What do you think?
Seasons of Light
Book by Brown, Peter, Levertov, Denise
133 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1988
About the author
Peter T. Brown
4 booksPeter Brown has photographed the open landscape and small towns of the Great Plains for the past twenty-five years. He is the author of Seasons of Light, On the Plains and the recently published West of Last Chance, a collaboration with the novelist Kent Haruf which won the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. His work has been collected by The Menil Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, MoMA New York, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others. He’s the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, the Imogen Cunningham Award, and grants from the Graham Foundation and the Cultural Arts Council of Houston. His work has appeared in Harpers, DoubleTake, Life, PDN, PhotoIcon, The New Yorker, Aperture, American Photographer, Texas Monthly and other magazines. He has degrees in English and Art from Stanford University and teaches at the Glasscock School at Rice University where he recently won their inaugural teaching prize. He was named Photographer/Educator of the year by the Houston Center for Photography and lives in Houston with his wife Jill and daughter Caitlin.
His work can be seen at the Harris Gallery, Houston; Stephen L. Clark Gallery, Austin; Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles; PDNB Gallery, Dallas and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.
His work can be seen at the Harris Gallery, Houston; Stephen L. Clark Gallery, Austin; Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles; PDNB Gallery, Dallas and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
April 1, 2018
I couldn't decide if this was a two-star book or a four-star book, so I chose three. I suspect, though, that no one will actually find it three-star enjoyable. Let me explain.
I don't remember when I picked up this book - I suspect it was maybe a bargain book at Barnes & Noble years ago. I'm always looking for a good deal and I pick up books that help fill up the shelves of my library in the subjects I collect in, and one of those is "art."
The fact that I have an "art" section probably tells you everything you need to know about how artistic I am, because I realize that's a vast (probably over-) simplification. Like anyone, I have creative moments. But I can't sing, dance, paint or sculpt, play an instrument any better than competently, and so on. I'm not an artist. But I recognize art as being something critically important to the health of the soul, and I have the deepest admiration for all of the artists among us that do so much to make our world better. To me, those of us who are more practical for a living do what we do to produce the surplus necessary for the other, more important "creatives" to do what they do. So I collect a certain number of art books, try to buy art and patron the arts when I can, and I buy art books.
OK, so regarding this book - it is a series of photographs and related text, both by Mr. Brown, except for some "special guest" poems and essays at the end of the book. The photographs are of everyday objects, rooms and scenes. There are no people in any of them that I can recall. Often the way the text is related is tenuous. Sometimes it's a description of what the author sees in the picture. More often it's a riff on what Mr. Brown was thinking or feeling or going through when he took that picture. Some of these are very imaginative - miniature short stories in a page to a page-and-a-half that you can see how they derive from the photo without connecting to it in any obvious way.
Does that sound wonderful or a little pretentious? If you think the former you're a future four-star reviewer. The latter? Two stars.
As I mentioned, at the end are some poems and an essay by Denise Levertov. This is some of the best writing in the book and present another perspective on a select group of the same photos that appear earlier in the book. Everything I wrote above I decided reading these last few pages. I was a two-star reviewer until then, so this is a short but wonderful section of the book.
Should you give it a shot? Its short, available for not a lot of money (and, I'm guessing, in many libraries), and it does give you a window into the mind of an artist, so I say go for it.
I don't remember when I picked up this book - I suspect it was maybe a bargain book at Barnes & Noble years ago. I'm always looking for a good deal and I pick up books that help fill up the shelves of my library in the subjects I collect in, and one of those is "art."
The fact that I have an "art" section probably tells you everything you need to know about how artistic I am, because I realize that's a vast (probably over-) simplification. Like anyone, I have creative moments. But I can't sing, dance, paint or sculpt, play an instrument any better than competently, and so on. I'm not an artist. But I recognize art as being something critically important to the health of the soul, and I have the deepest admiration for all of the artists among us that do so much to make our world better. To me, those of us who are more practical for a living do what we do to produce the surplus necessary for the other, more important "creatives" to do what they do. So I collect a certain number of art books, try to buy art and patron the arts when I can, and I buy art books.
OK, so regarding this book - it is a series of photographs and related text, both by Mr. Brown, except for some "special guest" poems and essays at the end of the book. The photographs are of everyday objects, rooms and scenes. There are no people in any of them that I can recall. Often the way the text is related is tenuous. Sometimes it's a description of what the author sees in the picture. More often it's a riff on what Mr. Brown was thinking or feeling or going through when he took that picture. Some of these are very imaginative - miniature short stories in a page to a page-and-a-half that you can see how they derive from the photo without connecting to it in any obvious way.
Does that sound wonderful or a little pretentious? If you think the former you're a future four-star reviewer. The latter? Two stars.
As I mentioned, at the end are some poems and an essay by Denise Levertov. This is some of the best writing in the book and present another perspective on a select group of the same photos that appear earlier in the book. Everything I wrote above I decided reading these last few pages. I was a two-star reviewer until then, so this is a short but wonderful section of the book.
Should you give it a shot? Its short, available for not a lot of money (and, I'm guessing, in many libraries), and it does give you a window into the mind of an artist, so I say go for it.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review