Terrain Of My Own Ambivalence Poem by gershon hepner

Between the terrain of my own ambivalence
and rich and fertile fields extending
the fascination that, mind-bending,
I now reject with a repulsion more intense
than my desires that have turned into dead losses,
I feel myself at last at home,
no longer with a need to roam,
having rolled like stones that do not gather mosses.

Inspired by a photograph by Larry Sultan, “Backyard, ” shoot in the San Fernando Valley on the site of a porno movie production, in an exhibition of photographs at the Huntington Museum, “This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs”.

Larry Sultan writes:

In the backward terrain of my own ambivalence, between the rich and fertile field that stretches between fascination and repulsion, desire and loss. I am home again.

Christopher Knight writes in the LA Times on June 18,2008:

Disappointingly, just 18 of the 108 named photographers are women. Glamour photographer George Hurrell is unsurprisingly included, for example, but not his MGM predecessor, Ruth Harriet Louise. More men than women would be expected, given social norms of the last 150 years, but the disparity is greater than it should be. The show is not organized chronologically or by artist. The seven visual essays are instead thematic, beginning with a selection in the library's West Hall that looks at L.A.'s reputation as an artificial garden. Edenic vista is framed by such works as Pierce's panoramic 1910 view of the Cahuenga Pass, all rolling hills dotted with farmhouses. The pervasiveness of the pastoral idyll subtly recasts Herb Ritts' pair of sensual portraits of male and female fashion models as iconic images of humanity's tragic fall, a blend of Angelyne and Dees. Ditto Larry Sultan's porn actors in a middle-class Valley backyard and Anthony Friedkin's deluxe patrons at the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool.

9/2/08