World of Wonders
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Book Summary Information
Photographer: Jimmy KatzPhotographer: Dena Katz
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-04-21
ISBN: 1576874923
Number of pages: 84
Publisher: powerHouse Books
Book Reviews of World of Wonders
Book Review: Wonderful
Summary: 5 Stars
Buy it! The book provides a sympathetic yet unwavering insight into the disappearing culture of the travelling carnival. The book grabs at your heart and soul with portraits of side-show artists, hawkers and roadies. The Katz duo captures a visually arresting and slightly unnerving family of personalities spanning the newly-arrived to the wizened and fading. Their stories are told in their own words and the texture of their voices unfold in the brief narratives. While Diane Arbus would have treated this subject matter from a judgemental distance, the Katz's are able to enter this travelling carnival like the best of ethnographers, almost invisibly, and portray an iconic way of a life with the regret that the ancient entertainment form is slowly becoming a victim of our modern life.
Summary of World of Wonders
Working in brilliant color and with a large format camera, photographers Jimmy and Dena Katz spent three seasons following the last authentic traveling side show in America to create this elegy to a uniquely American art form. Their powerful, poignant, and respectful portraits of aging performers and young recruits reveal disappointment, despair, and tenacity played out against the tawdry glitter of the fairground. These images, along with anecdotes and commentary by the performers, are brought together for the first time in World of Wonders.Sword swallowers, fire eaters, freaks, and illusionists have excited generations of Americans. Today, only this one troop persists, led by the legendary Ward Hall and his partner Chris Crist, who mounted multiple extravaganzas for Ringling Brothers more than fifty years ago. As the photographers listened to hard-luck stories and felt the power of hard-lived lives, they were moved by these men and women who continue to perform despite changing times and tastes.
The Katzes? widely acclaimed book about the surreal effects of human action on the salt flats of Utah, Salt Dreams (powerHouse Books, 2006), featured images deemed ?spectacular? by New York Times critic Grace Glueck. With this powerful and unsettling new work, Jimmy and Dena Katz continue to explore the postmodern aesthetics of American subcultures.
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