Customer Reviews

Suburban World: The Norling Photographs

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What a find. I initially found out about this book because I'm a fan of Alec Soth's photography (he wrote the foreword). I had no real idea what I was getting into with "Suburban World," but now, having paged through it several times, and read the text twice, I can say that this book defines the term "A picture's worth a thousand words."

Most pages feature a single photo, with a simple one-line caption that - thank God - lets the photo tell its own story. The text tells us that Irwin Norling considered himself an amateur, and would never have used the word "artist" to describe himself. That's part of what makes this book so unique and refreshing; the backdrop is evident here and there in some of the portrait photos, they are not cropped or prettified up in any way - the subjects stand alone.

The book is also a chronicle of how a small town becomes a suburb, mostly by virtue of highway construction, and in that sense it's partly a historical showcase. Beyond that, Norling's use of lighting is astonishing - apparently his family would stand around in the dark holding up lamps while he took the photos. I've been staring at some of these photos, for example a wonderful one of a rearing horse, wondering where in the world Norling was when he took the photo.

And the subject matter? Little girls in a civic parade, the mayor and his family eating dinner, gruesome car accidents, a murder-suicide, a girl at her first communion, and on and on. All of life, chronicled without a shred of sentimentality. This book is a gem.

Irwin Norling loved to take photos and the 125 in the book are a selection of 10,000 plus he took in and around Bloomington, Minnesota during the fifties and sixties. Fortunately the images are in safe hands with the Minnesota Historical Society. Norling actually worked full-time as a Honeywell engineer so it's quite amazing that he found time to capture so much as a freelance photographer. Brad Zellar explains, in the book's introduction, that the Norling home was rigged with police scanners and his wife and three children all helped with the photographic chores.

Norling would photograph anything in Bloomington and his photos record the expansion of the suburb over the years though this unfortunately is not a strong part of the book's content. I think it's worth stressing that he took photos just for the record, any creative input he left to others.

Interesting though the book is I felt it had several editorial flaws. There are too many page photos that really don't warrant the large size. These are just records and as such four to a page would have been fine and this would allow several images about the same event to be seen together. None of the photos seem to cropped which detracts from their impact. Page eighty-two shows a policeman photographed against a make-shift backdrop in a room, the final print would have been cropped to produce a portrait. Page thirty-four shows a highway accident where at least half of the shot could be trimmed to produce a better horizontal image. Norling kept detailed records of his work but the book makes do with very brief captions.

This is all rather disappointing and if only the editorial had been more rigorous Norling's photos would have made a super book. Interestingly the same publisher has a rather similar book that is quite stunning: Strange Days, Dangerous Nights: Photos from the Speed Graphics Era. It covers three decades of everyday life in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area taken from the archives of two St.Paul papers. Here the photos are well cropped and organized into chapters: crime, accidents, buildings, civic activities for instance and all the photos have long captions which reveal the stories behind what look like, sometimes, rather mundane photos.

Both books basically cover the same thing (and oddly, roughly in the same geographic area) but I don't think the Norling edition realizes the full potential of the material.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

I inherited a love of photography from my uncle, who was a newspaper photographer and collector first of old newspaper photos and in his later life photography and art books. I bought Suburban World because of the cover - great design - and the description of its contents. I wasn't disappointed once it arrived. The greatness of this book has nothing to do with where it was photographed or even the historical aspects; instead, its the excellence of design and reproduction and the contrast between subject matter. With no written explanation (photos are visual, that's all the explanation I need), these photos are just laid out one after another. A murder scene and a happy homemaker and an exploding house and goofy carpet salesmen. Look closely and you can see artistry at work in the layout - visual, not subject, similarities. My favorite kind of photo book, and the foreword by one of my favorite photographers, Alec Soth, seals the deal.

This book of Irwin Denison Norling photographs--discovered in the Bloomington, MN Historical Society--has been getting quite a great deal of attention because it was one of the major visual inspirations for the Coen Brothers' recent film A SERIOUS MAN. You can see why the Coens, who grew up in neighboring St. Louis Park (like Bloomington, another suburb of the Twin Cities), would have been attracted to this work, with its strange juxtapositions of unexpectedly surreal episodes in suburban life with local traffic fatalities; it shows the dark side of what would be otherwise one of the most unremarkable and unknown American towns. (Bloomington is currently the third largest municipality in the entire state of Minnesota, and the home of both the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport and the Mall of America.) But though the book's publishers, Borealis Books, are trying to push Norling's work as that of the Weegee or Brassai of suburban Minneapolis, the photos (while often arresting) aren't quite as interesting as promoted: Norling is more of a gifted amateur than anything else, and not all of the pictures live up to the hype.

This book would only be interesting to someone who lived in the area during that time. It was a little off-putting to have the death photos in there? Its like a photo of the Lions Club, then a fatal car crash. Weird.

I was somewhat disappointed in this book, only because I grew up in
Bloomington during the era which Irv Norling depicted. I greatly
enjoyed the photographs of the city itself and the dated but beloved
scenes of activities, but found it very disturbing to see so many photographs of traffic fatalities.

I lived in Bloomington and was active in the theatre during the years th at Mr. Norling included in his book. I thought there might be some coverage of the theatre so I ordered the book. There was no one I knew in it...so I am returning it.