Among the most accomplished color photographers of our time, Jeff Brouws presents over 80 resplendent photographs capturing the dreamy magic of the carnival midway. Gravity-defying amusement rides, brightly colored booths, the beseeching barkersBrouws' tableaux are accompanied by dozens of historical images from photographers such as Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, and Arthur Rothstein, and vivid text by cultural historian Bruce Caron. Inside the Live Reptile Tent is a journey to the heart of every special weekend and holiday adventure.
Evocative images of buildings and places, seen from the American road. Like many who grew up during the spread of sprawl--with its predictable landscape of housing developments, shopping malls, interstate highways, and big-box construction--acclaimed photographer Jeff Brouws is drawn to places that still embody the vernacular past as well as to those that starkly portray the soulless, franchised American landscape. What began as cultural geography of Main Streets became a visual critique of the myth of upward mobility that created this car-centered, paved-over universe. Some images look outward to the edges of suburbia where sprawl is encroaching upon nature. Others turn inward, documenting the devastated inner cities. All the stunning color photographs reflect the complex beauty and desolation of visual life in our time.
Among the most accomplished color photographers of our time, Jeff Brouws presents over 80 resplendent photographs capturing the dreamy magic of the carnival midway. Gravity-defying amusement rides, brightly colored booths, the beseeching barkers -- Brouws' cableaux are accompanied by dozens of historical images from photographers such as Ben Sbahn. Marion Post Wolcott, and Arthur Rothstein, and vivid text by cultural historian Bruce Caron. Inside the Live Reptile Tent is a journey to the heart of every special weekend and holiday adventure.
This volume presents a new way of looking at aspects of American culture that are at once familiar & increasingly rare. Jeff Brouws has recorded the discarded icons of highway culture, from abandoned drive-in movie screens to the rusty pickup truck. Essays by cultural critics compliment the images.
"Joe Nickell - once a carnival pitchman, then a magician, private detective, and investigative writer - has pursued sideshow secrets for years and has worked the famous carnival midway at the Canadian National Exhibition. For this book, he interviewed showmen and performers, collected carnival memorabilia, researched published accounts of sideshows and their lore, and even performed some classic sideshow feats, such as eating fire and lying on a bed of nails as a cinderblock was broken on his chest. The result of these varied efforts, Secrets of the Sideshows tells the captivating story of the magic, tricks - real or illusory - and performers of the world's midway shows."--BOOK JACKET.
Book has remarkable close-up photos of 100 mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and insects found east of the Great Plains in North America with information about habitat, appearance, behavior and also a CD recording of commons songs, calls, or other sounds for each.
In this book we are given a unique view of East Africa of the 1950s; not the stereotyped picture of wildlife safaris and leaping Masai, but the emerging independence struggle of a new African nation from the viewpoint of a white police office, in an exceptionally detailed, thoroughly readable, firsthand account of a rare period of recent history. It tells how an Australian veteran, fresh from the Korean War, became a colonial police officer in Tanganyika Territory (later Tanzania after federation with the offshore islands of Zanzibar in 1964). Ê The reader is taken on a journey which tourists in Africa never see: from back alleys and police cells in the polyglot city of Dar es Salaam, to snake-infested camps on UgandaÐRuanda border patrols, and on police field force emergency operations from barracks at the foot of Kilimanjaro. There is much here to discover about a mostly benign semi-colonial period in Africa which lasted less than fifty years, passing, in one AfricanÕs description, as briefly as a butterflyÕs heartbeat; where a few conscientious white administrators and their loyal African assistants managed vast regions of a desolate territory with remarkably selfless care and scarce resources; where things worked most of the time, but sometimes where chaos reigned. It is about the country itself, its ubiquitous animals and its people at close range, including villagers, criminals, hunters, witch doctors, and colonial officials, but most of all, the African askari policemen who were the authorÕs closeÑand often onlyÑcompanions.
