Today's art book, The Day to Day Life of Albert Hastings by Kaylynn Deveney, is one of my absolutely all-time favorite books ever. Not just favorite art books, favorite books period. I've actually mentioned it briefly before, in my love song to small books. And transparency requires that I mention it's published by Princeton Architectural Press, sister company to my own employer (I seem to be mentioning PAP, as they are familiarly known, quite a bit lately. I guess because they are cool). Anyhow, this book. What can I say? It's just totally and completely amazing. Photographer Deveney has made pictures of the life of one particular elderly man in Wales. His life is utterly normal. The photos are utterly beautiful. But, as I said here about a quite different book--she has not elevated his life to the stuff of art, no. Rather, she has revealed the hidden-in-plain-sight secret magic and beauty of a normal old man living a normal old life. Pure genius. Normally, when I take the photos for these art book posts, I flip through the book, pausing here and there to shoot my favorite spreads. When I started taking pictures of this book, though, well of course I had to shoot the first spread, it was great, oh, and then the second spread is great too, let's shoot that one as well, and then, oop, better do this third one, too, it's awesome. I quickly realized I could easily wind up shooting every single page in the book. It's that good. So I just stopped at some arbitrary point. So here are the fist ten pages or so of this book--and, oh wait, did I mention Albert's own handwritten captions for the images? Did I mention, genius?! Ok, I'll shut up now. Enjoy:
No comments:
Post a Comment