Michael Lesy - Wisconsin Death Trip - 1973

IMPORTANT AMERICAN PHOTOBOOK, mentioned here:
- Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books, pages 222 and 223
- Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, The Photobook, A History, volume 2, pages 216 and 2017

TRUE FIRST AMERICAN PRINTING FROM 1973 (not to mix with the later editions from 1990 and 2000).

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"Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip is one of the more interesting works to emerge from the 1970s rediscover of vernacular photography. The book was ahead of its time, not because it was a published collection of nineteenth-century vernacular photographs - any number of publications did that - but because of Les's attitude to his material. He looked upon the photographs of Charles Van Schaick, taken between 1890 and 1910 in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in a way that predicted postmodernism. To say that he viewed them sceptically would be overstating the case, but he certainly did not take them at face value, and he treated them proactively rather than reactively -that is, as a creative resource."
(Martin Parr, Gerry Badger)

"Van Schaick was a typical American small-town photographer, documenting local events and rites of passage - births, marriages, graduations, deaths, shop openings and fêtes. Lesy reproduces a selection of these typical images alongside reports from local newspapers and other writings, primarily the dispatches of Frank and George Cooper for the Badger State Banner, in order to build up a picture of rural America at the end of the nineteenth century.
The scenario that emerges is a depressing one - a seemingly endless recounting of murders, domestic vio-lence, suicides, accidents and general mayhem. During the 1890s it wasn't simply the harsh winters and loneliness of country life that beset rural American society;
it was the crisis caused by a depression almost as great as that of the 1930s, as the United States underwent the painful process of changing from a largely agrarian economy to an industrial one. It is not surprising, there-fore, that Lesy's Wisconsin seems populated by dysfunctional psychopaths who, if not killing other people, were killing themselves.
To state that this is Les's Wisconsin is entirely apt, for the point of his book is one of selectivity. Whilst not quite a photo-novel, Wisconsin Death Trip is a fiction, neither sociology nor history. Yet that does not mean that the events depicted here are unreal. The rural Wisconsin of the 1890s was a desperate place, with gangs of out-of-work tramps causing havoc in the countryside. Les is demonstrating - and again this is a postmodern impulse - that photographs and written reports are selective harbingers of truth. He shows, above all, that history, no matter how persuasive the terms in which it is pre-sented, is partial."
(Martin Parr, Gerry Badger)

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Pantheon Books. A Division of Random House, New York. 1973. First edition, first printing.

Paperback. 280 × 215 mm. 262 pages. 154 black and white photographs and photocollages and 9 black and white illustrations. Cover design by Kenneth Miyamoto. Preface by Warren Susman. Introduction and conclusion by Michael Les. Excerpts from town archives and newspapers. Photographs by Charles van Schaick. Sequencing and photomontages by Michael Lesy. Design by Stevan A. Baron. Text in English.

Condition:
Book inside fresh and flawless; clean with no foxing and with no previous owner marks (only the first page of the preface with underlings). Outside with well-preserved covers and spine which is not creased (like so often); lightly used, marginally rubbed at the corners, at the edges and at the top and bottom of the spine, better than usual with no remarkable defects. Overall fine condition.

Important American photobook classic by Michael Lesy.

"Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip is an eccentric, auda-cious, and frequently annoying book that its author calls 'as much an exercise of history as it is an experiment of alchemy.' Originally presented as Lesy's Ph.D. thesis at Rutgers, the book is also as much a document of its time as it is a reflection on the past. In the early 70s, when all received wisdom was subiect to skeptical "interrogation",
Lesy's imaginative and radical reevaluation of the historical record became a campus cult book much as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media had nearly a decade before. Drawing primarily from an archive of 3.000 images (culled from 30.000 glass-plate negatives) made by town photographer Charles Van Schaick and from newspaper accounts first printed in the Badger State Banner, Lesy lays out an intricate patchwork of fact and fiction whose blighted nexus is the Wisconsin community of Black River Falls between the years 1890 and 1910. Lesy approaches the material like a novelist or a New Journalist, supplementing terse news from the Banner with observations by "two mythical creatures," a town historian and a local gossip, and excerpts from Main Street, Spoon River Anthology, and other relevant texts. In this colorfully subjective version of events, however, the news is nearly always bad. Item after item reports on suicides, murders, epidemics, arsons, incest, infant deaths, haunted houses, bands of rapacious tramps, monstrous serpents in the lake. All of Wisconsin appears to have been swept into a state of hysteria - a mania hardly explained by the occasional note about mine closings and widespread unemployment or by Lesy's elegantly, if unpersuasively argued conclusions. (Among them: '(The] truth was that . .. the socioeconomic system of the United States was not only just as bad as a side show shuck, it was worse, it was a trap,' and "Paranoia was the clear vision the countryside offered its failures.') The photographs aren't much more convincing, but they've got a certain morbid fascination.
Van Schaick was not an undiscovered small-town visionary like Disfarmer, but he was considerably more versatile than the Arkansas studio photographer, and Les includes his pictures of school groups, rural scenes, still lifes, parties, commercial fa-cades, and even a muscular male nude among the expected array of formal and informal portraits. But since the book is haunted by death, the photos of the living are bracketed and overshadowed by pictures of babies dead in their coffins, of extravagant memorial wreaths, and of mourning or maddened fe-males. Lesy's decision to collage and manipulate some of these images, often simply by doubling them as if in a mirror, is in keeping with his approach to the other historical raw material here, which is to say at once respectful and fanciful. Some would call it fast and loose."
- Andrew Roth -