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.
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