MICHAEL LESY (Wisconsin Death Trip)—LONG TIME COMING: US Photos 1935-1943

Description: • For Your Consideration: • A First Edition in HARDCOVER of: • “LONG TIME COMING: A PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT OF AMERICA, 1935-1943”(W. W. Norton & Company, 2002) (HARDCOVER, First Edition, First Printing) • BY MICHAEL LESY • ABOUT THIS TITLE: • “Over 400 rarely or never seen photographs of a vanished America: LONG TIME COMING is derived from the 145,000 photographs made between 1935 and 1943 by a team of now-famous photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), whose ranks included ARTHUR ROTHSTEIN, BEN SHAHN, DOROTHEA LANGE, and WALKER EVANS. “We are all familiar with the iconic images of poverty that are usually associated with the project. The agency’s mission, however, went well beyond photographing dispossessed rural people, and this book is proof. It includes 410 remarkable images made in large cities (including New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, and Pittsburgh) as well as dozens of small towns and villages throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. “These are images that have rarely been seen―some twenty percent have never been published before―images that present a portrait of a vanished America, a visual record of everyday existence that enhances and enlarges our assumptions about the era. Setting the pictures in context, MICHAEL LESY’s iconoclastic, groundbreaking text intercuts excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some given as ‘assigned reading’ to the project photographers) with an extended look at ROY STRYKER, the FSA's controversial director. It presents the FSA photographs in a very different light from the bleak vision to which we are accustomed. 410 photographs.” —THE PUBLISHER • “Here, in a collection all the more impressive for its understated presentation…. These depictions of ordinary life—social gatherings, urban streetscapes, and small-town rituals—succeed, by their range and depth, in restoring a sense of the extraordinary to an enterprise now frequently taken for granted.”—THE NEW YORKER • “A beautiful book...best looked at not just once and slowly, but several times over.” —KILLING THE BUDDHA (WEBSITE) • “One of the most fascinating aspects of LONG TIME COMING is the glimpse it affords of obscure but remarkably talented photographers.” — FELICIA FEASTER, CREATIVE LOAFING • “Beyond the lush and entrancing photographs, there is the history one reads between the lines of captions.”—BETH KEPHART, CHICAGO TRIBUNE • “Blunt, impeccably thorough...articulate...a double edged hacksaw.” —LAURA ANNA BROOKS, PULP • “Here is an America long gone but well worth remembering…. Revelatory and exceptional.”—SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE • “It's great to see this smart blend of photographs neatly arranged in this terrific volume.” —PICTURE MAGAZINE • “The collection...reveals the artistry and compassion of a talented group of photographers.” —PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE • “These photographs are so much more vivid than any attempts at fine art could be, while often achieving that status themselves. The past is made real here: not just farms, migrants, and poverty, but the ordinary life of people in cities or at leisure, including old people, adults in their prime, teenagers, and children. There’s a feeling of spontaneity to many of these scenes that's quite remarkable for an age seventy years before the camera phone…. My mother was born in 1931, and this helped me understand the world into which she was born…. Highly recommended for lovers of 20th century American history and of street photography.”—JOHN COOPER, GOODREADS REVIEW • “The book, alas, is not cheap, but it is intelligently and sturdily put together and a copy should withstand many years of frequent use in a library. LONG TIME COMING deserves a spot in any general purpose or secondary school or college library. Indeed, I can see it as an instructive adjunct to any course on the history of the United States in the 20th Century. It also should be a valued (and, unlike many coffee-table books of photographs, an oft-browsed) addition to any home library.”—R. M. PETERSON, AMAZON REVIEW • ABOUT THE AUTHOR’S “WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP”: “First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. LESY has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, CHARLES VAN SCHAIK…. A shocking portrait of a small town crumbling--socially, morally, physically and emotionally--under the impact of the great depression of the 1890s.”—THE PUBLISHER • “MICHAEL LESY’s 1973 book WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP is an American oddity, a cult classic for a reason. In a way that few documentary texts do, it makes us leave the baggage of modernity at the trailhead. It forces us back into the inconceivably long nights in rural and small-town America before the widespread use of electricity, before radio, before antibiotics for dying children and antidepressants for anxiety bordering on mania, when events could make a family feel that some nocturnal beast had chalked its door.”—DWIGHT GARNER, NEW YORK TIMES (2023) • “As the title suggests, this is a truly strange book. Published in 1973, it is essentially a collection of photos taken in Black River Falls, WI, by CHARLES VAN SCHAIK between 1890 and 1910. The subject matter ranges from children in coffins, to farm animals, to family portraits of some of the grimmest-looking people imaginable; the photos are accompanied by snippets from newspapers. The whole package seems to confirm that the good old days were actually awful.”