From Publishers Weekly
With self-conscious invasiveness, 66 expert photographers, including Annie Liebowitz, Tony Mendoza, Mary Ellen Mark and Joel Meyerowitz, focus on their parents, siblings, spouses and children in this unsettling, often arch and excessively postured composite family album. Nudity and specialty arrangements abound, as in Patrick Zachmann's shot of a pregnant woman lying in a bathtub, a cartoon embryo drawn on her belly. David Hockney's assemblage The Scrabble Game and Carrie M. Weems's unstudied views of her sisters possess an authority and verve less convincingly demonstrated in many other, artfully posed and cropped, contributions. While Grundberg, chief curator of the Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco, suggests the photographers are "honest with their feelings and free with their medium," there remains an exploitative quality to many of these shots--in color or black-and-white--that undermines their authenticity and emotionality. Accompanying commentary by some photographers often provides valuable context.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
Review
"Marvelously complex...funny, disturbing, but somehow familiar." --
The Los Angeles Times Magazine"Powerful." --
The New Yorker"This collection of incredibly intimate photographs contains an amazing assortment of images: erotic, spooky, sweet, sad and just outright astonishing." --
San Francisco ChronicleNEW BOOK FOCUSES ON REAL LIFE
There are a lot of gorgeous new coffee table books on the market these days- beautiful tomes featuring exquisite reproductions on such esoteric topics as barns, period finishes and tulips. One is even devoted to the subject of blue and white rooms. Interesting, maybe, but not exactly the kind of thing that's going to liven up the ol' living room.
Then there's "Flesh and Blood-Photographer' Images of Their Own Families," edited by Alice Rose George, Abigail Heyman and Ethan Hoffman. This collection of incredibly intimate photographs, with essays by Ann Beattie and Andy Grundberg, makes Madonna's highly hyped new book seem like even more of a bust, because it contains an amazing assortment of images erotic, spooky, sweet, sad and just outright astonishing.
Perhaps the most shocking is the series from Donald Dietz, who photographed his father lying dead at the bottom of the stairs, in the coffin at his funeral and, finally, as a pile of cremated ashes.
There are plenty of bathtub shots, of course, but with charming twists, especially Hoffman's shot of his soaped-up brother with wife and baby. And the nudes are extraordinary, whether it's a young girl swinging on the legs of a dining room table or the darling "Where Niki Got His Red Hair" by Nicholas DeVore III.
Most of these photos have not been overly exposed in other books or shows, and the ones that are familiar, such as Doug DuBois' "Lise, Christmas Eve, 1985" come with text that causes one to look at them in an altogether new way.
DuBois' photos show a family falling apart and then coming together again- they're photographic evidence of the fragile yet enduring bonds of family.
"Flesh and Blood" is bound to raise some eyebrows. Leave this one out when the guests drop by, and you'll probably see some interesting developments. -- Liz Lufkin, San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 18, 1992.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
