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Robert at 25

Larry Wolf, Robert at 25 (2025)

 

Larry Wolf, Robert at 25 (2025)

Larry Wolf, Robert at 25 (2025)

Larry Wolf, Robert at 25 (2025)

While applying to the Hood Artist Residency at the Allerton Park and Retreat Center, I created a fortune teller to further understand how the land might have appeared to Robert when he was twenty-five, his first summer at The Farms (1898), before he built the grand house and started the formal gardens, and how Robert and the land appear to me now (2025).

Flexing the fortune teller, opening and closing the petals. What is seen? What is waiting to be revealed? How are we shaped by our environment? What is universal? What is deeply personal?

See the project page for more about my working with fortune tellers.

Our Many Selves

On a blustery Tuesday, I led a workshop for thirty or so 11th and 12th graders, using the form of a fortune teller to explore how we present ourselves, what we freely show and what we keep close.

Layers of Identity (outer, inner, secret)

 

Parts come together

Form new wholes

Hide and reveal

Our many selves

Borders that connect

Edges that hold us

Intersecting spaces of belonging

Family, geography, culture, language, identities

Direct experience beyond words

 

Tom Lau, Larry with Fortune Teller (2025)

Tom Lau, Student Holding Zine, Larry Folding Paper (2025)

Prologue to the Present

Larry Wolf (2018)

Twists and turns seem like a direct path in retrospect. One recent (not so recent) piece of my story of how I got here, making photographs and generally creating art (photos, zines, poetry, drawing, painting) dates from 2018 and 2019.

2018 - August

Rather than give in to obsessive thoughts of a new camera, I ordered The Soul of the Camera by David duChemin. It's about the photographer.

2019 - January

I was in dialogue with Shawn Rowe about his upcoming photography class, looking to catch up on the changes in thinking about and making photographs since my last immersion in the 1970s. It's about making photographs.

2019 - September

While in DC for HIMSS Health IT week, I was transfixed by the shifting light and shadows in my hotel room and captured a series of 18 images over the course of one minute. Noticing something visually compelling. Holding a camera. In the flow. Something about that minute felt so right, so what I wanted to be doing. Without thought, I was on the other side of the decision. Be a photographer.

Larry Wolf, More Or Less Transparent - Overview Grid, September 2019

Larry Wolf,
Robert Aitken's Present 1935 (2019)

Present - The Past Is Prologue

During that September in 2019, I walked past this sculpture and inscription at the National Archives. A quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "What is past is prologue." The sculpture is titled "Present". I photographed that sculpture multiple times over the years. I keep circling myself. 

2021 - January

Zine making became the answer to What do I do with my photographs? Zines are what I bring with me when I meet friends for coffee, have with me for when I meet someone new, are the form I've adopted for my contact info. Again it was Shawn Rowe who was my teacher. Thank you, Shawn.

2025 - August

Larry Wolf, More or Less Transparent (2025)
Printed at Matiz Press

I reprinted More or Less Transparent as a risographed booklet. In blue because that seemed like the best of the color options. It's been growing on me. Something ethereal and dreamy in the blue, lighter than I imagined, opening more visual space for the viewer. A gentle touch of image on paper in hand. 

At a Zine Fair

Hide Seek / The ___ of ___

A glance

Catch my eye

Hold my gaze

A flash of attraction

Radiance

Shimmers

Like on sunrise

Like a bomb blast

Like a wink

Like a smile

Like me

Love me

Hold me

All of me

In this fleeting moment

A moment of 

being

of

dissolution

of

coming

of

cumming

of

small death

of

birth

of

becoming

of

this moment

an end

that is

endless

Saturday in July 2025

-- Larry Wolf, 19 July 2025

[Index of Poems]

Larry Wolf, Hide & Seek (2025)

 

Larry Wolf, Hide Seek (2025)

Larry Wolf, Hide Seek (2025)

