Wednesday September 23, 7:30 p.m.
From Surrealist Photography to the Mylar Chamber: Clarence John Laughlin and Ira Cohen
A talk by Allan Graubard
Free Times Cafe, 320 College St.
Clarence John Laughlin (the celebrated New Orleans photographer) is the first of his generation in the 1940s to root his vision in Surrealism and surrealist techniques. Two decades later, Ira Cohen (post-Beat New York poet, photographer and publisher) broadens that vision in the Mylar Chamber experience. For Laughlin, the photograph transforms the relationships between him and the objects, subjects, and environments he photographs, revealing their unique inner life. For Cohen, the same takes place but in the Mylar Chamber where the photograph, now a reflection of a reflection, captures wild transformations. By the end of the 1960s, we have entered a realm where virtuality gains its first representations.
Allan Graubard will discuss this legacy with visual projections. A friend of and collaborator with Clarence John Laughin (1905-1985 ) and Ira Cohen (1935-2011 ), he is also one of their documentarians.
Allan Graubard is a poet, writer, playwright, literary critic and curator of art. Recent titles include Sun Step Black Lake (Broken Sleep Books, UK, 2024; La Page Blanche, in French translation, 2026), Language of Birds (Anon Editions, NYC/LA, 2020), Into the Mylar Chamber: Ira Cohen (Fulgur Press, UK, 2019) and more. He is editor of and contributor to the international art and literary journals: Nigredo (2022), Aerial Archipelago (2024), and Caliber (2026). Recent curations at the Eugenio F. Granell Foundation Museum, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, include Homage aux Nabis: The Pont-Aven Suiteby Gregg Simpson (2025), Calle Cervantes: The Art of Collage by David Coulter (2023), and Dragons: The Art of Eugenio F. Granell and Rik Lina (2022). He was also contributor to and consultant for the International Encyclopedia of Surrealism (Bloomsbury, UK, 2019). His plays have been performed in NYC, Washington, DC, Dubrovnik Croatia, and Sibiu, Romania, with publication.Allan lives in NYC and dedicates this event to his late wife Carolyn McGee, actor and master teacher of acting.
Sunday October 28, 7:30 p.m.
Pursuing Narrative in Medicine
A talk by Dr. Sharon Baltman
Free Times Cafe, 320 College St.
In medical school in the sixties, we were taught to ask the patient for their Chief Complaint, and to clarify it with a series of concrete descriptors in 15 seconds or less. What was not attended to, was the patient’s back story. Only in 2006, Dr. Rita Charon, an internist at Columbia, wrote the first book on Narrative Medicine. In it she teaches that instead of asking the patient to describe the type of pain, its location and intensity, to simply pose the question: “What do I need to know about you?” And then to listen closely to their story, in the same way we would study a piece of art. Narrative Medicine is now on the curriculum of every medical school. Only in retrospect did I realize that the trajectory of my career pursued narrative in medicine.
Sharon Baltman is a retired physician psychotherapist, who began writing creatively in 1992. Her experiences in medicine are represented both in her memoir Escape from The Bedside (2013), and the novel Anne of Oasis (2021), which is informed by the tools she taught patients in the therapy room. She is the author of articles in the Globe and Mail, in literary anthologies, and on CBC Radio, and is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada.
