Don's View

Corcoran Men's Lavatory


The Cocoran Gallery of Art, the oldest in Washington DC, recently featured the photography of Annie Leibovitz and Ansel Adams.

Leibovitz, a lifetime photographer of people, both family and famous, is perhaps most popularly known for her nude portrait of pregnant Demi Moore published on the August 1999 Vanity Fair magazine cover.

In contrast to Leibovitz' color portraits of people, Adams was a master of black-and-white landscape and archetectual photography. The Corcoran's posthumous retrospective of his work conveys the growth to mastery of Adams' photographic skill.

The Corcoran Gallery was founded in 1869. I don't know when the mens' room was built, but it is old enough to have been called a lavatory. The natural lighting, wood panels, and black and white of tile and fixtures presented the semblance of an old sepia toned photograph even before the picture was taken. The mood had been set by the featured shows, and so I captured the image.

Labels: Corcoran Gallery, mens lavatory