http://jim-dow-american-studies.org American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:18:13 +0000 http://jim-dow-american-studies.org en http://www.jim-dow-american-studies.org/EVENTS-AND-EXHIBITIONS http://www.jim-dow-american-studies.org/following/jim-dow-american-studies.org/EVENTS-AND-EXHIBITIONS Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:18:13 +0000 American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow 1143497 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/2/86803/1143497/13. Lil Lunch Box.jpg" width="670" height="529" width_o="701" height_o="554" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/2/86803/1143497/13. Lil Lunch Box_o.jpg" data-mid="5500409" border="0" align="left"/> Friday, September 9, 6:30 p.m. American Studies: Jim Dow Talk, Book Signing*, and Reception Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Auditorium and Porch 1317 West Pettigrew Street Durham, North Carolina 27705 Directions * Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Durham's Regulator Bookshop. Watch a video of Dow's September 9 presentation at CDS Monday, June 20, 6:30-8:30 p.m. American Studies: Jim Dow Talk and Book Signing Hosted by Photographic Resource Center Tickets: $5 for PRC members; $10 for nonmembers Boston University, Photonics Building Auditorium Room 206 8 St. Mary's Street Boston, Massachusetts 02466 Directions June 2–July 15, 2011 Jim Dow: American Studies Janet Borden Gallery 560 Broadway, New York, New York 10012 Directions Thursday, June 2, 6-8 p.m., Opening Reception and Book Launch Party Friday, September 9, 6:30 p.m. American Studies: Jim Dow Talk, Book Signing*, and Reception Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Auditorium and... http://www.jim-dow-american-studies.org/PRAISE-FOR-AMERICAN-STUDIES http://www.jim-dow-american-studies.org/following/jim-dow-american-studies.org/PRAISE-FOR-AMERICAN-STUDIES Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:16:31 +0000 American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow 1143488 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/2/86803/1143488/11. Mohana Sign- Houma- LA.jpg" width="670" height="534" width_o="962" height_o="768" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/2/86803/1143488/11. Mohana Sign- Houma- LA_o.jpg" data-mid="5500382" border="0" align="left"/> “ ‘Some objects are more alive than most humans,’ the Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer once told me. He was looking at a 300-year-old cabinet when he said it, but he could have been looking at Jim Dow’s new book American Studies, a work of the greatest love, patience, and mastery. It is a rich and vivid inventory of American individuality and of the human imagination at work. The fierce affection Jim Dow evokes for time and place awakens in us the realization that we have perhaps loved this wild world and its wonders less than we should. In these photographs, objects and places, some of them now past, are intensely alive.” —Emmet Gowin, photographer and professor emeritus, Princeton University “Jim Dow’s American Studies describes the country in photographs at once broadly eloquent and meticulously detailed. Taking as subject all manner of human endeavor, Dow traversed this nation, east to west, north to south, making photographs over the better part of half a century—yet it is in the poetry of his telling that he gives us a deeply generous, insightful, witty, and idiosyncratic ballad of our times.” —Laura McPhee, photographer “Jim Dow’s photographs don’t just document the world as it is, they reveal the beauty and mystery and sadness hidden beneath the surface of everyday objects and landscapes. Dow’s a master, a photographer with the eye of a journalist and the heart of a poet.” —Tom Perrotta, author “Dominating Dow’s peopleless photographs are the people. Lurking in the borders of every picture is the human impulse to mark one’s passing through ordinary days, to let the imagination wander, to allow some pleasure to creep into one’s work, to wonder.” —Laurel Reuter, director, North Dakota Museum of Art “Jim Dow shows us the American soul plain and simple, with a deep eloquence seldom seen in photography. Reverent in an age of irony and cynicism, Dow works not out of nostalgia but a vision fueled by a genuine desire to know where we’ve come from and what we’re made of. American Studies will be an immediate classic.” —Tom Rankin, photographer “ ‘Some objects are more alive than most humans,’ the Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer once told me. He was looking at a 300-year-old cabinet when he said... http://www.jim-dow-american-studies.org/PHOTO-GALLERY http://www.jim-dow-american-studies.org/following/jim-dow-american-studies.org/PHOTO-GALLERY Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:13:12 +0000 American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow 1143480 <img src="http://www.photoshelter.com/gal-kimg-get/G0000IVUcOOUumCw/s/670/467" alt="" /> http://www.jim-dow-american-studies.org/ORDER-BOOK http://www.jim-dow-american-studies.org/following/jim-dow-american-studies.org/ORDER-BOOK Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:12:14 +0000 American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow 1143465 A CDS Book Published by powerHouse Books and the Center for Documentary Studies 136 pages, 12.25 x 11.25 inches 115 color and black-and-white photographs ISBN 978-1-57687-565-0, hardcover, $39.95 Publication date: May 6, 2011 American Studies is available from your local bookseller or by ordering directly from powerHouse Books 212-604-9074 (phone) 212-366-5247 (fax)
