Customer Reviews

Trailers

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This should have been a neat little book with the simple task of revealing trailer folk in words and images but I thought that many of Carol Burch-Brown's photos didn't quite work, either the compositions were too bland (page twenty-seven) or they were too tight on the subject. Not helped either by being printed in a 133 screen so they all have a very grey look and lack contrast. Another omission is a lack of captioning, just who is the teenager (page thirty-nine) sitting in a chair next to an elderly lady in bed, is she his mother, relative, neighbor? Who is the happy mom (page ninety) holding a baby, is it hers, her sister's, a friend's? I would class these photos as reportage rather than arty images and as such they cry out for some sort of explanation.

The text by David Rigsbee is partly autobiographical, partly observational but fully meandering and obscure. A couple of examples:
From page thirty-eight: 'By virtue of its sheer lack of substance, a trailer speaks eloquently to circumstance. And this in turn reflects a just apportioning of its powers of evocation and harmony with its mortal inhabitants, for the rawly circumstantial looms forever just around the corner.'
Or, from page forty-one:
'The trailer is the transformer box that redoubles this dotted trail and prefigures the logic of its interchange with the outside world. It is also the power box of a dream space: its defined enclosure induces something like the captive's fantasy that the mind to which it has access is as large as the world, to which it does not have access.'

So, I'm still looking for a photographic book about this little corner of American life. 'Trailers' is a start but I think trailer folk deserve better.

This book is simple and small, and great. Burch-Brown having lived in VA for years knows her surroundings well and proves it with this book. I would also suggest checking out her web site and looking at some of her other amazing work. I may have a skewed view of her work because i happened to be lucky enough to have her as a professor. But her photos really speak about the area she lives in, and having lived there myself, and grown up in that area i have seen this reality myself. I think the contrast of sad and funny, creates a series of photos that tells a story without the long narrative often needed in a collection of photos