Michael Lesy – författare

At the turn of the twentieth century, the stereograph was king. Its binocular images revealed the world in vivid, three-dimensional detail. Drawing on an enormous, rarely seen collection of stereographic views, Michael Lesy presents images displaying a riot of peoples and cultures, stark class divisions and unsettling glimpses of daily life a century ago.Lesy’s evocative essays reassert the primacy of the stereograph in American visual history. In underscoring the unnerving parallels between that period and our own, Looking Backward reveals a history that shadows us today.

Things began as they usually did: Someone shot someone else. So begins a chapter of Michael Lesy's disturbingly satisfying account of Chicago in the 1920s, the epicenter of Murder in America. Just as Lesy’s first book, Wisconsin Death Trip, subverted the accepted notion of the Gay Nineties, so Murder City exposes the dark side of the Jazz Age. Revisiting seventeen Chicago murder cases—including that of Belva and Beulah, two murderesses whose trials inspired the musical Chicago—Lesy's sharp, fearless storytelling makes a compelling case that this collection of criminals may be progenitors of our modern age.

In the summer of 1971, Michael Lesy and a friend found most of the snapshots in Snapshots 1971–77 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.Week after week, Lesy took home thousands of snapshots from the dumpster. He studied them as if they were archeological evidence. By the end of the summer, he’d formed his own collection of images of American life.He 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 Wisconsin Death Trip (1973).Over 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 humor.Lesy’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.In Wisconsin Death Trip 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 Snapshots 1971–77 serve as prophesies of present-day broken dreams, toils, and tribulations.

In 1973, Michael Lesy was a young scholar whose first book had just been published. In the soon-legendary Wisconsin Death Trip 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.That 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, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 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 those many layers of meaning and feeling in photos, from seemingly ordinary snapshots to majestic landscapes.In 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."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 colorful instant images, and he used it to take his last photographs—portraits of people, in extreme close up, and portraits of objects."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."

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.