—LIBRARY JOURNAL • “MICHAEL LESY has collected and arranged a number of remarkable old photographs; he has culled accounts, principally of death, depression and disease, from local papers, recorded a little local gossip…then to accompany these composed a brief though eloquent and perceptive text, and put all this handsomely and artfully before us…. The result is an impressive example of the poetry of history…. There can be no question that this original work makes us deeply feel one form that misery has taken; and in causing us to feel as well as consider, WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP has enlarged on the uses of history.” —WILLIAM H. GASS, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • “Hugely influential.” —NEIL GAIMAN • “Ahead of its time, not because it was a published collection of nineteenth-century vernacular photographs....but because of LESY’s attitude to his material. He looked upon the photographs of CHARLES VAN SCHAICK, taken between 1890 and 1910 in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in a way that predicted postmodernism. To say that he viewed them skeptically would be overstating the case, but he certainly did not take them at face value, and he treated them proactively rather than reactively—that is, as a creative resource.” —GERRY BADGER & MARTIN PHARR, “THE PHOTOBOOK: A HISTORY, VOL. 2”• “The book is now an essential part of photobook history, revered as a sort of cult classic.” —BRIAN ARNOLD, PHOTO-EYE (BLOG)• “I remain both puzzled and enthralled.” —MUTANT JOURNALISM (BLOG)• “WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP upset the dominant narrative of western expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the LAURA INGALLS WILDER / ROSE WILDER LANE story of hardy, self-sufficient, and virtuous settlers. Its genius is that there appears to be no interpretation—it is just news articles, primary sources and pictures. Of course, the selection of sources is actually interpretation. But the squalor, misery, and mayhem described will make any sentient reader question our favored view of our nation’s history.” —NBT, AMAZON REVIEW• “Read WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP, and remember that you are reading about real people, in a real place, at a real time.” —DETROIT FREE PRESS• “WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP has become a cult favorite, an example of hybrid nonfiction narrative about more than an era and its people in Black River Falls. LESY created a story of the seen and unseen, the spoken and the silent in small-town America at the end of the nineteenth century…. In that space between knowing and not knowing, WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP becomes mesmerizing.” —JESSICA HANDLER, RIVER TEETH: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION NARRATIVE• “MICHAEL LESY’s grim collection of American Gothic uses old glass-plate negatives to clobber an old myth: the idyll of ‘pioneers’ escaping the city’s evils to reap happiness on the open prairies…. LESY’s reading of rural decay is history with a wrench…. A drama of an American Nightmare.” —NEWSWEEK• “At a superficial glance, this remarkable book—an experiment in psychohistory by a young photographer and historian—appears unpromising, if not downright repugnant…. But on closer inspection, a fascination sets in: The photographs start to glow with an eerie otherworldliness…the news items begin to work on us RIPLEY’s ‘BELIEVE IT OR NOT’ of the macabre and demented.” —CHRISTOPHER LEHMAN-HAUPT, NEW YORK TIMES• “An extraordinary exercise…. Remarkable.” —LOS ANGELES TIMES • “An agonizing journey behind the dream and into the bowels of [Wisconsin’s] frontier fairyland. In this stunning book…the years dissolve in a striking montage…. Those quaint photographs, in a dead sleep for some eighty years, suddenly awaken on the page before you…. WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP transcends time and transmits life—as only poetry can—to the printed page.” —MINNEAPOLIS TRIBUNE • • For other details about this book, please see below. • TITLE: “LONG TIME COMING: A Photographic Portrait Of America, 1935-1943” AUTHOR: MICHAEL LESY TYPE: HARDCOVER PUBLISHER, LOCALE, & YEAR: W. W. NORTON & COMPANY (New York & London), 2002 PRINTED IN: ITALY EDITION: FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING* *RE: On the Copyright Page, the statement “First Edition” & this Number Row: “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0.” NOTE: This copy is NOT an ex-library copy. PAGES: 479 SIZE: 11.25 x 10.25 x 1.50 (INCHES) ISBN: 0-393-04943-4 CONDITION OF DUST JACKET: VERY GOOD MINUS. Price ($65.00) is uncut. Corners & spine tips are chipped. Moderate but persistent wear along edges. Sides are lightly but persistently scratched & smudged. For all this, DJ remains bright & clean with no cuts. CONDITION OF THE BOOK: VERY GOOD PLUS. Book is square & firm. Blue cloth boards are bright & clean. There are three dings (indentations) along the top edge of the back & 1 ding along the top edge of the front—these dings do not affect the book other than here & the edges are otherwise fine. Corners are bumped. Spine is tight & uncreased with bumped tips. Light smudging on the top text-block edge near the spine; other text-block edges—& endpapers—are fine. Pages are all pointedly bright & clean—with no writing, no underlining, no stains, no rips, no foxing, no foul odor, etc. LOOKS UNREAD. • SHIPPING NEWS: This book will be wrapped with care before being shipped in a protected & sturdy box. THANK YOU! ********************** /\___/\=•ᆺ•= “We believe it’s good business to be good to our customers.” *********** FLAPPINCAT’s HOUSE RULES ***********1. GENERAL TREATMENT. We enjoy treating FLAPPINCAT customers with honesty & respect & warmth because that’s how we like to be treated when we buy things on eBay.2. GENERAL ATTITUDE. We are grateful you choose to trust us with your business. 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Price: 45 USD

Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

End Time: 2025-01-01T11:32:11.000Z

Shipping Cost: 7.99 USD