Most attempts to generalize about photography as a medium run up
against our experience of the photographs themselves. We live with
photos and cameras every day, and philosophies of the photographic
image do little to shake our intimate sense of how we produce
photographs and what they mean to us. In this book that is equal
parts memoir and intellectual and cultural history, French writer
Roger Grenier contemplates the ways that photography can change the
course of a life, reflecting along the way on the history of
photography and its practitioners. Unfolding in brief, charming
vignettes, "A Box of Photographs" evokes Grenier's childhood in
Pau, his war years, and his working life at the Gallimard
publishing house in Paris. Throughout these personal stories,
Grenier subtly weaves the story of a lifetime of practicing and
thinking about photography and its heroes--Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Weegee, Alfred Eisenstaedt, George Brassai, Inge Morath, and
others. Adding their own insights about photography to the
narrative are a striking range of writers, thinkers, and artists,
from Lewis Carroll, Albert Camus, and Arthur Schopenhauer to Susan
Sontag, Edgar Degas, and Eugene Delacroix. Even cameras themselves
come to life and take on personalities: an Agfa accompanies Grenier
on grueling military duty in Algeria, a Voigtlander almost gets him
killed by German soldiers during the liberation of Paris, and an
ill-fated Olympus drowns in a boating accident. Throughout, Grenier
draws us into the private life of photographs, seeking the secrets
they hold for him and for us. A valedictory salute to a lost world
of darkrooms, proofs, and the gummed paper corners of old photo
albums, " A Box of Photographs" is a warm look at the most honest
of life's mirrors.
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