Central America Books

Today, when we think of art, we can't imagine a work without the artist's signature or some identifying mark, but in the 1930s, many women and men of New Mexico and southern Colorado worked without credit or recognition. Hispano and Hispana (men and women) worked "sin nombre," literally "without name." But they worked for the love of producing beautiful paintings and murals, fabric and textile art, tin work, and wood carving and furniture. And the love and knowledge of fine crafting shows in everything; much of this cultural legacy appears here in photographs for the first time. This book is a permanent monument to Southwestern Art and the people; it is a cultural and community achievement. The author, or central energy behind the project, Tey Marianna Nunn, has given us her own work of love and persistence--evidence of the will power necessary to recover the names of these nearly lost artists of the New Deal Era.

In May 2001, at the Moroles Art Center in Los Cerrillos, (south of Santa Fe), I had the luck to attend a gathering of the remaining New Deal artists and workers of the Civilian Conservation Corps who told their stories. I feel sure that this revival of interest in the surviving New Deal and WPA artists came about because of Tey Nunn and her book. Thank you so much for the joy this book has brought over the years.

A few years ago, a brilliant and talented student found a gap in the recent art history of New Mexico. She went out and conducted the research, raised the money, wrote the PhD thesis, and then was curator for an exhibit at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe that identified and saluted the artists whose names had been lost in the dusty archives of our Great Depression and the resulting New Deal. The exhibit changed the lives of the artists still living and assured artistic credit for those who are no longer with us. How many of the thousands of PhD theses produced since Dr. Nunn wrote hers have had any impact, let alone a major impact on the lives of people? This beautiful book is climax to Dr. Nunn's efforts.

Most people will never have the opportunity to be charmed and enlightened by a Dr. Nunn lecture. This book is a wonderful introduction to what a committed individual can do to make modern art history come alive. It is also a very useful introduction to the art of New Mexico created by the true artists of New Mexico, not the visitors (temporary or permanent) from other parts of the country. The Hispana and Hispano artists of the New Deal look straight at us from the pages of this book not for our approval but with pride in the art that they have created. Fortunately for us, Dr. Nunn, the Museum, and the University of Mexico Press have taken the time to reproduce this art to let us share in their joy of creation.

I'd never heard of Mari Sandoz until the other person who reviewed Slocum House sent me a copy, along with the suggestion that the tome should be on my SYLT Guide for good western fiction. After reading it twice I'm still puzzled about why Sandoz isn't more well known, even though the book was written in 1937.

Slocum House is one of the few works of fiction I've ever read that successfully portrays the nasty side of the power/wealth battle for the west. That battle and the results can be found easily enough in the nooks and crannies of actual history and autobiography. The Albert Fountain homicide in New Mexico, the various works gradually seeping out of the cracks about Mountain Meadows, Elfigo Baca, the Salt War and the Catron Gang and even the Pat Garrett homicide all portray a time in our history when county elections were a life and death matter. Until Mari Sandoz all that's mostly escaped the notice of fiction writers.

Slogum House should not be missed--it's certainly on a par with
Lonesome Dove. It's realistic and uncompromising--but don't look
for the sweep of Lonesome Dove, or the shootouts of most westerns.
The novel is about the Slogum family of Nebraska in the late 1800's
and up to the 1930's. Gulla Slogum rules the ranch--she's greedy
and unscrupulous--willing to prositute her daughters and encourage
her sons to rob and kill in order to expand her small empire. She
keeps a map, and slowly over the years is able to add new pieces
to the Slogum holdings. The sheriff and judge are kept on the
string with payoffs--both money and the sexual favors of two of
the daughters. There are no traditional shootouts--the sons
find things are much safer if they shoot someone in the back with
a rifle from a distance--why take chances?

The husband, Ruedy, is well-meaning, but weak. The two youngest
children, Libby and Ward, are decent people. There are others
over the years who come and go--such as Butch, Gulla's sadistic
brother. This is a portrayal of frontier life at it's best and
it's worst--at a time when the indian fighting is past, and when
we think that things are civilized. Reudy and Libby and Ward
persevere--they turn out to be the strongest ones in the end.

So--no cattle drives, no shootouts in front of a saloon. In fact,
almost all the scenes are at the ranch. It's a bleak, harsh, very
tough picture of rural Nebraska. The writing is excellent--there
are no parts that you find yourself hurrying through. I keep 3-4
copies--so that when I reread the book (about once a year) I can
find it easily.

A vivid chronicle of the heartbeat of America as glimpsed thorugh the daily life in small towns.

