None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
William T. Vollmann has spent forty years photographing, painting, and printing his way through war zones, brothels, and the Arctic, then generously compiled the results into two $65 volumes for those of us who preferred to stay home.
Volume One is photographs. Volume Two is everything else: drawings, prints, paintings, the full maximalist arsenal. Together they constitute what happens when a writer of prodigious, uncontainable ego decides that prose alone cannot hold him. Insurgents. Refugees. Prostitutes. Inuit teenagers. Tahitian women. A transgender alter ego named Dolores. Bible scenes in which God is female. Vollmann has strong views on suffering, and he has photographed all of it, personally, often at great personal risk.
Essays accompany the images, explaining what photographs can and should say. Vollmann has opinions on photographic "consensuality,” about cyanotypes of marginal figures, about gum bichromate landscapes. Of course he does.
The trouble is that the book is exactly what it promises, and promises are the enemy of surprise. Vollmann writes seriously about technique and wants you to know it. For a writer capable of moral vertigo on the page, the critical prose here stays resolutely on the surface.
Fans will buy it. Fans should. Then they will place it on the shelf beside the seven volumes on violence and the two on climate change, and occasionally open it, and feel the familiar mixture of admiration and exhaustion that Vollmann reliably provokes. Essential it is not. At $65 a volume, empathy turns out to be quite expensive.
❤️ 🇮🇱
William T. Vollmann has spent forty years photographing, painting, and printing his way through war zones, brothels, and the Arctic, then generously compiled the results into two $65 volumes for those of us who preferred to stay home.
Volume One is photographs. Volume Two is everything else: drawings, prints, paintings, the full maximalist arsenal. Together they constitute what happens when a writer of prodigious, uncontainable ego decides that prose alone cannot hold him. Insurgents. Refugees. Prostitutes. Inuit teenagers. Tahitian women. A transgender alter ego named Dolores. Bible scenes in which God is female. Vollmann has strong views on suffering, and he has photographed all of it, personally, often at great personal risk.
Essays accompany the images, explaining what photographs can and should say. Vollmann has opinions on photographic "consensuality,” about cyanotypes of marginal figures, about gum bichromate landscapes. Of course he does.
The trouble is that the book is exactly what it promises, and promises are the enemy of surprise. Vollmann writes seriously about technique and wants you to know it. For a writer capable of moral vertigo on the page, the critical prose here stays resolutely on the surface.
Fans will buy it. Fans should. Then they will place it on the shelf beside the seven volumes on violence and the two on climate change, and occasionally open it, and feel the familiar mixture of admiration and exhaustion that Vollmann reliably provokes. Essential it is not. At $65 a volume, empathy turns out to be quite expensive.
❤️ 🇮🇱