Don’t Touch the Art by DS Waldman

The first time I brought my mother to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she reached out and touched one of my favorite paintings. I’d acquired a long-term press pass to the museum to help finish my first book, which features a number of ekphrastic poems and art criticism, so for two years I came and went for free. Having spent considerable time there, I was excited to show my mother, an old-process photographer, some of my favorite things, especially in the cameraless photography wing.

Together, and separately, we drifted around the gallery, along walls of Man Ray’s ghostly rayographs, Allison Rossiter’s experimental photograms printed on expired, thus unstable, photo paper. At the gallery’s exit—or entrance, depending on one’s path—there hung a wall-size grid of cyanotypic squares, all together forming a single, very large blue rectangle.…