By Ann Dunn (ann.dunn@mindspring.com) Most astonishing, for me, is the 1946 portrait of Ruth Asawa. She seems trapped behind her own arm. I think she thinks she will never stop crying. She sees something horrible beyond the frame that we cannot, and do not want to, see. One hand is in her mouth and the other is entwined in her disheveled hair. Archer has shaped the image into a tall, narrow rectangle, like the space between prison bars. Asawa, interred in a California camp for Japanese four years before this picture was taken (when she was 16), has only recently left, and has not seen her father since his arrest in 1942. Today, 60 years later, Asawa is weakened by Lupus, but has lived a happy and fulfilled life. She became famous for her intricately woven wire sculptures that enclose space and make it be still, and for her fountains that release it and set it in motion.

Finally, the Nature series brings us full circle to the Zen of Archer’s work. Here the only human presence is the eye that is present to see. Here nature is simply an inscrutable cycle, from winter to winter. We may meditate on pale dogwood blossoms against a pale sky or a time-eaten leaf, half-covered in snow, but we might as well be sitting in an apartment in Queens for all the understanding we will ever achieve. Just look, Archer seems to say. Just be, like the leaf. Or as Cunningham has put it, “leave it to the moment.”

When I was a wanna-be photographer in the mid-sixties, standing in the silence of Nell Dorr’s darkroom waiting for my images to emerge from submerged Agfa paper, I was struck by the solitary holiness of the process. There is a moment when one must simply wait and see what one has seen. The flow from sight to intention to choice to act is all past. Even the eye is closed. After each darkroom session, before I opened the door to the bright Berkshire sun, I used to pray, “Let me see deeper.” The Hazel Larsen Archer exhibit at BMCMAC is indeed deep-seeing.

Jacqueline Gourevitch, an Archer student at Black Mountain College, recalls, “There was an atmosphere of extreme mutual respect, an awareness of the importance of silence, an intense meditative, spiritual quality that permeated her space, her aesthetic, and everything around her. That was new to me. I had never before met people who recognized the actual trees and stones in one another’s photographs, one by one. It was inspiring.”

If $3 worth of inspiration is not enough for you, you can, for a few dollars more, purchase the extremely fine catalogue book for this exhibit, Hazel Larsen Archer: Black Mountain College Photographer. Illuminating essays by Connie Bostic (artist and writer), David Vaughan (Merce Cunningham’s archivist) and Erika Zarow (Archer’s daughter), accompany Susan Rhew’s compelling design and Alice Sebrell’s clear rendering of the images. I intend to use the book in my next class at UNCA, to put the whole “art” issue to rest with the thing itself.

In one final attempt to capture the essence of Archer’s images and the people in them, I would like to conclude with a quote from Robert Rauschenberg about the life-long collaboration with Merce Cunningham and John Cage that began in those distant Blue Ridge summers: “All of us worked totally committed, shared every intense emotion and, I think, performed miracles, for love only.”



Vaughan, David in Hazel Larsen Archer: Black Mountain College Photographer. Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center. Aheville, NC, 2006. p17.
Cunningham, Merce. In The Dancer and the Dance: Merce Cunningham in Conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve. Marion Boyars, Inc. New York, 1980. p 139.
Brown, Jean Morrison, ed. The Vision of Modern Dance. Princeton Book Company. Princeton, NJ, 1979. p90.
“ p90.
Cunningham. p199.
Gourevitch, Jacqueline. http:www.bmcproject.org
Klotsty, James, ed. Merce Cunningham. Saturday Review Press. New York, 1975. p83.