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In 1973, Michael Lesy was a young scholar whose first book had just
been published. In the soon-legendary Wisconsin Death Trip he
combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a
devastatingly tragic epoch, the real-world antithesis of the
fanciful "Gay Nineties." It startled readers then and remains a
touchstone of modern photographic interpretation. That year Lesy
met and became close friends with the great photographer Walker
Evans, who in the 1930s had collaborated with writer James Agee to
create another towering landmark in the American photo-essay, Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men. Old, frail, with just two years left to
live, Evans was still urgently and obsessively photographing.
"Outside the rooms he inhabited," Lesy writes, "the world was
scattered with objects on their way to oblivion. He photographed
them in their passage." Brief as their friendship was, it was
intense and rewarding. Each admired the other; each saw himself
reflected in the other: aesthetic visionaries who shared a radical
belief that photographs were not flat and static documents-that
"the plain truth of the images . . . wasn't as plain as it seemed,"
Lesy explains. "Meanings, beliefs, and emotions lay crisscrossed
under the surface of the most plainspoken photographs." Throughout
his career in the classroom and in more than a dozen books, Lesy
has continually inspired us to open our eyes, our minds, and our
hearts to those many layers of meaning and feeling in photos, from
seemingly ordinary snapshots to majestic landscapes. In this
unconventional, lyrical biography, Lesy traces Evans's intimate,
idiosyncratic relationships with men and women-the circle of
friends who made Walker Evans who he was. "Wonder and scrutiny
produced the portraits Walker made in his prime," Lesy writes.
Evans's photographs of Agee, Berenice Abbott, Lady Caroline
Blackwood, and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Lesy's telling of
Evans's life stories. "Wonder and scrutiny, suffused with desire
and dread, produced the portraits he made in his last years," Lesy
notes. In the 1970s, Evans became enthralled with the Polaroid
SX-70 and its colorful instant images, and he used it to take his
last photographs-portraits of people, in extreme close up, and
portraits of objects. "Good clothes and good conversation, wit and
erudition, originality and inventiveness, the charms of smart and
pretty women-Walker took pleasure in being alive," Lesy writes. "He
photographed objects as if they were people and people as if they
were souls. All the while, he never forgot Blind Joe Death. The
annihilations of the First War, the extinctions of the epidemic
that followed it, the pyres and the pits-these he never forgot. The
still silence of his images was, to the very last, transcendental,
and always he remembered the skull beneath the skin."
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Are You Sleeping Little One (Board book)
Hans-Christian Schmidt; Illustrated by Andrea Nemet; Text written by Cynthia Vance; Translated by Laura Lindgren
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R133
Discovery Miles 1 330
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Prepare little ones for bedtime with this whimsical book of simple
rhymes and gentle, soothing pictures. With lyrical rhymes, this
charming board book describes the sleeping habits of over a dozen
animals, including species both common and rare, from ducklings to
sloths, bats to giraffes. With its gentle rhymes and sweet,
soothing pictures Are You Sleeping, Little One? is the perfect way
for little ones (and parents!) to end the day.
In the summer of 1971, Michael Lesy and a friend found most of the
snapshots in Snapshots 1971-77 in a dumpster behind a gigantic
photo-processing plant in San Francisco. The photos were in the
trash because the machines that printed them made them so fast -
duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates - that the people on the
processing line couldn't stop them. Week after week, Lesy took home
thousands of snapshots from the dumpster. He studied them as if
they were archeological evidence. By the end of the summer, he'd
formed his own collection of images of American life. He took that
collection with him when he returned to Wisconsin to finish his
graduate work in American history. His understanding of the
snapshots from California as reflections of the troubled state of
American society influenced the PhD research he was doing in
Wisconsin - research that became the American classic Wisconsin
Death Trip (1973). Over the next six years, Lesy added to his
collection of California snapshots with hundreds of snapshots that
had been left unclaimed and then discarded by a photo processor in
Cleveland. While Lesy looked through other people's lives in
pictures, the world was coming apart at the seams. The Vietnam War,
the murderous rampage of the Manson Family, and the Attica State
Prison uprising filled news headlines - and the general public
carried on their lives, with hope and abandon and everything in
between: chaos, cruelty, familial bonds and breaks, materialism,
lawlessness, unwitting humor. Lesy's collection of snapshots from
the 1970s is a time capsule of things familiar and alien. Now,
fifty years later, everything and nothing about our lives has
changed. In Wisconsin Death Trip Lesy pulled back the curtain of
"the good old days" to reveal the stark reality of American life
from 1890 to 1910. The anonymous images in Snapshots 1971-77 serve
as prophesies of present-day broken dreams, toils, and
tribulations.
The first book on the Mutter Museum contain artful images of the
museum's fascinating exhibits shot by contemporary fine art
photographers. Here, the focus is on the museum's archive of rare
historic photographs, most of which have never been seen by the
public. Featured are poignant, aesthetically accomplished works
ranging from Civil War photographs showing injury and recovery, to
the ravages of diseases not yet conquered in the 19th century, to
pathological anomalies, to psychological disorders. Many were taken
by talented photographers between the 1860s and the 1940s as
records for physicians to share among colleagues and to track
patients' conditions, and demonstrate various techniques used in
medical photography including the daguerreotype, micrography, X
ray, and traditional portrait-style photography. As visual
documents of what humans endured in the face of limited medical
knowledge, these extraordinary and haunting photographs demonstrate
how far medicine has advanced.
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