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Folk Photography
Nov. 12th, 2009 03:54 amNew Luc book, mostly pictures.
The text—a mere 25 pages; won't take you long even with today's reduced attention span—represents the boiling down of thirty years' thinking on the subject, and comprises a miniature theory of photography as a bonus. The pictures, 122 of 'em, display the United States (and Canada and Mexico to a smaller extent) of a century ago in all its messiness, sprawl, disaster, homely comfort, hard labor, pageantry, violence, optimism, piety, ignorance, hubris, imaginative flight, orderliness, grandeur, chaos, and pastoral quiet. If it were a movie it would be three weeks long and you'd still hate to leave your seat. The pictures are distant and immediate, beautiful and crude, and each one tells a story and leaves a mystery.
(I originally hypothesized that what Luc blogged about "Zion City" was fiction, since he often writes little imaginative bits there that ring true as fact. But I checked Wikipedia, and what he wrote did indeed occur.)
The text—a mere 25 pages; won't take you long even with today's reduced attention span—represents the boiling down of thirty years' thinking on the subject, and comprises a miniature theory of photography as a bonus. The pictures, 122 of 'em, display the United States (and Canada and Mexico to a smaller extent) of a century ago in all its messiness, sprawl, disaster, homely comfort, hard labor, pageantry, violence, optimism, piety, ignorance, hubris, imaginative flight, orderliness, grandeur, chaos, and pastoral quiet. If it were a movie it would be three weeks long and you'd still hate to leave your seat. The pictures are distant and immediate, beautiful and crude, and each one tells a story and leaves a mystery.
(I originally hypothesized that what Luc blogged about "Zion City" was fiction, since he often writes little imaginative bits there that ring true as fact. But I checked Wikipedia, and what he wrote did indeed occur.)
