Overview

In the summer of 1971, Michael Lesy and a friend found most of the snapshots in Snapshots 1971–77 in a dumpster behind a gigantic photo-processing plant in San Francisco. The photos were in the trash because the machines that printed them made them so fast — duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates — that the people on the processing line couldn’t stop them. Week after week, Lesy took home thousands of snapshots from the dumpster. He studied them as if they were archeological evidence. By the end of the summer, he’d formed his own collection of images of American life. He took that collection with him when he returned to Wisconsin to finish his graduate work in American history. His understanding of the snapshots from California as reflections of the troubled state of American society influenced the PhD research he was doing in Wisconsin — research that became the American classic Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). Over the next six years, Lesy added to his collection of California snapshots with hundreds of snapshots that had been left unclaimed and then discarded by a photo processor in Cleveland. While Lesy looked through other people’s lives in pictures, the world was coming apart at the seams. The Vietnam War, the murderous rampage of the Manson Family, and the Attica State Prison uprising filled news headlines — and the general public carried on their lives, with hope and abandon and everything in between: chaos, cruelty, familial bonds and breaks, materialism, lawlessness, unwitting humor. Lesy’s collection of snapshots from the 1970s is a time capsule of things familiar and alien. Now, fifty years later, everything and nothing about our lives has changed. In Wisconsin Death Trip Lesy pulled back the curtain of “the good old days” to reveal the stark reality of American life from 1890 to 1910. The anonymous images in Snapshots 1971–77 serve as prophesies of present-day broken dreams, toils, and tribulations.

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9780922233502

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Reviews

In Michael Lesy's fascinating book of common snapshots, I see ghosts, images of people who once performed the rituals of their age, society, culture. The people--like us and also not us--appear innocent, as if their times had been simple. But Lesy reminds us the photographs were shot in the 1970s, when life was no simpler. Looking at the snapshots, I wonder if, far in the future, these will be relics, read like hieroglyphs, a different language of costume and gesture, ancient humans performing peculiar rituals. Lesy's book contains troves of treasure, inadvertent, touching and poignant histories of how people spend their days. -- Lynne Tillman, writer, American Genius: A Comedy and Men and Apparitions Snapshots, at their best, present a vision of life uncolored by artistic pretension. The images in this extraordinary collection Michael Lesy has assembled are raw, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, but always communicating the taste of experience. -- Stephen Shore, author of Uncommon Places: The Complete Works Snapshots 1971-77 is a book of life, the completion of a visual hymn Michael Lesy began nearly 50 years ago with his landmark Wisconsin Death Trip. But it is not an end, because these snapshots invite us into a call-and-response of self and other. This transcendent book--art, archive, alchemy, profanity, punchline, epitaph, and birth notice--is Lesy's masterpiece, a vision and a kind of vow, a commitment to looking and to seeing fulfilled. -- Jeff Sharlet, author of This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers Wisconsin Death Trip shocked me into completely rethinking how I think about history. Every Michael Lesy book since has been a new revelation. Snapshots 1971-77 is like an unhinged family album for the Family of Man, intimate but universal, unspeakably strange yet familiar, sometimes funny, often ineffably disturbing. If you don't see yourself in these stranded glimpses, look again. -- John Strausbaugh, author of Victory City These extraordinary photographs, which Michael Lesy kept in storage for almost half a century, would have looked unprepossessing and even banal for most of that period, but now time has brought out all their strangeness. They give a view of the 1970s that can be appreciated only at a distance--wacky, touching, abject, serene--while turning the spotlight on gender relations, race, class status, material possession, and the implication of violence. -- Luc Sante, author of Maybe the People Would Be the Times Lesy's eye--ever consistent, ever restless, ever curious--is our guide for how to recover our shared past without nostalgia or sentimentality. It's all here: hope, anger, sex, sweetness, violence, the comic, the portentous, the American way of life and love and death. -- Richard Deming, author of Art of the Ordinary and Day for Night Lesy once said that Wisconsin Death Trip was about all of us; it's our shared history--the whole catastrophe. Snapshots demonstrates a space where our past overlaps with another's. Looking through I swear I saw my brother perched atop a diving board, grinning back at me. It's a collective memory that allows us to find ourselves inside the pages amongst strangers. -- Jim Goldberg, author of Raised by Wolves

Author Information

Michael Lesy is one of America’s leading photographic scholars. His books include Wisconsin Death Trip, Murder City, Angel’s World, Long Time Coming:A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935–1943, and Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. In 2007, the United States Artists Foundation named Professor Lesy its first Simon Fellow, and in 2013 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Photography Studies. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is professor emeritus of literary journalism at Hampshire College.

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