{"title":"Michael Lesy","description":"\u003cp\u003eMichael Lesy’s works offer a profound exploration of history and memory through visual and narrative lenses. His books intricately weave photography and storytelling, revealing hidden facets of American culture and everyday life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eReaders can expect a thoughtful blend of archival imagery and compelling text that illuminates the past, framed within the broader contexts of \u003cem\u003earts \u0026amp; culture\u003c\/em\u003e. Lesy’s collections invite reflection on the ways images shape our understanding of history.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"looking-backward-by-michael-lesy-9780393239737","title":"Looking Backward","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePull the yellowed card from the box and slide it into the viewer. Two binocular images, nearly identical, reveal a scene from the past in vivid, three-dimensional detail. Transcending space and time, the card shows the world as it existed in 1900, a moment when technology collapsed borders; when wars ignited between great powers; when natural forces brought disaster on surging, vulnerable cities—a moment very much like our own.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1900 the stereograph was king. Its three-dimensional optics created a virtual presence for the viewer. Millions of Americans, especially schoolchildren, absorbed ideas about race, class, and gender from such 3D images, the embodiment of the notion that \"seeing is believing.\" Drawing on an enormous, rarely seen collection of some 300,000 stereographic views spanning the first decade of the twentieth century, Michael Lesy presents nearly 250 images displaying a riot of peoples and cultures, stark class divisions, and unsettling glimpses of daily life a century ago.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLike Lesy's landmark works of American macabre, \u003cem\u003eWisconsin Death Trip\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eMurder City\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eLooking Backward\u003c\/em\u003e slides the reader into suspended animation. Haunting views of the early twentieth century's most significant events at home and in the farthest reaches of the world—war, rebellion, industrial revolution, and natural catastrophe—flank pictures of the last remnants of the premodern natural world. Lesy's evocative essays reassert the primacy of the stereograph in American visual history. He profiles the photographers who saw the world through their prejudices and the companies that sold their images everywhere. In underscoring the unnerving parallels between that period and our own, \u003cem\u003eLooking Backward\u003c\/em\u003e reveals a history that shadows us today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47461158912236,"sku":"9780393239737","price":94.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780393239737-looking-backward.jpg?v=1774959480"},{"product_id":"snapshots-197177-by-michael-lesy-9780922233502","title":"Snapshots 197177","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the summer of 1971, Michael Lesy and a friend found most of the snapshots in \u003ci\u003eSnapshots 197177\u003c\/i\u003e in a dumpster behind a gigantic photo-processing plant in San Francisco. The photos were in the trash because the machines that printed them made them so fast—duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates—that the people on the processing line couldn't stop them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWeek after week, Lesy took home thousands of snapshots from the dumpster. He studied them as if they were archaeological evidence. By the end of the summer, he'd formed his own collection of images of American life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHe took that collection with him when he returned to Wisconsin to finish his graduate work in American history. His understanding of the snapshots from California as reflections of the troubled state of American society influenced the PhD research he was doing in Wisconsin—research that became the American classic \u003ci\u003eWisconsin Death Trip\u003c\/i\u003e (1973).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOver the next six years, Lesy added to his collection of California snapshots with hundreds of snapshots that had been left unclaimed and then discarded by a photo processor in Cleveland. While Lesy looked through other people's lives in pictures, the world was coming apart at the seams. The Vietnam War, the murderous rampage of the Manson Family, and the Attica State Prison uprising filled news headlines—and the general public carried on their lives, with hope and abandon and everything in between: chaos, cruelty, familial bonds and breaks, materialism, lawlessness, unwitting humour.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLesy's collection of snapshots from the 1970s is a time capsule of things familiar and alien. Now, fifty years later, everything and nothing about our lives has changed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eWisconsin Death Trip\u003c\/i\u003e, Lesy pulled back the curtain of “the good old days” to reveal the stark reality of American life from 1890 to 1910. The anonymous images in \u003ci\u003eSnapshots 197177\u003c\/i\u003e serve as prophecies of present-day broken dreams, toils, and tribulations.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47461422498028,"sku":"9780922233502","price":74.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780922233502-snapshots-197177.jpg?v=1774967325"},{"product_id":"walker-evans-last-photographs-life-stories-by-michael-lesy-9780922233526","title":"Walker Evans: Last Photographs \u0026 Life Stories","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1973, Michael Lesy was a young scholar whose first book had just been published. In the soon-legendary \u003ci\u003eWisconsin Death Trip\u003c\/i\u003e, he combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a devastatingly tragic epoch, the real-world antithesis of the fanciful \"Gay Nineties.\" It startled readers then and remains a touchstone of modern photographic interpretation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat year, Lesy met and became close friends with the great photographer Walker Evans, who in the 1930s had collaborated with writer James Agee to create another towering landmark in the American photo-essay, \u003ci\u003eLet Us Now Praise Famous Men\u003c\/i\u003e. Old, frail, with just two years left to live, Evans was still urgently and obsessively photographing. \"Outside the rooms he inhabited,\" Lesy writes, \"the world was scattered with objects on their way to oblivion. He photographed them in their passage.\" Brief as their friendship was, it was intense and rewarding. Each admired the other; each saw himself reflected in the other: aesthetic visionaries who shared a radical belief that photographs were not flat and static documents—that \"the plain truth of the images . . . wasn't as plain as it seemed,\" Lesy explains. \"Meanings, beliefs, and emotions lay crisscrossed under the surface of the most plainspoken photographs.\" Throughout his career in the classroom and in more than a dozen books, Lesy has continually inspired us to open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to the many layers of meaning and feeling in photos, from seemingly ordinary snapshots to majestic landscapes.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn this unconventional, lyrical biography, Lesy traces Evans's intimate, idiosyncratic relationships with men and women—the circle of friends who made Walker Evans who he was. \"Wonder and scrutiny produced the portraits Walker made in his prime,\" Lesy writes. Evans's photographs of Agee, Berenice Abbott, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Lesy's telling of Evans's life stories.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\"Wonder and scrutiny, suffused with desire and dread, produced the portraits he made in his last years,\" Lesy notes. In the 1970s, Evans became enthralled with the Polaroid SX-70 and its colourful instant images, and he used it to take his last photographs—portraits of people, in extreme close up, and portraits of objects.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\"Good clothes and good conversation, wit and erudition, originality and inventiveness, the charms of smart and pretty women—Walker took pleasure in being alive,\" Lesy writes. \"He photographed objects as if they were people and people as if they were souls. All the while, he never forgot Blind Joe Death. The annihilations of the First War, the extinctions of the epidemic that followed it, the pyres and the pits—these he never forgot. The still silence of his images was, to the very last, transcendental, and always he remembered the skull beneath the skin.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47464765882604,"sku":"9780922233526","price":89.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780922233526-walker-evans-last-photographs-life-stories.jpg?v=1775053919"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/collections\/michael-lesy.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}