Leonard Freed, Martin Luther King Being Greeted on His Return to
the United States after Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, 1963.
All three essayists delve into matters in provocative and
illuminating ways, pointing (forgive the pun!) to different,
all valid ways of looking. Among multiple points of view
expressed in each of their essays: Blessing focuses
on the hand as instrument; Hoving on its (imagined)
disconnection from the body; and Rugoff on the hand
as an instrument of opposites.
My own view of Buhl's unique collection owes a poetic
debt to the late, great literary theorist and semiotician,
Roland Barthes, whose slender book, Camera Lucida,
is a meditation on the shuttered, frozen image and loss,
on the photograph as eventual memorial of whatever
HYLAND