Clifton C. Edom founded the Missouri Photographic Workshop in 1949. Through his work with the workshop he became known as the father of photojournalism education. An instinctive alchemist and catalyst, he was less a teacher than a dominating presence. Cliff Edom presented his last workshop in 1990 shortly before his death. Nothing is forever, but the Missouri Workshop lives on in is image.

'Small Town America' seems an obvious choice for a photobook title but I doubt there has been anything published as good as this since Sherwood Anderson's 1940 'Home Town'. The 215 black and white photos reflect life in rural Missouri from the early fifties to the late eighties and it is all student work. In case this puts you off remember that these students had the benefit of some remarkable faculty members, Russell Lee for instance was part of the team for many years and his boss at the FSA, Roy Stryker taught in 1949 and 1957.

Visually the book is divided into four chapters, On Main Streets, Heart of the Country, A Place Called Home and chapter four has three photo essays covering a Joplin school in 1962, the Hannibal flood of 1986 and a family in Neosho during 1981. The three main chapters nicely run the photos out of date order though it seems to me that the earlier photos reflect the photojournalism techniques of the thirties and forties with their content-rich imagery. One of the really great ideas about Photo Workshop was that each year a different location was chosen so that the students were not photographing in the same place each year.

Look through the book several times, as I have over the years and you'll get a clear impression of small town America with a very human face. The book was published in 1993, perhaps it's time for an update to see how the students have seen rural Missouri since then and in color.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

This book grabs you right away, just in seeing what the subject is. It is certainly something which I have never really thought about before, discussing soft porn and how it has been portrayed. Mr. Andrews keeps it interesting and makes you want to keep turning the pages.

This is an excellent book on a strange subject -- soft core porn. I am hardly a porn afficianado but I found this book fascinating due to Andrew's careful treatment of softcore. Too often, Andrews argues, softcore porn is seen as a 'watered down' version of hard core pornography. Against this view he points out that softcore has its own distinct aesthetic. The similarity between soft core and more 'high brow' forms of art then becomes a source of anxiety to high-brow (and especially feminist) critics. As a result the book is about more than just pornography -- it is about how American culture categorizes things as 'sophisticated' or 'smut' and it demonstrates just how complex the line between these two things is and how it has been drawn (and defended) in the US today.

Now, to be honest, the book is an academic monograph -- it is not an easy-to-read pop piece. That said, Andrew's prose is easy to read by academic standards, with a wonderful economy of expression that conveys highly complex analysis in only slightly-complex prose. But what makes this book so great is not Andrew's analytical chops -- which, to be sure, he's got in spades -- but his stupendous erudition. His mastery of the genre -- the filmography lists hundreds of movies he has watched -- and his unparalleled knowledge of ths history of pornography is truly astonishing. Like an entomologist who knows every detail of 'his species' or a Shakespeare scholar who can provide paragraphs of commentary for each line in Hamlet, Andrews simply appears to have acheived that rare feat: total knowledge of an entire genre. And this gives him the ability to understand and present the genre's relevance for our understanding of all forms of art and media.

It is difficult to believe that something as... well.. _smutty_ as soft core pornography could have something to teach us about media and society in America, but that is exactly what David Andrews manages to convince us of in this tasty book on a tasteless topic.

Reviewing this book, which I have owned since it first appeared (thanks to the fantastic Urban Latino magazine for reviewing it so long ago), I feel a lot like Dracula opening the door to Jon Harker, saying *enter of your own free will*. This book is filled with darkness. Manmade darkness. Apapthetic darkness.

However, when you buy and open this book, it is filled with the light of love as well. A spirit that keeps these young people going amidst a hopeless cycle. The photographs illuminate in the greatest tradition of photojournalism. W. Eugene Smith would be proud. The photos never pander to our emotions, yet they don't allow us to stand above implacably indifferent either. You can feel the love from the photographer and his night guide: a priest who takes in some of the kids. An amazing intimate body of work.

But that's not all. You have a job to do after you open this book, as Bianca Jagger so eloquently pleads - what will we do *now that we are no longer ignorant*. It is a call of awareness and a call to action.

Human beings are leaving wide swaths of evidence for the prosecution to codemn us to our fate. This is a key piece of photographic evidence for you the jury to consider...

see the effects of the globalization of our work force, the effects of reducing a great nation from the revolutionary socialist hopes of the eighties to its entrapment through conservative and now arrested President Aleman into the multi-national industrial slave labor machine. See this book and its photos and feel for yourself what we do where we cannot see for the greater profit of Wall Street. In the Sandinista eighties these same people had housing, education, literacy and jobs. Now our USA victory leaves them nothing at all.

THe preface by Nicaraguan Mrs. Jagger (the inspiration for Brown Sugar) is worth the purchase alone.