Flesh & Blood: Photographers' Images of Their Own Families - Hardcover

George, Alice Rose; Heyman, Abigail

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 096325510X ISBN 13: 9780963255105

Publisher: Picture Project, 1992

Synopsis

Flesh & Blood dramatically reveals family life - intimate, joyful, and poignant - through the personal family pictures of many of the world's finest photographers.
Selecting from wallet snapshots, private albums, and museum walls, the editors viewed a wealth of emotional and insightful images taken by more than 500 photographers. Because of the intimacy that is evoked by family events and family members, these are the images that photographers (like everyone else) usually consider their most dear.
This extraordinary collection represents a broad range of contemporary photography. Included are images by both the very famous, and the younger, less known photographers who will emerge in the next generation. Among the sixty-six photographers whose work is included are Tina Barney, Bill Burke, Raymond Depardon, Elliott Erwitt, Ralph Gibson, Emmet Gowin, David Hockney, Annie Leibovitz, Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark, Sheila Metzner, Joel Meyerowitz, Eugene Richards, Stephen Shore, Clarissa T. Sligh, Larry Sultan, Carrie M. Weems, and William Wegman.
The deeper definition of family that emerges from this unique and beautiful work is one of involvement and complexity. Flesh & Blood expands the way we see our own families.

About this title

Review:

"Marvelously complex...funny, disturbing, but somehow familiar." -- The Los Angeles Times Magazine

"Powerful." -- The New Yorker

"This collection of incredibly intimate photographs contains an amazing assortment of images: erotic, spooky, sweet, sad and just outright astonishing." -- San Francisco Chronicle

NEW BOOK FOCUSES ON REAL LIFE

There are a lot of gorgeous new coffee table books on the market these days- beautiful tomes featuring exquisite reproductions on such esoteric topics as barns, period finishes and tulips. One is even devoted to the subject of blue and white rooms. Interesting, maybe, but not exactly the kind of thing that's going to liven up the ol' living room.

Then there's "Flesh and Blood-Photographer' Images of Their Own Families," edited by Alice Rose George, Abigail Heyman and Ethan Hoffman. This collection of incredibly intimate photographs, with essays by Ann Beattie and Andy Grundberg, makes Madonna's highly hyped new book seem like even more of a bust, because it contains an amazing assortment of images erotic, spooky, sweet, sad and just outright astonishing.

Perhaps the most shocking is the series from Donald Dietz, who photographed his father lying dead at the bottom of the stairs, in the coffin at his funeral and, finally, as a pile of cremated ashes.

There are plenty of bathtub shots, of course, but with charming twists, especially Hoffman's shot of his soaped-up brother with wife and baby. And the nudes are extraordinary, whether it's a young girl swinging on the legs of a dining room table or the darling "Where Niki Got His Red Hair" by Nicholas DeVore III.

Most of these photos have not been overly exposed in other books or shows, and the ones that are familiar, such as Doug DuBois' "Lise, Christmas Eve, 1985" come with text that causes one to look at them in an altogether new way.

DuBois' photos show a family falling apart and then coming together again- they're photographic evidence of the fragile yet enduring bonds of family.

"Flesh and Blood" is bound to raise some eyebrows. Leave this one out when the guests drop by, and you'll probably see some interesting developments. -- Liz Lufkin, San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 18, 1992.

From Publishers Weekly:

With self-conscious invasiveness, 66 expert photographers, including Annie Liebowitz, Tony Mendoza, Mary Ellen Mark and Joel Meyerowitz, focus on their parents, siblings, spouses and children in this unsettling, often arch and excessively postured composite family album. Nudity and specialty arrangements abound, as in Patrick Zachmann's shot of a pregnant woman lying in a bathtub, a cartoon embryo drawn on her belly. David Hockney's assemblage The Scrabble Game and Carrie M. Weems's unstudied views of her sisters possess an authority and verve less convincingly demonstrated in many other, artfully posed and cropped, contributions. While Grundberg, chief curator of the Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco, suggests the photographers are "honest with their feelings and free with their medium," there remains an exploitative quality to many of these shots--in color or black-and-white--that undermines their authenticity and emotionality. Accompanying commentary by some photographers often provides valuable context.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picture Project
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 096325510X
• ISBN 13: 9780963255105
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 190
• Editor: Hoffman Ethan