Decompositions

John Pfahl and David Weiss collaborated on an exhibition of thirteen Ektacolor photographs with fourteen poems that were inspired by them.  Pfahl’s photographs are large, colorful semi-abstractions of his backyard compost pile taken at various times of the year, and include watermelon rinds, bean pods, ginko leaves and other organic materials in various stages of decay.  Weiss’ poems deal with mortality, love, time and other large and small issues—each in a different format.  Some are formal and dense; some are like haiku; and others like concrete poetry.

John Pfahl is an internationally renowned photographer living inBuffalo.  David Weiss is a writer and poet living inIthacaand teaching atHobartandWilliamSmithCollege.  This exhibition was curated by Mark Jones, professor atHobartandWilliamSmithCollege, where the exhibition premiered in April 1999.  John Pfahl made a slide presentation and David Weiss gave a poetry reading, followed by a reception for the artists: Sunday, September 17, 2000, 2-5 p.m.  Also, the Nina Freudenheim Gallery presented a coordinating exhibition, John Pfahl, Extreme Horticulture, September 9 - October 6, 2000.

In the obituary "John Pfahl, 81, world renowned photographer focused lens on Buffalo,” published in The Buffalo News on April 18, 2020, Anne Neville begins:

“John Pfahl could make even a heap of garbage look beautiful.”

That’s how Buffalo News Art Critic Richard Huntington in 2000 summed up the humorous, inspired work of John Pfahl, whom Huntington described as “one of the most widely esteemed of Buffalo’s nationally recognized photographers.”

Making garbage look beautiful, Huntington wrote, was what Mr. Pfahl did in his 1992 series, “From the Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile.” Huntington wrote, “Watermelon rinds, orange peels, bean pods, cabbage leaves and other assorted table scraps in various stages of decomposition are discovered by Pfahl’s flawless eye to be the unlikely source of ravishing displays of color and quite rational compositions.”