On the Photography of Allen Frame

Selecting images from DETOUR/ALLEN FRAME involved engaging with a dark, elegant publication that draws a curtain on a world where sign languages of Eros are embedded within a languorous drift of grain. Frame's CV as a photographer, educator, performer, and film producer could fill this allotted space; most significantly Frame is a surviving member of the 1970's “Boston School” of artists and photographers whose historicization accelerated from the ongoing AIDS epidemic which so decimated its ranks. Its photographers include revered cultural figures such as David Armstrong, Mark Morrisoe, Jack Pierson, and Nan Goldin. Now mythic, they exemplified a louche but socially determined LGBTQ clique originating in Boston with branches in Provincetown, NYC, London, and Berlin during that fabled age of cheap rents, cheap international flights, and endlessly accommodating friends of friends.

A detour redirects one off the expected physical or social route snapping him/ her out of reverie while alerting them to an immediate unknown. Maybe we pull over and roll down the window to get our bearings. If the detour is social, perhaps we settle back to regard this new set of people, our camera at the ready for the person or place that holds our sharpened attention. This marooned down time is the mildly decadent sweet space between events Frame reserves for being his most productive. Depending on who is behind the lens, every camera is capable of transforming a nobody into a somebody, which Frame accomplishes as part of a larger, but more complex pictorial agenda. Frame's people share a lean contemporary physical beauty and unstudied sense of self, owning whatever space they are in. They appear members of an oblique but not overly familial community inhabiting interiors of hotel-room minimalism with few reassuring reference points to time or place. Every image's title requires reading to pinpoint our location on the globe; even if an individual's style may read as “Eastern Bloc”, we co