Almost two weeks ago I posted a photo that I’d entitled “Diebenkorn on the table-top.” It was shot looking through two screen-covered windows taken from a camera resting on the top of a table (where I was having breakfast). Richard Diebenkorn was not a photographer. He was a painter who worked mostly in the San Francisco Bay area. I became acquainted with his work in the Summer of 2004 when I was in Chicago. I was there to give a keynote address for the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS), but I also took a bunch of photographs of Millennium Park, which had just opened. Since the Art Institute of Chicago was nearby, I visited it. That’s where I became acquainted with Diebenkorn.
I took this photograph while standing in the garage beneath Millennium Park, which is built over a garage and railroad yards. I didn’t have a car, but I went down into the garage more or less so I could take photos like this. When I got that photo out of my camera, I said to myself: “That looks like a Diebenkorn.” It still does, as does that previous photo. They’re of very different subjects, but, when flatted out, their compositions resemble Diebenkorn’s composition.
