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January 10, 1922. New York. "McRay and Baroness v. Freytag." Claude McKay, Jamaican writer and a figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and avant-garde artist-poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the "dadaist baroness" of Greenwich Village. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection. View full size.
This doesn't look like lens-smearing blurriness, but rather the use of tilt-plane selective focus.
This is so silly I can't believe it. Yet I find the focus interesting. Do you think smearing the lens with petroleum jelly was popular in those days? I don't, but it would be a Dada thing to do.
Wow, it must have been Halloween every day when with those two. But I do remember going to one or two similarly outfitted Southern California love-ins myself, back about 1970. Actually I don't remember too much ELSE about the '70s. And I'm suddenly getting the munchies.
McKay's face in this picture belongs in the dictionary as the visual definition of "Bemused".
It's too bad the elites didn't show the same expression to the Dada movement ... instead of taking it seriously.
Watch the movie made about the baroness. Her reputation is that she would make a "Wild Child" look like a tame dame.
She had a bizarre and tragic life:
http://mysite.ncnetwork.net/zzyzlane/write/essay/baroness.html
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