Jerry Spagnoli Livres

Jerry Spagnoli is one of the world's foremost daguerreotypists and this book brings together the last decade of his work, including selections from his Western Landscape and Anatomical Studies series and a comprehensive presentation of his documentary series The Last Great Daguerreian Survey of the Twentieth Century. Adopting a narrative form which unifies what at first appears to be disparate subjects, the viewer is led on a journey through a world distilled through the idiosyncratic perspective of the daguerreotype, a world which is both familiar and uncanny. Daguerreotypes have long been noted for their accuracy and veracity. In the hands of Spagnoli the technical limitations of the medium, the long exposures, odd tonalities, shallow focus and the necessity of large cumbersome cameras, are exploited to produce images which are at once completely objective yet intensely personal.

In Local Stories, Jerry Spagnoli contests the notion of history as a narrative told to support particular agendas, and installs personal experience in its place—the myriad stories we as individuals create on a daily basis. History is no longer a chronicle of “facts” written by those in power, but a collaborative social fabric shaped by our memories and ever growing. “It is beyond the power of any medium to communicate that vast ocean of experience, but perhaps it is possible to point in that direction,” explains Spagnoli, “These images are my attempt.” His photos encompass the city, suburbia, the countryside and all between throughout the world—from the neon noise of Times Square to a peaceful cafe on the Île Saint-Louis, from a street parade to friends picnicking under cherry blossoms, from the Forbidden City to surfers bobbing patiently on their boards, waiting for the next wave. “This fundamental sensation of moving through time is what unites us all as humans and presiding over it all, there before the beginning, and certain to be there after the end, the sun in the center of the sky.”

Between May and September 2012, Jerry Spagnoli photographed the myriad faces of people transfixed by an enormous electronic billboard above New York's Times Square. Regard, the result of this ambitious documentary undertaking, is a visual chronicle presenting almost 500 faces of great cultural and individual diversity. The particular billboard in question was set up to periodically display an image of the crowd beneath it. Pedestrians would wander by, absorbed in their thoughts, before noticing the billboard and pausing to search for their images. On finding themselves, many marked the occasion with an obligatory selfie. Spagnoli recorded these processes and the emotions of expectation and delight they elicit, creating an intricate collective portrait. For me the situation was compelling and complex. The light in Times Square is particularly beautiful at that time of the year. The expressions on people's faces were open and unselfconscious, as they all looked up towards that great light in the sky. Jerry Spagnoli

American Dreaming presents a vision of America from 1990 to 1995. Spagnoli took these photographs with a small Leica camera in the classic manner of street photography and then selected small details from the negatives. The resulting images of gestures, signs, faces and objects are freed from their original contexts and reconfigured. Spagnoli’s subject is the build-up to the First Gulf War, but we see these social and political events at best obliquely as Spagnoli’s version of history is primarily subjective and fragmentary. American Dreaming is the second of Spagnoli’s books in a trilogy about the personal experience of history, the first being Daguerreotypes (2006). Born in New York in 1956, Jerry Spagnoli is one of the principal practitioners of the daguerreotype and lectures regularly on the subject. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. Spagnoli’s work has appeared in many publications, and Steidl published Spagnoli’s Daguerreotypes in 2006.