Book Signing at Arcana 11/15/12 > Arthur Grace: America 101
AMERICA 101: Photographs by Arthur Grace
An award-winning photojournalist and social documentarian, Arthur Grace has traveled globally and to every region of America on assignment for major news organizations as well as for his own personal projects since the early 1970s. In America 101, Grace draws one hundred and one pictures from his rich personal archive of the United States to assemble a visual crash course on what defines and represents us as Americans.
Organized into thematic chapters, Grace’s book subjectively and insightfully plumbs America’s cultural DNA. Fusing the style and the physical proximity of a photojournalist with the conceptual distance and healthy skepticism of an artist, his pictures speak to a set of themes that resonate deeply with the American experience over the past half century, revealing the simultaneously familiar and curious rituals of American life.
As High Museum of Art Curator of Photography Brett Abbott states in his cogent introductory essay, Grace’s study “represents the yin and yang of America... In Grace’s America, the ordinary meets the absurd, veneration and irreverence comingle in unexpected and delightfully humorous ways, a lighthearted joie de vivre soothes a violent vein, and the sanctity of the individual competes with our continual drive toward collective direction. Indeed, what is perhaps so prescient about Grace’s condensation of the past is how much it resembles the basic structure of our present.”
