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Overview
Where We Live presents more than 150 images from the Bruce and Nancy Berman collection of contemporary photographs. From Mitch Epstein's Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Camilo Vergara's Detroit, to John Divola's 29 Palms in Southern California, the images here concentrate on the American landscape and the people and structures that can be found in its vast vistas--and its backyards. The photographs that the Bermans have been drawn to often represent changing American communities recorded by artists whose vision is passionate but unsentimental--a vision that acknowledges the present as fleeting, desolate, and lyrical.
Beautifully reproduced in this volume--which coincides with an exhibition to be held at the J. Paul Getty Museum from October 24, 2006, to February 25, 2007--are works from twenty-four contemporary photographers, the majority working in color, from William Christenberry and William Eggleston to Doug Dubois and Sheron Rupp. Accompanying the photographs are illuminating essays by Kenneth A. Breisch and Colin Westerbeck and an introduction by Judith Keller. An essay by novelist Bruce Wagner captures the mood that runs through this powerful assemblage of photographs.
Editorials
Library Journal
These 150-plus eclectic photographs from the Bruce Berman Collection at the Getty Museum make up this catalog of an eponymous show at the Getty showing through February 25, 2007. Ranging over great contemporary American photography, this volume has only one flaw: its name. "Where We Live" seems a mismatch for photographs that often isolate a strange, empty place or an odd, random object (e.g., a battered briefcase). But the shots of people, curiosities, humble and worse structures—some teetering near collapse—and plain old junk speak to a journey across the land, where 24 photographers stopped to notice a particular mess or detail. Essays by Breisch (architecture, Univ. of Southern California), Colin Westerbeck (writer, Los Angeles Times), and novelist Bruce Wagner (I'm Losing You and Still Holding) pay tribute to the broad themes within the groups of images. The images themselves, very carefully reproduced in this handsome book, speak of Berman's taste and of the Getty's good fortune to have begun a photography collection in 1984 that, little more than two decades later, is extraordinary in scope and quality. Recommended.—D. Bryant
Book Details
Published
December 28, 2006
Publisher
Los Angeles : J. Paul Getty Museum, c2006.
Pages
192
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780892368549