Van Schaick – Lesy, Michael.
Wisconsin death trip. With a preface by Warren Susman. (Photographs:
Charles van Schaick). New York, Pantheon Books a Division of Random
House (1973). Quer-4°. [131] Bl. mit 153 Abb. auf Tafeln. OLn. mit
illustr. OU. (by Kenneth Miyamoto).
Auer 558. Roth, The Book of 101 Books
222 f. The Open Book 292 f. – Erste Ausgabe. – „Michael Lesy’s
Wisconsin Death Trip is an eccentric, audacious, and frequently annoying
book that its author calls “as much an exercise of history as it is an
experiment of alchemy.“ Originally presented as Lesy’s Ph.D. thesis at
Rutgers, the book is also as much a document of its time as it is a
reflection on the past. In the early ’70s, when all received wisdom was
subject to skeptical ’interrogation,“ Lesy’s imaginative and radical
reevaluation of the historical record became a campus cult book much as
Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media had nearly a decade before.
Drawing primarily from an archive of 3,000 images (culled from 30,000
glass-plate negatives) made by town photographer Charles Van Schaick and
from newspaper accounts first printed in the Badger State Banner, Lesy
lays out an intricate patchwork of fact and fiction whose blighted nexus
is the Wisconsin community of Black River Falls betwee n the Years 1890
and 1910. Lesy approaches the material like a novelist or a New
Journalist, supplementing terse news from the Banner with observations
by „two mythical creatures, a town historian and a local gossip, and
excerpts from Main Street, Spoon River Anthology, and other relevant
texts. … The photographs aren’t much more convincing, but they’ve got a
certain morbid fascination. Van Schaick was not an undiscovered
small-town visionary like Disfarmer, but he was considerably more
versatile than the Arkansas studio photographer, and Lesy includes his
pictures of school groups, rural scenes, still lifes, parties,
commercial facades, and even a muscular male nude among the expected
array of formal and informal portraits. But since the book is haunted by
death, the photos of the living are bracketed and overshadowed by
pictures of babies dead in their coffins, of extravagant memorial
wreaths, and of mourning or maddened females. Lesy’s decision to collage
and manipulate some of these images, often simply by doubling them as
if in a mirror, is in keeping with his approach to the other historical
raw material here, which is to say at once respectful and fanciful. Some
would call it fast and loose“ (V. Aletti in Roth). – Sehr gutes
sauberes Exemplar der gesuchten gebundenen Ausgabe.
Gute Ware
alles bestens!
