Hollis Frampton (1936-1984)

An important figure of avant-garde film, Hollis Frampton was a filmmaker, photographer, theorist, and a professor of Media Studies at the University at Buffalo. Frampton associated with academy friends Frank Stella and Carl Andre and enjoyed a correspondence with Ezra Pound. He experimented with the camera’s relationship to time—film’s ability to fix and extend time—and with techniques including video synthesis, image processing and xerography. Retrospectives of his work have been shown at major museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Anthology Film Archives in New York, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. ADSVMVS ABSVMVS is Latin and translates as “We are here, we are not here.” Images of death and decay in the series evoke the vacillation between absence and presence that Frampton considered central to human thought. The photographs were some of Frampton’s last, taken around the time of his father’s death. —Joan Vita Marotta, 2002