Holding You

Devil’s Rope, Laramie, 1998 

October 

A chill breeze comes off the Rockies

My ruddy wires cast shadows from the warrior moon

A quiet night

A truck pulls up

You and two others stagger out

They tower over you

Push you

Threaten you

Growl

FAGGOT

ON YOUR KNEES

Your face at their crotches

You plead

They pull out their

Gun 

Raise it

Bash the butt 

Into your head

your head

your head

You crumple

They drag you, toss you

Onto me

I sag, hold your unconscious weight

Doors slam

Engine starts

Tires spin up dirt

They’re gone

We’re alone

Your arms thrown backwards over me

My taut wire cuts into your armpits

barbs tear your shirt and skin

Your head hangs listless

Your breath

Rough

Ragged

Irregular

Shivering

Shaking

Convulsing

Your spasms pulse through me

Then 

Still

Limp 

Seeping blood

Cold night

I can offer 

No help

No warmth

Only presence

In the faintest dawn

A passing runner, pauses, wonders

Is that a scarecrow?

Sees it is a boy

Goes for help

Sirens

Police

Flashing lights

Ambulance

Useless

We’re entangled 

I quiver as you're lifted

Carried away

Clinging to life

Bits of your clothes

flesh

blood

On me, left behind

Cars arrive

Candles

A vigil

Days and nights

A stream of mourners

River of mourners

Flood of mourners

Months pass

Still they come

We spent a night together

Your last night out

Out 

Under the vast sky you loved so much

Matthew Shepard

Matthew Shepard

Matthew Shepard

-- Larry Wolf, 30 June 2025

[Index of Poems]

Larry Wolf, Held (Zine Photo 2025/Fence Photo 2010)

An earlier version of this poem was read at Maine Media Workshops on June 27, 2025, at the conclusion of The Photographic Poem with Richard Blanco.

The above photo is of my zine Rough Raw Reclaimed (2021). The text, on the inside of the zine, reads:

Tear Streaked Cheeks

On a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, a man was beaten and left to die on a cold October night, 1998. Matthew Shepard became the poster child of gay hate crimes. There were candlelight vigils – organized all too quickly and too well. We should not be so good at this public mourning and outcry. Enough is enough. 

The trial. The protestors chanting hell for the homosexual. The angelic counter-protests. His parents. Their compassion. Their determination. The plays, art, chorale works and politics that followed.

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act became law in 2009. Two brutal deaths in 1998, one homophobic, one racist. A decade. Another decade. Much still to do.

 

An Earlier View from the Fence

Jeff Sheng's MFA Thesis Exhibition included a large forty foot wide by six foot high digitally constructed panoramic photographic installation, titled "Where Matthew Lay Dying: Laramie, Wyoming," originally shot and taken from the spot and vantage point where the hate crime/murder victim Matthew Shepard was found on a fence post outside Laramie, Wyoming. 

[Wikipedia Entry for Jeff Sheng]

A Year in Zines - 2024

Larry Wolf, A Year in Zines 2024 (2025)

I realized that most of these have not made it to my blog, so here's a very quick recap.

A Glimpse of History

Larry Wolf, March on Washington 1979 (2024)

Larry Wolf, March on Washington 1979 (2024)

After the 2024 election, I needed a reminder that I have lived in rough times. It's not new. So this zine of images from the 1979 March on Washington for LGBTQ Rights. Images from my archive. I was also there in 1987 and 1993. 

Within The Canon

Larry Wolf, In Conversation 2024 (2025)

For several months in 2024, Gallery 293 at the Art Institute was filled with works by queer artists who lived in New York in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. I learned of their cross-connections through my own research. These five zines, In Conversation, put me in dialogue with the artists: Greer Langton, David Wojnarowicz, Zoe Leonard, Martin Wong, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and others. There's a separate page about my explorations. 

Enfants Terribles

Larry Wolf, Enfants Terribles 2024 (2025)

Arthur Rimbaud and David Wojnarowicz shook things up in their time and for decades after. They lived almost exactly 100 years apart. Now together in a zine (and this earlier blog post).

A Summer Afternoon

Larry Wolf, Summer in Vermont 2024 (2025)

More from the archive and also a risograph version. We were young once, and in our hearts, always.

