The poet Allen Ginsberg shot a series of pictures through his kitchen window in different years in the 1980s, but apart from changes of season the view is the same: the window with a cluttered table in front of it, and outside a tenement backyard with scrappy trees, facing walls and patches of sky above. Basically these are still lifes: undramatic, domestic, emblems of circling time. Or maybe you could think of them as images of everyday altars. In a characteristically paratactic inscription at the bottom of this image Ginsberg writes: “Since 1984 I get more and more focused weekly on my kitchen window backyard seasons daily view, here morning snow, dropped sill, white-roofed toolshed, bare-branched ailanthus “trees of heaven,” snow-lines on fence and fire-escapes, Times’ rail strike, January 27, 1987.”
