These pictures were all taken in the bright and frosty month of February, 1991. A wary, technical war was being fought in the deserts far away, and on one's way through campus one would unexpectedly find oneself in the midst of a sullen group of rather repellent youngsters raising and flailing signboards with starkly imbecilic anti-war inscriptions ("Stop trading oil for blood!" or "Aren't Iraqis Human Beings Too?"). There are special mittens that allow photographers to operate small metallic parts in the cold, and even a pocket warmer, but it took at least ten minutes to set up my apparatus (medium format, on a tripod) and my finger would become sluggish and numb from frost despite all the preventive measures. The pictures came out well, although the versions reproduced here have lost more of the original quality than usual, for laboratorial reasons. There are two curious things about photographing VN's places in Cambridge, Mass.: first, certain details and vistas resemble, rather absurdly, his haunts in Old England Cambridge, and secondly, the gloomy dark-brick no. 8 in Craigie Circle is famous for refusing to be captured on film, and not merely because of the cramped space in front of it. Two of my negatives turned out inexplicably "flashed" (grey and muddy), and the only serviceable one was still very bad. As always, the pictures are lined up in a more or less chronological order. The Pictures 1. "Comparative Paradise" 2. "Cambridge to Cambridge" 3. "VN's D-Day" 4. "Conversation Piece" 5. "The Jack Frost House" 6. "Thickskinny" Zembla depends on frames for navigation. If you have been referred to this page without the surrounding frame, click here. 1: THE GRAVEYARDS | 2: PARIS | 3: CAMBRIDGE, MASS. CONTACT THE PHOTOGRAPHER