Dual Lens

Larry Wolf, Dual Lens 2024 (2025)

I've been exploring making images with a lens intended for 3D. I'm captivated by how the two lenses make a pair of overlapping images, the right and left sides similar and different. This is the first zine to hold those images. More are in the works (see also Dual Lens).

Watercolor from a Zine

Larry Wolf, Rough Cut 1977/2024 Watercolor (2024)

Larry Wolf, Rough Cut 1977/2024, full sheet unfolded (2024)

Larry Wolf, Rough Cut 1977/2024, Risograph Mini-Zine (2024)

As Seen By Others

Wayne Cable, Portrait of Larry (2023)

Dana Day, Portrait of Larry - Collodian Tintype (2023)

These photographs are from the Filter Photo Festival. Wayne Cable and Dana Day graciously took my portrait, at the conclusion of the week and at Rashod Taylor's Wet Plate Collodion Workshop.

Thoughts Today

Artist Statement

Actions change the world.

The world changes us.

Technology, indistinguishable from magic, shifts perception.

Photography as ritual.

Camera as transitional object.

Feelings follow form.

Form springs from feeling.

Fold paper - zines, fortune tellers, hyperbolic paraboloids, angels.

Handcraft mechanical reproductions.

Stories held - in objects, in hands, in bodies, in memories, in society.

Exchange at cafes, online and in the mail. 

Vulnerable and resilient.

Hidden and revealed.

Obscure and obvious.

Sacred, scarred and scared.

Fine prints and objects that invite touch. 

Fractured and whole.

The broken object is the object.

Something will kill me. 

Probably not today.

See you tomorrow.

Artist Bio

I am 72. Prostate cancer hasn’t killed me. Heart disease hasn’t killed me. COVID hasn’t killed me. A polarized country hasn’t killed me. Leaving the corporate world hasn’t killed me. AIDS hasn’t killed me. The cis-gendered heteronormative world hasn’t killed me. Nuclear war hasn’t killed me. Antisemitism hasn’t killed me. Living hasn’t killed me.

Cameras are lifelines, throughlines. Objects to hold in uncertainty. A companion that accompanies me on dates, to family gatherings, to protest rallies, to retreat programs, to treatment for cancer, to walks around the city.

Fortune Teller and Contained Images 

Larry Wolf (2023)

Larry Wolf (2023)

Larry Wolf (2023)

Submitted to Latitude as part of my application for their Artist in Residence 2024

Here's my Project page on Fortune Tellers

Loving Small Things

Larry Wolf, Fortune Teller Folded (2023)

Larry Wolf, Fortune Teller Unfolded (2023)

Larry Wolf, Fortune Teller Flat (2023)

I create 3D objects from single sheets of paper to tell stories. My latest work is a fortune teller about my diagnosis and treatment for prostate cancer. Images are hidden and made visible, revealing layers, juxtapositions, surprises. The imagery is fractured, made whole when folded, animated by the participant observer. In an exhibition, there would be a stack of printed sheets for visitors to fold and play with. What fortunes are we telling?

Submitted to Filter Photo: we like small things v.6
Juried by Anna Goldwater Alexander

Here's my Project page on Fortune Tellers.

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). 

Riso Calling Card Zine

Larry Wolf, Pink and Blue (2023)

Larry Wolf (2023)

Made at Lillstreet in a workshop with Matt Davis of Perfectly Acceptable Press. Color separation by Spectrolite.

Bridge to Now

The narrative from my application to the Bridge program at the Hyde Park Art Center, to be curated by Jory Drew.

What I Might Get

I imagine the Bridge Program as a mini-residency and mentorship, a time to focus on one project, to challenge myself to go as deep and far as I can in the five weeks, to participate with others on a similar adventure, to take myself seriously (but not too seriously) as an artist.

I want to learn from the other artists and from the program curator - How do they make their art? How do they incorporate their lived experience? How do they create space for their viewer/audience to engage on their own terms? 

