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BRIEFLY NOTED
Books of Interest in Spring 2024 Issue of ZEKE
Published October 2024
Edited by Alice Currey
Order We Sort of People
By Henry Horenstein
Kehrer Verlag, 2023
136 pages | $50
Journalist and writer Leslie Tucker and photographer Henry Horenstein began working together in 1997 when she invited him to Maryland to shoot a mysterious multiethnic family, the little-known Wesort clan: “We sorts are different from you sorts.” The project started as a genealogical search for a family whose roots stretched back to the founding of Maryland as the first Catholic colony, it grew into a mystery about the multiethnic origins of America, then became a race against time as the Wesorts and their descendants disappeared and their stories died. While Horenstein photographed the last generation of Proctors and their disappearing world, Tucker recorded the conversations she had with the wise women of the family. A living archive emerges, with voices that portray the complex realities of their lives in their own words, as seen through their eyes.
Shadows of Emmett Till
By Bob Newman
Kehrer Verlag, 2022
268 pages | $90
The Mississippi Delta has been called “The Most Southern Place on Earth”, a region of layered histories that collide with each other daily. It is a place that defines America like no other part of the country – a culture entwined with slavery, poverty, and political and economic oppression. It is the land that gave birth to the creative genius of B. B. King and the murder of young Emmett Till. Shadows of Emmett Till seeks to probe that complex past by observing the many ways the shadow of Till’s murder still hangs over the Delta. This work breathes the Delta air and seeks to frame the region and its people in a 21st-century context, at a time when white America may be starting to finally come to terms with the sins of its past. Along the way, the past spills into the present, with parallels to George Floyd and so many others.
Deep Inside the Blues
By Margo Cooper
University Press of Mississippi, 2023
384 pages | $45
Deep Inside the Blues collects thirty-four of Margo Cooper’s interviews with blues artists and is illustrated with over 160 of her photographs, many published here for the first time. For thirty years, Cooper has been documenting the lives of blues musicians, their families and homes, neighborhoods, festivals, and gigs. In 1993, Cooper began photographing in the clubs around New England, then in Chicago, and before long in Mississippi and Helena, Arkansas. On her very first trips to Mississippi in 1997 and 1998, Cooper had the good fortune to photograph Sam Carr, Frank Frost, Bobby Rush, and Otha Turner, among others. “The blues come out of the field,” Ulmer told Cooper. Seeing those fields, as well as the old juke joints, country churches, and people’s homes, inspired her. She began recording interviews with the musicians, sometimes over years, listening and asking questions as their narratives unfolded. Many of the key blues players of the period have already passed, making their stories and Cooper’s photographs of them all the more poignant and valuable.
Josef Koudelka: Next
By Melissa Harris
Aperture and Magnum Foundation, 2023
352 pages | $50
An intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists. Throughout his more than sixty-year-long obsession with the medium, Josef Koudelka considers a remarkable range of photographic subjects—from his early theater work to his seminal project on the Roma and his legendary coverage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, to the solitariness of exile and the often-devastating impact of humans on the natural landscape. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over almost a decade as well as conversations with his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators worldwide—this deftly told, richly illustrated biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind of this notoriously private photographer. Writer, editor, and curator Melissa Harris crafts a unique, in-depth, and personal history of both the man and his photography. Richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, Josef Koudelkas Next includes many biographical and behind-the-scenes images from Koudelka’s life, as well as iconic images from his work, from the 1950s to the present.
Dammed: Birth to Death of the Colorado River
By Debbie Bentley
Daylight Books, 2024
192 pages | $50
Dammed follows the roughly 1,450-mile main stem of the Colorado River, from birth in the Rocky Mountain National Park to its end at the border of Mexico, and the 16 dams and diversions along its course. The multi-year photographic project documents the river, dams, reservoirs, and people interacting with the river along this route. This environmental photography project intends to bring attention to the increasingly arid condition of the Colorado River basin, and prompt discussion and learning about not only the Colorado River watershed but of water supply in general.
American Prospects
By Joel Sternfeld
Steidl Books, 2023
108 pages | $50
Born of a desire to follow the seasons up and down America, and equally to find lyricism in contemporary American life despite all its dark histories, American Prospects has enjoyed a life of acclaim. Its pages are filled with unexpected excitement, despair, tenderness, and hope. Its fears are expressed in beauty, its sadnesses in irony. Oddly enough, the society it seems to presage has now come to be; oddly enough, the ideas of this book bespeak our present moment. Often out of print, this new edition of Joel Sternfeld’s seminal book returns to the format of the original 1987 edition. All of the now classic images within it—alongside a group of never-published photographs—examine a once pristine land stewarded by indigenous peoples who needed no lessons in stewardship, and a land now occupied by a mix of peoples hoping for salvation within the fraught paths of late capitalism. The result suggests a vast nation whose prospects have much to do with global prospects, a “teenager of the world” unaware of its strengths, filled with idealism and frequent failings. These pictures see all but judge not.
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