Page 116 - TITLES FOR WORK I NEVER MAKE i go to disneyland alone

These stories may not seem connected, but it’s funny how images can recall times in our life. Photography is memory and I’m pretty sure I wore a Speedo that day at the beach. I definitely wore one at the Y.
I like Polke’s picture of two swimmers but not the book’s cover as it has a reproduction of an embossed snake skin on it, and I’m terrified of snakes. Compounded with that fear, after I got the book home, I couldn’t find the swimmer picture reproduced! Don’t you just hate it when curators leave out a piece from the exhibition, let alone don’t make postcards of the image you like? It took repeatedly searching to find it was buried as a thumbnail in the exhibition checklist. Maybe there is some beauty in that the exhibition and book designers hid this small photo. Its lack of importance to the paintings did seem predictable. I’d like to think I found the jewel, hidden gem or a forgotten memory of being young and a Speedo-wearing swimmer.
Just after graduate school (four years before moving permanently to New York) I spent August of 1986 visiting John in his tiny Hell’s Kitchen apartment. When he was at work, I would take cheap Polaroids of myself with various objects lying around.
Hell’s Kitchen