These well-curated images intriguingly reroute our way of seeing Yosemite’s beauty by foregrounding the people that call it...
In his debut, Kulikauskas offers a rich, complex collection of black-and-white photographs taken in Yosemite National Park.
Returning 19 times in two years with his 35-mm camera, the photographer didn’t aim to capture the park’s black bear or bighorn sheep, but its human visitors. Inspired by a member of the wait staff going about her routine, Kulikauskas decided to focus on people and their impact on Yosemite. A thoughtful introductory essay called “Spirit and Matter” by Carol McCusker, the curator of photography at the Harn Museum of Art, in Florida, gives a brief history of writers and photographers at Yosemite, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Ansel Adams, suggesting that these new images illuminate a crucial intersection of the sacred and the profane (the natural-spiritual and the earthly-consumerist) most true to the park’s present state. McCusker notes that ignoring human presence among the giant sequoias or on the fixed cables up Half Dome would miss something vital—the combined efforts of year-round employees and tourists shape the park’s identity. Jaw-dropping shots of pure wilderness don’t make up the centerpiece. Instead, full-page spreads depict horses on a pack trip, tethered to each other and to the people who ride them. In “2-Hour Tram Tour,” broad mountain faces pale to a foamy gray against the darker, foregrounded truck that drives a group of tourists. In another example of human impact, we see visitors watching the landscape with their binoculars and reaching into paper bags for lunch at Lake Tenaya. In the more than 100 photographs, composition choices show skill with the effects of light; page layout deploys an engaging variety of image size and orientation. Romantics might favor the few photographs that grant a deep perspective toward a lush tree line, as in “Ahwahnee Meadow,” or allow a divine downspout of sunlight into a scene in which the human figures are dwarfed, as in “Cook’s Meadow.” The last pages feature the words of a stable manager, interpretive rangers, a gardener—those with deep attachments to the park. The volume concludes with four transcribed interviews with these park personnel and several first-person stories about living and working at Yosemite.
These well-curated images intriguingly reroute our way of seeing Yosemite’s beauty by foregrounding the people that call it home for years or for a day.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9973951-9-8
Page Count: 168
Publisher: A Thousand Words Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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