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11/25/12

IN THE SHADOW OF THE CAPITOL

Photographs by Carl Mydans for the U.S. Resettlement Administration, September 1935 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress). Edited and with text by Tom Clark

“That ominous roominghouse-stairway interior, when I found it, became the signal that keyed this image search (for America, was it?). Having discovered that shot, and reflecting then upon the dark inner-sanctum descent it suggested, I went through the original Mydans “Lots” (the image groups — over a thousand images have survived in these scattered sets of “Lots”, preserved in the archive in random fashion, so that the ordering as we now have it represents my own editing selection and sequencing plan); one thing led to another, and…” - Tom Clark, IN THE SHADOW OF THE CAPITOL


Published by Pataphysics Books, Melbourne, 2012 
Hard Cover, 33 Black and white photographs printed in tritone on uncoated paper, 245 x 210mm, limited editon of 500
Photographs by Carl Mydans 
Edited and with text by Tom Clark 
Book design by Yanni Florence
Available here: http://m33.net.au/in-the-shadow-of-the-capitol/ and here http://www.worldfoodbooks.com/in-the-shadow-of-the-capitol/
















Carl Mydans (1907-2004) is best known as a photojournalist. He began reporting and taking pictures part-time for the Boston Globe and Boston Herald while still a Boston University undergraduate. Not long after taking the photos in this book for the U.S. Resettlement Administration, he went to work for Life magazine, joining Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Peter Stackpole and Thomas McAvoy as staff photographers there. Mydans won an international name for himself with his war photography in Asia. His photos of the effects of Japanese bombing in Chungking became widely known. 

 Tom Clark was born in Chicago in 1941 and educated at the University of Michigan, Cambridge University and the University of Essex. He has worked variously as an editor (The Paris Review), critic (Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle) and biographer (lives of Damon Runyon, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn), has published novels (Who is Sylvia?, The Exile of CĂ©line, The Spell), memoirs (Jim Carroll, Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan). His poetry and essays have been widely published. He keeps up a blog (Beyond the Pale) at http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/

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