![]() ![]() ![]() A middle aged man sitting on a slouching bed in a rumpled bedroom, his entire right leg in a cast, his other leg bare except for a black sock. An open can of beer set next to a just-so anniversary cake. And yet, he also has an eye for when something is off - something added, or missing, or unusual. His selection process positions the snapshot as the container for secrets, something only family or close friends know. The 193 photos selected for Snapshots - culled from thousands he collected during the period - included “intimate, domestic, close-up information that I could never have known otherwise,” Lesy writes in his introduction. But Lesy recognizes that ordinary life, when you train a camera on it, becomes addictively strange. ![]() As hallucinations go, his trip was pretty earthbound: the images he was drawn to tended to feature people in ordinary circumstances, talking, celebrating, partying, traveling, and flirting. This was, as he relates in the introduction to his book Snapshots 1971-77, a transformative experience - a “drug experience without drugs” that kicked off a five-decade career as a scholar of American photography. In 1971, Michael Lesy recovered a cache of snapshots from the dumpster of a photo-processing plant in San Francisco. ![]()
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