I am currently working with the imagery in The Bull, a poem by Ocean Vuong, a Vietnamese-American Buddhist. I’ve been making watercolors and drawings based on that. There is a mix of desire, longing, fear, and loss in the poem, as we enter into a not knowing, heightened sexual awareness and vulnerability. There’s also a thousand-year history of ox herding as a Buddhist teaching metaphor of the search for enlightenment and living after enlightenment. It’s traditionally a combination of woodblock prints and poetic commentary. Bulls and oxen have a long European history as well, from bullfight to minotaur. I am engaging with this as a drawing and watercolor exercise, where does my mark making take me? And also as a conceptual research into the culture of bulls and oxen.

Larry Wolf, Bull (2022)

I expect the Bridge Program will bring a few surprises and discoveries about myself and the work I’m making.

What I Might Offer

I bring a curiosity about how others see the world, how they make sense of it, how they make their art. I bring a commitment to listen closely to what is said and listen deeply for the message beneath the words. I am both an outsider and an insider. We will be finding our personal truths by working together to understand who we are.

I have taught contemplative photography courses which emphasize looking closely at images, for what they contain and for what they evoke in each of us. I bring this openness to look and see, to making, viewing and discussing artwork. 

I have training and years of experience as a mentor and coach, teaching meditation, leading advisory committees, working with nonprofits as a volunteer and board member. I have taught collaboratively and found ways for groups to move forward while acknowledging differences. 

I am a retired married gay white male Buddhist born Jewish former technology executive. I didn’t think I’d make it to my current age of 70 - many of those identities might have killed me - from gay bashing, from AIDS, from anti-semitism, from a family history of early deaths. Some of those identities gave me privilege - a masters in computer science, a job with a national healthcare provider, and, clearly, being white. They have shaped who I am and what I bring.

A Work That Works

To Hold Infinity

The work is an altar made from a sheet of 8 ½ x 14 paper, printed front and back, folded to be freestanding. Light passes through it, in a kind of radiance, as well as reflects off of its surfaces. 

The impetus was the sudden death of a friend’s wife, his grief and yearning for continued connection with her. He asked if angels needed fire to get to heaven, as a reframing of her request to be cremated. He felt her spirit in the waves on the beach and the quiet of a moonrise.

The work combines photographs of a solar eclipse, a full moon and a nuclear explosion, with my own drawings of hands which cradle the cosmos, the angels which populate our world. They are manipulated in Photoshop and through risograph printing, with the final version produced on the laser printer at a local copy center. 

The paper is folded as a variation on an 8-page mini-booklet zine, modified to be viewed without turning the pages. It is a descendant of the portable folding triptych shrine. The title is from the poem Auguries of Innocence by William Blake (To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour).

Larry Wolf, To Hold Infinity (2021)

This webpage provides more information and shows the evolution of the work: https://www.larrywolf51.com/p/to-hold-infinity.html

Artist Statement

I create works as a self-discovery process and to share that with others. For the past year, I’ve been making zines and three-dimensional works from single sheets of paper. I want the work to be touched and manipulated, sometimes with a DIY component, not kept at a distance as something too pure to be handled. My work combines drawing and watercolor as well as new and archival photographs.

In addition to zines, other paper-based and photographic traditions inform my work: origami, calling cards, snapshots. The work lives at the intersection of small-scale mechanical reproduction and hand crafted unique objects. The resulting object is ephemeral and strong, easily mailed, easily recycled, possibly archival. They are passed among friends as part of a shared experience.

The process of creation is a personal unpacking/repacking of aspects of my white gay male jewish buddhist technologist life. I lean into the potential for queerness and shield myself in the ordinary. I combine my history with the current moment - the long shadows of AIDS, the Holocaust, colonialism/racism - the recent deaths of my parents and the end my corporate career - the exuberant days of early Gay Liberation and the quiet joys of a walk with my husband. There is an undercurrent of grief, of loss, and also of new life and celebration, a firebird arising from the ashes, a wolf in sheep's clothing, an irritating grain of sand around which a pearl forms.

