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12/19/2005 12:39:35 PM · #1 |
Interesting article, you may have to register (free) with the NY Times to read it.
//www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/arts/design/17lesy.html?th&emc=th
An exerpt:
From May 1952 to June 1966, a troubled recluse named Angelo Rizzuto stalked Manhattan with a camera. He saw a city of solitary beings isolated amid the architectural grandeur, cold streets prowled by disillusioned women, exhausted men and vulnerable children. He ended every roll with a portrait of himself, alone in a spare room, sullenly staring or bizarrely grimacing into the camera, a loner among loners.
No one saw these images while Mr. Rizzuto lived. When he was dying of cancer in 1967, he asked that his photographs - some 60,000 of them - be sent to the Library of Congress, along with $50,000 from his estate to finance a book of his work.... |
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12/19/2005 01:48:23 PM · #2 |
| It's good that there are people like Michael Lesy willing to work on book projects like this. |
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12/19/2005 01:53:45 PM · #3 |
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12/19/2005 01:57:17 PM · #4 |
Interesting and quotable!
I especially liked the Lesy quote, "There are possibilities that go beyond the safe definitions of what an artist is and what a camera is used for."
Thanks for sharing! |
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12/19/2005 01:58:46 PM · #5 |
Further quote, very interesting ("Mr. Lesy" is the scholar that put this book together):
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"For "Angel's World," Mr. Lesy selected 98 photographs from the thousands Mr. Rizzuto left, carefully matching pairs of images on facing pages to create an almost cinematic montage both sad and exhilarating. He says that the art of winnowing such a huge collection is "a matter of visiting and revisiting, a level of persistent viewing, and the ability to enter into a relaxed but alert state of looking. It's almost a yogic practice. Over time, you begin to recognize in a large body of work that there are things a guy like Rizzuto kept returning to - sorrow, solitariness, loss, reverie, the grandeur of space. You begin to understand that this guy, like all of us, had certain melodies he kept playing."
In the past, Mr. Lesy has ruffled some academic feathers by arguing that what he calls "demotic photography," like family snapshots or picture postcards, deserves the same level of scholarly study traditionally given only to art photography. He writes in "Angel's World" that once, when he presented the work of the unknown, half-mad Mr. Rizzuto to a group of his colleagues, they reacted angrily, as though "he was a naked fool and I was a charlatan."
"The art and photography historians really do not want anyone to say that the canon is something larger and more mysterious than they are willing to accept," he says. "My whole intention is to subvert the canon. I'd like to blow the whole thing up - not to destroy it, but to open it. To say the world is a far more wondrous place, greater in extent and breadth and twisted, gnarly depth than you could ever imagine. There are possibilities that go beyond the safe definitions of what an artist is and what a camera is used for."
Mr. Lesy is currently on sabbatical from teaching literary journalism at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, working on his next foray outside the canon - "Murder City," a study of newspaper photographs and articles documenting Depression-era homicides in Chicago.
In all his books, he said, his ambition is "to touch the soul and the heart and the mind." He continued: "And that's what I think academics are bad at. They don't understand the heart. They deal with photographs as aesthetic, intellectual constructs, or as integers in philosophical or linguistic argument. That's not all they are. They're slippery and deeply emotionally charged. A photograph is a thing which, to use an old scholarly word, needs to be 'unpacked.' There's the manifest content, then half a dozen layered contents." "
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"Demotic Photography" would make a good challenge topic :-)
Robt. |
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