Jed

2009 · ref. 200854 — Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press 2009. Hardcover. VG Ex art library with sticker on DJ spine and to rear endpaper; DJ and boards are lightly edgeworn/scratched; interior is in excellent condition; binding is solid. Grey pictorial DJ with white orange and grey lettering; black cloth over boards with stamped lettering; 132 pp.; chiefly illustrations. "Sight is central to the medium of photography. But what happens when the subjects of photographic portraits cannot look back at the photographer or even see their own image An in-depth pictorial study of blind schoolchildren in Mexico Look At Me draws attention to and distinctions between the activity of sight and the awareness of form." "Combining aspects of his acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding has concentrated closely on these children's features and gestures probing the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior. Design composition and the play of light and shadow are central elements in these photographs but the images are much more than formal experiments; they confront disability in a way that affirms life. Fielding's sightless subjects project a vitality that seems to extend beyond the limits of self-consciousness. In collaborative joyful participation with the children he has made pictures that reveal essential gestures of absorption and the basic expressions of our creatureliness. Fielding's work achieves what only great art and particularly great portraiture can: it launches and then complicates a process of identification across the barriers that separate us from each other. Look At Me contains more than sixty arresting images from which we often want to look away but into which we are nevertheless drawn by their deep humanity and palpable tenderness. This is a monograph of uncommon significance by an important American photographer."-- Jacket. University of Chicago Press hardcover