Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
Christopher Payne
MIT Press, 2009
Beautifully researched, exquisitely photographed, expertly composed and edited, this book takes readers on an engrossing tour of abandoned state mental institutions across the nation. Though devoid of living souls, Asylum is every bit the portrait: it's a portrait of a lost generation, that reverberates with human tenderness on every page. Extraordinary. [JH]
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Speak, Memory
Vladimir Nabokov
McGraw Hill, 1966
Who has written more evocatively and more precisely about memory, childhood and objects than Nabokov? His descriptions of his colored pencils or the lure of imported English products in pre-Revolutionary Russia or his nanny’s hands are examples of how physical objects and visual memory can be imbued with astonishing emotional meaning. [AHL]
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Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
Hilar Stadler & Martino Stierli, editors
Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess, 2009
A collection of images from slides, photos, and films from the original field research of 1966-1968 that would form the visual core of Venturi, Brown, and Izenour's seminal analysis, Learning from Las Vegas (1972). Like the sun-bleached image of its cover, this book captures a fugitive moment in American culture with images that parallel and in some cases presage the deadpan aesthetic of artists such as Ed Ruscha and Dan Graham or the subjects of the new color photography as practiced by artists such as Stephen Shore. [AB]
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