Bodies, Rest and Motion
Steven Jenkins
...
While the red ribbon remains an appropriately universal symbol of loss, remembrance and hope, artists have responded to two decades of pandemic trauma with far more complex and idiosyncratic forms of memorial. With his visually haunting, psychologically loaded series Primitive Behavior, photographer Frank Yamrus offers us a rare opportunity to eulogize those to whom it has been so difficult to say goodbye. Taken in the sand dunes that hug the shore of Provincetown, Massachusetts -- historically a site of amorous, anonymous coupling among gay men -- Yamrus's eerily beautiful black-and-white photographs commemorates the fallen dead who once populated this landscape of furtive sexual escapade. At the same time, Yamrus's eloquent images of bodies stilled in dappled sunlight remind us, the still-standing witnesses, that intimacy is vital, and that we must accept its conflicting consequence if we are to discover, for the first or one-hundredth time, what it means to live life fully in the adult world.
@1997 Steven Jenkins
To read the complete essay by Steven Jenkins, please download the pdf by clicking here.
To read additional essays about the Provincetown Photographs you may download the following pdfs:
No Less Glamorous by Greg Campora
Beat Poetry by Jennifer Smith as it appeared in (not only) blue
The Provincetown Photographs by Edward Osowski
Feral Portraiture by J. A. Hagar as it appeared in Provincetown Magazine