A visually vibrant but conceptually blurry coffee-table book.
The physical contours of technology, architecture, and settlement intertwine with humanity’s understanding of society and the universe, according to this debut photo essay.
In this lavishly illustrated coffee-table tome, Stark, a documentary filmmaker, pairs photos of highly patterned buildings, cities, tools, and diagrams with commentary on the zeitgeist that allegedly birthed them. She focuses on characteristic shapes that she feels epitomize stages of human culture. For hunter-gatherers, she contends, those shapes are circles and webs, as seen in photos of circular huts and villages, sand drawings by Australian Aborigines, and buxom fertility-goddess carvings, all symbolizing a worldview enmeshed in the rhythmic cycles of nature. Agricultural and industrial civilization, by contrast, shapes itself into triangles, ladders, and grids, as photographed in pyramids, skyscrapers, and right-angled urban street plans. These speak of a top-down, hierarchical order that separates heaven from earth, worships heroic male leadership, fixates on quantitative reasoning, and imagines history as progress rather than a cycle. Stark argues that humanity is now entering a new era rooted in two novel guiding shapes: the helix, which she considers a blueprint for adaptive change because it coils about a directional axis and is associated with DNA and evolution, and the network, because the internet is everywhere. (She further conjectures that the torus—the Platonic form of the bagel—will be the shape of the future.) Stark’s photos, from bacterial colonies to galactic panoramas, are colorful and engrossing and sometimes prompt engaging meditations, as when she compares Stonehenge’s collegial circularity to a Cambridge cathedral’s hierarchical Christian verticality. But her morphological categories are more fuzzy metaphor than sound history. (Helixes, for example—screws, springs, spiral stairs—have been around for centuries.) In treating shape as ideology, she seldom considers the practicalities that determine forms. (She shows how the row-and-column periodic table of the elements could be redrawn as a helix or a torus, without noting that those alternate versions are unreadable.) Stark’s analysis rarely yields more than vague truisms—“we shape our world, and then it shapes us”—and her critique of rectilinearity lapses into eco-mysticism: “The grid is growth gone wild…a cancer,” she intones, while celebrating curves as the essence of holism, peace, and sustainability. Still, dogmatic interpretations aside, the photos here nicely highlight the spatial inventiveness of humankind in every age. The tell is somewhat muddled, but the show is just fine.
A visually vibrant but conceptually blurry coffee-table book.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62634-471-6
Page Count: 101
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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