$28.50
(disponible sur commande)
Résumé:
"Downtown America" was once the vibrant urban center romanticized in the Petula Clark song-a place where the lights were brighter, where people went to spend their money and forget their worries. But in the second half of the twentieth century, "downtown" became a shadow of its former self, succumbing to economic competition and commercial decline. And the death of Main(...)
Downtown America : a history of the place and the people who made it
Actions:
Prix:
$28.50
(disponible sur commande)
Résumé:
"Downtown America" was once the vibrant urban center romanticized in the Petula Clark song-a place where the lights were brighter, where people went to spend their money and forget their worries. But in the second half of the twentieth century, "downtown" became a shadow of its former self, succumbing to economic competition and commercial decline. And the death of Main Streets across the country came to be seen as sadly inexorable, like the passing of an aged loved one. "Downtown America" cuts beneath the archetypal story of downtown's rise and fall and offers a new story of urban development in the United States. Moving beyond conventional narratives, Alison Isenberg shows that downtown's trajectory was not dictated by inevitable free market forces or natural life-and-death cycles. Instead, it was the product of human actors-the contested creation of retailers, developers, government leaders, architects, and planners, as well as political activists, consumers, civic clubs, real estate appraisers, even postcard artists. Throughout the twentieth century, conflicts over downtown's mundane conditions-what it should look like and who should walk its streets-pointed to fundamental disagreements over American values. Isenberg reveals how the innovative efforts of these participants infused Main Street with its resonant symbolism, while still accounting for pervasive uncertainty and fears of decline. Readers of this work will find anything but a story of inevitability. Even some of the downtown's darkest moments-the Great Depression's collapse in land values, the rioting and looting of the 1960s, or abandonment and vacancy during the 1970s-illuminate how core cultural values have animated and intertwined with economic investment to reinvent the physical form and social experiences of urban commerce. "Downtown America"-its empty stores, revitalized marketplaces, and romanticized past-will never look quite the same again.
Théorie de l’urbanisme
Abelardo Morell
$29.95
(disponible sur commande)
Résumé:
Born in Havana, Abelardo Morell emigrated to the United States in 1962, where he took his first photography course after winning a scholarship to Bowdoin College - a small liberal arts college in Maine. There, Morell experimented with a variety of photographic techniques to create surreal effects that reflected his feelings of alienation as a Cuban living abroad. He(...)
Abelardo Morell
Actions:
Prix:
$29.95
(disponible sur commande)
Résumé:
Born in Havana, Abelardo Morell emigrated to the United States in 1962, where he took his first photography course after winning a scholarship to Bowdoin College - a small liberal arts college in Maine. There, Morell experimented with a variety of photographic techniques to create surreal effects that reflected his feelings of alienation as a Cuban living abroad. He proceeded to complete the graduate programme at Yale University, where he worked within the framework of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand’s tradition of black-and-white street photography. In 1983, he began teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where he remains a professor. In 1986, Morell began a family and his fascination with his son engaged a new interest in this domestic environment as a subject. Morell began exploring the world from a child’s perspective – approaching mundane household objects in a new way that challenges the viewer’s perception of reality and how we see it. Morell transforms everyday objects by distorting angles and using extreme close-ups, and by exploiting perspectives that confuse and jar with our expectations. For instance, viewed from below a stack of toys blocks tower over the viewer; and a close-up of liquid pouring from a jar seems ominous and dramatic rather than an everyday occurrence. Similarly, Morell continued to transform the familiar into the surprising in his series of photographs of books, maps, American money and, more recently, a series that illustrates a new edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This preoccupation with reality and illusion is most clearly realised in Morell’s series of camera obscura images. He takes an ordinary room and tapes black plastic over the windows, leaving only a 3/8" hole for the light. After setting up a large-format camera in the room and pointing it at the opposite wall, Morell leaves - a single exposure takes 8 hours. In the resulting images a scene of Brooklyn floats upside-down along the walls of his son’s bedroom; global landmarks like the Uffizi and the Eiffel Tower are projected across hotel rooms. In this, Morell’s best known and most ambitious series, the distinction between the outside and the domestic world is merged and his preoccupation with the mechanics of human vision and the principles of photography is illuminated.
Monographies photo