Customer Reviews

Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties

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I hadn't planned to review this book. I was just surfing Amazon.com and had decided to check on photographer-historian Michael Lesy's books because I find him an interesting author. And because when I taught a course on historical method in the 70s, I used two of his books, Wisconsin Death Trip and Real Life: Louisville in the 1920s as required texts. Wisconsin Death Trip is a phenomenal book: Lesy doctors his photographs to emphasize the points he wants to make about the particular pathologies of an upstate, turn of the century Wisconsin county, obsessed with death, particularly the death of young children. After my students read the book and about it in class, they had a different on what constituted historical evidence about a past time and what qualified as legitimate issues to study in the past. I used Real Life the next year. Where Death Trip was sensational and jarring, Real Life was mundane, but both made the same point about interpreting the past: photographs are one of the primary ways we preserve and promote cultural values in our modern age. What came across in Real Life was how flat (and philistine) mid-level America was in the twenties, before all hell broke loose with the Depression. (It was kind of like the 80s but less affluent.) I think you only benefit from one of these collections from Lesy if you let yourself sink into the photos and sop up the life values that inform the pictures. If you do that, they can very much enlighten.

Um... here is a review I am passing on:
"This book is another of Michael Lesy's strange photographic essays of a trip into the past. His most famous is titled "Wisconsin Death Trip." This book could be called "Louisville Death Trip." It has chapters on Main Chance, Love, Money, Whites, Blacks, Power, Visions, and Sunday Feature, with photographs of street life, Ohio River life, car wrecks, black people, death, shops, factories, romance, poverty, suicides, wealth, police, criminals, ministers, and alcoholics, and many other fascinating subjects, taken in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1920's. Very strange, almost gothic, photographs!"

I pass this on so people wanting historic normal photos do not think this is the book for them.