If Walker Evans’ famous Depression-era pictures for the Farm Security Administration long overshadowed his other work, his magazine career has been the most obscured of all. Employment at Henry Luce’s Fortune can easily seem at odds with his very individual vision and his social consciousness. But David Campany makes an effective case for elevating the magazine spreads to the first rank, and the book includes numerous facsimiles as evidence. Evans had a great deal of creative control, and the magazine format allowed him to present photos and text in ways that make his ideas more explicit than you can garner
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Short Review: A New American Picture
This is one of those “why didn’t I think of that” books, or more accurately, “I kind of thought of that but never got around to doing it” books. Doug Rickard travels the country via Google Street View and creates a virtual street photography from the massive library of automatically generated images. Rickard gravitates to images of more or less distressed locations that include people, which means he is drawing from a small percentage of available pictures. I’m impressed with the patience this must require. As the book notes, his approach lets him show places he’s never been and would
Continue readingShort Review: What Is Happening to News
Jack Fuller is a member of that unlucky generation of journalists who were in charge when the online flood started to swamp the newspaper industry. Contrary to some popular cliches, Fuller and many of his colleagues were well aware of the challenges posed by the Internet and tried very hard to turn them into opportunities. The Chicago Tribune, where Fuller was editor and then publisher, invested heavily in digital publishing and brought some great ideas to fruition, many quite successful. Unfortunately, the circumstances undermining the economics of the newspaper business were beyond control. In this book Fuller goes beyond the
Continue readingReview: Louis Wain’s Cats
Louis Wain would have been important if he had only been the greatest master ever of cute and anthropomorphic felinity, which, around the turn of the 20th Century, he was. His images of kitties were cranked out and reproduced in vast numbers, creating an inexhaustible reservoir of catty charm. Wain would have been important if he were only known for the increasingly bizarre and (before the term was coined) psychedelic cat images he produced toward the end of his life while institutionalized as a schizophrenic. And Wain would have been fascinating if only for the ceramic cats he designed in
Continue readingShort Review: George E. Ohr: The Greatest Art Potter on Earth
It’s hard to call Ohr’s pottery anything other than magnificent, and this book has a ton of beautiful images. The strength of his work is such that it is not overpowered by his story, which is saying a lot. Ohr cultivated eccentricity. His biography is uniquely entertaining, and the story of his work and its reception — in his own time and its rediscovery long after his death — is endlessly fascinating. The writing occasionally comes off as a bit too jolly, but I understand the temptation presented by Ohr’s own ebullience. Overall the text is engaging and authoritative.
Continue readingShort Review: Through the Eye of a Needle
Peter Brown takes on the end of the Western Roman Empire through the lens of wealth and religion, shining a brilliant light on the transition from Antiquity to the beginning of the Middle Ages. He writes extremely well for non-specialists, but with authority, and as he has elsewhere, makes a strong case that the Dark Ages as commonly understood did not exist. While there certainly was plenty of discontinuity, the Roman Empire did not abruptly disappear followed by blank centuries. Instead, as Brown traces, there were interrelated military, political, economic, social and religious evolutions as the Empire dissolved into a
Continue readingBook Review: Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments
Jo Farb Hernandez’s study of Spanish art environments is so epic that even a large-format volume of nearly 600 pages can’t get the job done, so a bonus CD adds thousands more thumbnail pictures and hundreds more pages of text. If creating a world-class art environment requires obsessive devotion, Hernandez is a match for the creators she studies. Her devotion demonstrates Spain is a match for the rest of the world, even if its environments have not received the same attention as the great sites in France or Wisconsin.
Continue readingShort Review: The True Gospel Preached Here
The True Gospel Preached Here by Bruce West My rating: 5 of 5 stars Lots of people stumbled onto Margaret’s Grocery by accident, taking the cutoff from Highway 61 into Vicksburg, Miss. It was an incredible site and its maker, the Rev. H.D. Dennis, was just as incredible (and voluble). Bruce West not only stopped, he developed a continuing relationship with Dennis and his wife, the site’s eponymous Margaret. The book documents the evolution of the environment, from his early encounter to its decay after the couple had died. West’s photos and text gives the site, and the couple, their
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