Customer Reviews

LaPorte, Indiana

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Upon your initial flip through this beautiful book, you will immediately understand why photographer Frank Pease didn't have the heart to toss out the treasure trove of portraits that are compiled here.

Lucky for Jason Bitner, whose past exploits at Found and Dirty Found offer proof of his eye for the lost, the forgotten, and the bizarre. Bitner has whittled down the collection of over 18,000 photographs into a fascinating look at the people of Small Town, USA.

While wending through the pages of LaPorte, Indiana, the reader can almost feel the excitement Bitner must have had at finding such an amazing archive. Each page tells a story and that story is only inferred by the brief moment captured on film. It's an incredibly compelling book, filled with images of a time that seems to be lost forever.

I am a huge fan of the Found crew, I find their unironic sentiment, enthusiasm and respect for people's findings to be utterly refreshing.

The format of the book is goregous, the paper stock wonderful and so appealling to either flip through or go page by page to view the juxtopositions the author (or finder?) intended. It is a wonderful "coffee table" book and so intriguing for so many different kinds of people in your life to give as a gift.

I inherited a large box of black and white photographs that my grandfather had left to me at his death years ago. As a 15 year old, shifting through photos of both his life and strangers was emotionally overwhelming. He was an amateur photographer and had made a darkroom from a closet in his suburban PA home. There are so many similar photos of children and women of the photographer of La Porte, Indiana and my own! Yet I am glad to see Jason was able to reproduce that sense of wonder at the joy and oddness of everyday people through the lens of an everyday man.

Jason Bitner's LaPorte, Indiana offers a glimpse of the small-town Midwestern personality that is touching in its simple elegance. The layout--one portrait per page, sized to occupy the full page--draws no attention to any one picture, makes no editorial comments designed to influence. Each portrait is given equal status to the others, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions, intuit what he will about the soundless characters presented within.

This lack of commentary (aside from a brief introduction and forward) is LaPorte, Indiana's second-strongest point, behind the selection of portraits themselves. We are shown what we were never meant to see--castoffs from a portrait studio, the shots that didn't quite make it. Still, we do not have completely candid shots. These are the just-less-than-perfect pictures of people who have presented perfect versions of themselves. This doesn't make them any less true, but the portraits' subjects are editorializing themselves, in a way, and any additional layers of comment by the author would be too much.

The enjoyment and beauty of this collection goes beyond just the subjects, however. Comparisons and juxtapositions arise; the young from one page cascade into the old on another; men and women on facing pages, who may never have met, stare at each other across the book's binding. Beyond the individuals held in this book are the interactions held within it. One can trace a theoretical life through the pictures of the newborn, the youth, the adolescent, the middle aged, and the ederly. The reader can impose, discard, and impose anew themes and groupings on sections of the book, looking for what may connect these people.

Overall, this is a gorgeous work. It's a wonderful preservation of a specific, overlooked bit of America. And it's beautiful way to pass an afternoon, reading it alone or sharing it with friends.

I grew up on Michigan Avenue in La Porte, and went to La Porte High School with the owner of the diner who inherited all those many boxes of black and white photos that so eloquently reveal my town. Every time we visited La Porte, we went to the diner to spend a little time in the back room browsing the boxes, looking for family members, neighbors, grade school friends. Finding someone we knew would evoke a shriek of delight. More often, however, we weren't sure. Was that Pammie's mom and dad, or people we didn't know? Did that guy run the shoe store during the early 60s, or was he someone else? Didn't that girl go to our church? I could tell you that these pictures tell a story of my town. But they tell the story of anybody's town, evoking instantly the feel of the middle of the last century, the slight artificiality of the photographer's studio, the "special occasions" that were at once unique and commonplace. You will look at a young couple and wonder if you knew them. We may all be just ourselves, but we are everybody else, too.

LaPorte, Indiana is a collection of portrait photographs taken throughout the 1950s and 1960s in a small northern Indiana town. Jason Bitner, who co-created Found Magazine, stumbled across a few 5"x7" black and white photographs taped to a pie case at a local diner, B & J's American Café. Finding the photographs personally appealing, he asked the waitress where they originated. She led him to an unused dining area of the restaurant where 22 boxes were stuffed with thousands of photographs. After looking over the 18,000 images, he selected a couple hundred of the most intriguing to create a story of the town.

Frank Pease, co-owner of Mural Craft Studios made the images along with his wife, Gladys. Together they crafted anniversary photographs, senior portraits, kid's photos and any style portrait that included a formal sitting. Taken over four decades, they mark important milestones including graduations, engagements, new additions to a family and personal achievements. The way Bitner has laid out the book tells a story of the town's cultural history and how each individual wanted to be portrayed.

Bitner considers himself an accidental historian. He states in the forward of the book "the collection reads like an incredibly beautiful census, with expertly lit faces replacing biographical data." He became a stenographer of LaPorte. Finding significant historical value, in each photograph, Bitner creates a story of the Midwest. With the subjects in their nicest clothes and their hair and make-up done just right, you soon realize that having a portrait made in that era and in a small town was an important event. The book contains no text to accompany the portraits. Bitner relies on the viewer to imagine each individual through gesture or costume and in the end, viewers imagine an entire town and way of life.

I was surprised how such a simple book can be so good. I like to leave it lying around and pick it up every so often and flip through it. Very interesting concencept.

Like Thorton Wilder's OUR TOWN, this book of portraits paints a picture of quiet, anonymous, ordinary lives that are incredibly compelling. I love this book.

THIS BOOK IS LOVELY TO LOOK AT. I ENJOYED IT, THEY ALL LOOKED FAMILAR. THANKS

I find it surprising that Jason and Alex find this trove of portraits so exceptional. Every community across the country had their Frank and Gladys Pease, thousands of them recorded the positive aspects of the lives of the white middle-class. Admittedly it is sort of unusual to find boxes of photos stacked up in a café, usually this stuff gets donated to State Historical societies, local museums, or destroyed though I expect there are still a few small town studios in existence who've kept all their decades of negatives.

The Muralcraft Studio that Frank Pease ran seemed to have specialized in portraits and this I think is the weakness in the book: page after page of faces. After a few look throughs I thought it provided diminishing interest. If only there had been some photos, every few pages, of what these folk did in La Porte (weddings, new store openings, street parades, the High School Prom or church events for instance) it would have made for a much more visually interesting book.

Local commercial photographers like Frank Pease certainly captured the feel of the times and there a few books that reveal, only in a positive light of course, what community life was like decades ago. Bill Wood's Business is a stunning selection from the 20,000 negs given to the International Center of Photography in NYC, of Wood's work in Fort Worth from 1937 to 1970. Barbara Norfleet has spent years searching through the negs of small town snappers, three of her best books are: When We Liked Ike: Looking for Postwar America; THE CHAMPION PIG great moments in Everyday Life and WEDDING/NORFLEET P (Fireside Books (Holiday House)). All these provide a much more in depth look at Middle America than pages of portraits.

***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

I believed this would be a picture history of LaPorte. It turned out, however, to be a bunch of classbook pictures without identification. The book is meaningless.