarowicz made a mask from a photograph of Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet, and made portraits of himself and others wearing that mask in iconic New York locations. 

I began reading Margaret Iversen's Photography Trace and Trauma this week in preparation for a reading group that starts next month (Exploring Death, Grief and Trauma, led by Kean O'Brien at Latitude). Iversen's description of Felix Gonzales-Torres' Untitled 1991 reminded me of the photo that I created three years ago. I did not consciously remember Gonzales-Torres' photograph when I created mine, though it's certainly possible I had seen it in the past. In keeping with Iversen's text, that image could well have left a trace in my unconscious and influenced the image I created.

It is fascinating that evidence of a prior presence can speak powerfully about its absence in the present.