 A CDS Book Published by powerHouse Books and the Center for Documentary Studies 136 pages, 12.25 x 11.25 inches 115 color and black-and-white photographs ISBN... http://www.jim-dow-american-studies.org/HOME http://www.jim-dow-american-studies.org/following/jim-dow-american-studies.org/HOME Sat, 05 Mar 2011 23:16:23 +0000 American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow 1136251 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/2/86803/1136251/Dow cover.png" width="670" height="612" width_o="1170" height_o="1070" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/2/86803/1136251/Dow cover_o.png" data-mid="5461450" border="0" align="left"/> Fullscreen Published by powerhouse Books and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Description "What I love about Jim Dow's pictures is that they're not kidding. . . . In wordless ways America continually describes its vision to us, dropping broad hints about what its citizens are expected to be. With these photographs Dow catches the hints latent in dozens of American settings. . . . And when I say his pictures aren't kidding, I mean they avoid the danger that exists in recording such hints and signs . . . no superiority, no wry chuckles from a more refined altitude. Aspects of his photographs are funny, maybe even hilarious, but that's only noted in passing. He's more interested in what the American vision is, or was, and in the scary open-endedness of our identity." —Ian Frazier, from the introduction Jim Dow’s America is a land we both know and don't know. His photographs show a country always reinventing itself, discarding and preserving elements of its past, almost as though by accident. These places, often built by ordinary Americans for the most ordinary of purposes, share inventiveness with commonality, resilience with restlessness, and grace with roughness. Dow sees a landscape shaped by human life. His photographs take us ever closer to the human instinct to make and leave a mark: signs, barbershops, diners, churches, motels, billboards, libraries, pool halls, roadside stands, war memorials, office buildings, ballparks, metal buildings, wooden structures, amusement parks, general stores, courthouses, shrines, clubs, interiors, exteriors—pieces of a world primarily made by and for men whose lives took shape in the United States before the Second World War and whose marks on our country are at once indelible and changing. Beginning with photographs Jim Dow made in the late 1960s, this retrospective book covers almost forty years, ending with pictures made at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Dow’s vision grows in part out of the influence of Walker Evans whom he knew and whose negatives he printed for Evans’s Museum of Modern Art retrospective. His work has evolved from his early straight black-and-white photographs to richly complicated color studies of American culture. With few exceptions, his photographs present us with peopleless spaces, but the spaces are never “empty”; they speak to and resonate with the presence of people and communities. An obsessive photographer, Dow makes images that show how Americans create environments for utility but with transforming aesthetic power, how we find companionship, celebrate our lives and gods, memorialize the past, and make money. In these beautifully composed photographs, made in many different places in the United States, Dow reveals what is both commonplace and monumental in the American experience. Jim Dow studied graphic design and photography at the Rhode Island School of Design during the 1960s. From that time forward he has been the recipient of numerous commissions, fellowships, and grants that have allowed him to travel and photograph as well as exhibit and publish extensively. His subjects include folk art, roadside architecture, signs, county courthouses, baseball parks, soccer stadiums, private clubs, barbeque joints, and taco trucks. He is fascinated by the way people leave their mark on both the rural and urban landscape and seeks to preserve this through photography. He lives in Boston and teaches at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/2/86803/1136251/cds_logo_158x43w.png" width="158" height="43" width_o="158" height_o="43" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/2/86803/1136251/cds_logo_158x43w_o.png" data-mid="6309328" border="0" align="left"/> Published by powerhouse Books and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Description "What I love about Jim Dow's pictures is that...