Selected Product:
| Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together 1840-1918
Paperback
Author: David Deitcher
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Release Date: 2005-03-01
ISBN-10: 0810992302
ISBN-13: 9780810992306
List Price: $17.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Reproducing more than one hundred never-before-published vintage photographs dating from shortly after the introduction of photography in the United States to the end of World War I, this groundbreaking book focuses attention on the physical intimacy between men that challenges the conventional view of the Victorian era as more inhibited than our own. David Deitcher's provocative text combines historical research, social observation, pictorial analysis, and personal reflection to explore the nature of same-sex affection between men during that period and the meaning of its ambiguous photographic legacy for people today. We now understand that the Victorians had a surprisingly broad-minded attitude toward intimate friendships: men and women were in many ways encouraged to establish intense, even passionate, bonds with members of their own sex. These ties could be romantic in ways that we would identify as sexual but that Victorians, in their state of pre-Freudian innocence, would not. Enthusiastic collectors - most of them gay - have rescued these enigmatic objects from oblivion. Dear Friends investigates the social conditions that made these photographs possible and examines both their abandonment and subsequent retrieval by those who cherish them as rare historical visual evidence of love between men.
If only
| Customer Rating:  | In a spirit of full disclosure: I am a member of the target audience for this book - a gay man interested in photography, history, and critical theory.
I'm also a skeptic, and know that 19th- and early-20th-century American photography was not the outlet of homosociality the author suggests. Among the reasons I find his program suspicious:
-Many of the men in specific photographs bear striking FAMILY resemblances to each other.
-Given the long exposure times required for studio photography of the era, practitioners had to find ways to keep the subjects as still as possible. For individuals, photographers would often use a kind of iron armature to keep the subject from swaying (which would blur the photo). A clever solution to the problem with multiple subjects: have them touch, rest on each other, and general overlap to steady themselves. This is a conventional method of overcoming the limitations of the medium, not necessarily the expression of physical attraction among the subjects.
-Given the fact that the poses for obvious family members do not differ from those of men who do NOT resemble each other, the author would have to retrospectively assume that the photos convey public acknowledgement of incest, if one is to take his arguments to their logical conclusion.
-Humor and irony are not always visible to every observer. The author reads the photos with a kind of literalness that seduce him into back-projection. He doesn't approach the images with (an admittedly ephemeral) objectivity, because he wants these often beautiful and overwhelmingly interesting pictures to express what they cannot.
-Same-sex couples involved in sexual relationships may very well appear in some of these photographs; given what little the author knows about their provenance, it is unlikely we'll ever know which. |
Interesting Concept, Awkwardly Executed
| Customer Rating: | If this were just a book of "photographs of men together" without the heavy-handed, ponderous stretches of the author's awkward, long-winded prose between photos, it would be an enormous improvement. Deitcher's text reads like a proposal for selling the book to a publisher - I lost count how many times he states things like, "this book is..." and then describes the book you are holding in your hand.
Newsflash: We're already reading the book. Stop describing what you intend to accomplish with it and just do it, already.
I liked when he used quotes and excerpts that were contemporary to the times the photos were taken, which give the reader a better idea of what life and society was like then. But there was too little of this, and too much conjecture on his part, and, yes, I know it's his book, but too much personalizing. I wasn't interested in knowing that the author, as a young man, fantasized about the photos of swimmers he saw in American Red Cross "Junior Lifesaving" manuals (page 50). Rather, I was a little creeped out, and unsure why this very personal anecdote is included in his book.
Here's a passage that kind of sums up my problem with his writing - also from page 50:
"Today we can swim in seas of homoerotica and X-rated porn. It should not be taken as a detraction from the pleasures of porn to underscore the guilelessness and ingenuity with which image-starved gay men and lesbians once perused everyday representations for sexual excitement; nor to admit to mourning the passage of such creative strategies for (homo)sexual survival as one of the costs we have had to pay for replacing gay subcultural ingenuity with gay culture, tout court. There are, of course, other related trade-offs in which one thing is lost at the price of another being gained. Ultimately, this book provides evidence of a parallel trade-off that results from the historical transformation of the social meaning of same-sex affection from a nineteenth-century tradition of romantic friendship and comradely love, and its physical expression among men who posed for photographers holding hands, entwining limbs, or resting in the shelter of each other's accomodating bodies, innocent of the suspicion that such behavior would later arouse."
And he goes ON like this! I defy anyone to get any sort of cognizable meaning out of all this academic double-talk. I'm left wondering if the photos came up short and he had a larger page-count to fill because he says basically the same thing over and over throughout the course of the book, and it never gets any more straight-forward or lucid than what you just read above.
So - in short: Liked the concept, loved the photos, was NOT a fan of the text. |
Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918
| Customer Rating: | | An excellent gift for a gay male friend. |
Words worth of pictures
| Customer Rating: | | Alas - I wish I could have given this book a top mark, but it is not to be. What kept me from doing so were not the pictures, but the limply connotating articles that accompany them. In this day and age of multiple choice selections the author may be forgiven to think that readers (or viewers alike) would be unable to detect what matters in the details of an image. However I found it annoying to have a visual sensation reproduced (and that means interpreted) by often sensually inept words. Inept, because these saccharine follies detract from what should have really mattered: a distinction in time and culture. The age which produced the spirit of these pictures has been edited out of our consciousness - the fact that no man's and no woman's sexuality has to be pre-defined is what interests now. The fact that things were different once( but how so?)also interests now. This book is very much a child of the spirit of its times, ours. As such it contrasts what we have come to struggle with: the rigidly stereotypical images we have created of our senses and genders. In the same vein it also does what has become 'de rigueur', drown those things which speak for themselves, instead of understatedly enhancing them. The yearning for acceptance; the proof to show that things were not always as we have them now is, I think, the main missile behind this book. Looking at the other reviews, it is clear that such a search is on, now. For bringing those images to mind, letting people know tha no-one is an island, even over the centuries, the book should be lauded.
However - I should recommend that Mr Deitcher begin work forthwith on a book showing us picture of soldierly love from the two world wars, a field that has not been explored to depth. |
A Wonderfully-Written Book
| Customer Rating: | | I'm not sure where I heard about this book, but I am grateful to the author for writing it. The photographs Deitcher describes and provides for us are beyond words. They provide such a wonderful insight into male friendships/relationships in the 19th Century and are very interesting to look at and ponder. This book is of particular interest to me as I'm currently writing a novel about a great uncle of mine and I have several photographs of him with other men, some more defined than others. But it isn't just the photographs that makes the book so excellent, it is Deitcher's words that bring everything to life. I was interested in his analyses of the relationships and that he is honest and forthcoming with the fact that we can never really know for certain what these photos represent, particularly when examined within the context of 19th Century social constructions. |
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