Examples

Larry Wolf, SIP-Mobile (2022)
SIP Installation 2022

Larry Wolf, Angels (2021)
SIP Installation 2022

Larry Wolf, Zines (2021)
SIP Installation 2022

Dazed

Larry Wolf, Maxi's Zine (2022)

My 2021 Zine Making Journey

Sparks of Joy

One of the joys of the pandemic (yes, I said that) has been the on-lime communities and the art making opportunities that sprung up. 

Larry Wolf, Three Zines (2021)

In February of 2021, I joined a photo zine class with Shawn Rowe and some buddies from Lillstreet Art Center. I quickly got hooked ол single-sheet zines, both accordion fold and the classic 8-page mini-zine. 

I liked the small technical challenge to do the layout in Photoshop and that I could then print them on 11x17 ledger size paper and cardstock at my neighborhood Staples.

One hundred years late, I had entered the world of mechanically reproduced art. [Thank you Walter Benjamin]

Zines seemed like the perfect answer to the nagging questions

What do I do with my photos? 

What kind of object do they become?. 

From Objects To A Community 

With zines in hand, and in the mail, I started showing them, exchanging them, and generally made them my cartes de visite* - a jumping off point for a conversation, a way to show something which spoke to me - or some soap box I wanted to talk from. 

[*calling cards or cartes de visite - For several decades, beginning in the 1850s, it was common to have photographs mounted on cards that were 2½ x 4“ to be left as a calling card or otherwise shared with friends and family. They were the beginning of small scale mass production, sometimes personal, sometimes cultural. 

Later (1925-1928), Andre Kertesz used postcard stock as his art form during his first years in Paris, sharing them among the artists who were part of his emigre cafe community. Late in his life, Kertesz became enamored with Polaroid SX70 images. I too was a fan of the SX70 and its prints. There is something joyful about passing around photos with friends.]

Larry Wolf, Zine Mercado
(2021)

I started sharing my zines with other zine makers (at Zine Mercado, at Quimby’s, through the Zine Club Chicago, with others in Jasper Goodrich's SIP art classes at the Hyde Park Art Center, and at the Filter Photo Festival and crit group).  

... and Archives

I learned from Nat Pyper that there is a queer zine archive, QZAP, in Milwaukee (with great on-line access). There's also the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at SAIC (a great resource when they re-open to the public). 

Moving into the Third Dimension

Several people suggested I look at Hedi Kyle and Ulla Warchol's book The Art of the Fold.

The little books they describe are so much more than ordinary booklets. They are handcrafted 3-D objects. OMG. 

How does this work? 

Where do I start?

Larry Wolf, 3-D Prototype (2021)

I started with a variation on the 8-page mini-zine. It takes a sheet folded the long-way and then works with the short-way folds and cuts across pairs of panels, to create pop-put sections. I love the architectural look.

From that concept, I drew on it, scanned it, added layers of color with a Risograph, rescanned that, further edited it digitally, and printed a run to pass around. 

I kind of got carried away. Wow! WTF? (see To Hold Infinity - Zine Club Edition)

Looking Ahead

Now that I have the 3-D bug on top of the zine bug, I’ve been further researching the world of pop-up books and modernist origami. I’m blown away by the awesome creations. For example, the documentary film Between the Folds (also on YouTube), this presentation by Erik Demaine and the many books of Paul Jackson and so many others!!!

As I continue to lean into single sheet creations, where will this take me?

Larry Wolf, Paper Mask Self-Portrait (2022)
[based on a design by Paul Jackson]

Previously Posted in 2021

To Hold Infinity

Rough Raw Reclaimed

Pavement 

Moments

Seen 

Pavement Calligraphy

 Clark and Lawrence

Larry Wolf, Pavement (2021)

Larry Wolf, Pavement (2021)

Larry Wolf, Pavement (2021)

Larry Wolf, Pavement (2021)

Larry Wolf, Pavement (2021)

Larry Wolf, Pavement - zine front and back (2021)

Larry Wolf, Pavement - zines (2021)