About the Author:
Thomas Roma, a two-time recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York. He is the author of Sicilian Passage (powerHouse Books, 2003), Show & Tell (powerHouse Books, 2002), Sanctuary (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Enduring Justice (powerHouse Books, 2001), Higher Ground (Distributed Art Publishers Inc., 1999), Sunset Park (Smithsonian Books, 1998), Found in Brooklyn (W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), and Come Sunday (Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 1996). Director of Photography at Columbia University, Roma lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
John Szarkowski is director emeritus of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and was the director of the department from 1962 to 1991, in which time he oversaw more than one hundred exhibitions and the inauguration of MoMA’s photography collection galleries, and edited and contributed writing to numerous publications. Szarkowski is the recipient of various awards, including two International Center of Photography Infinity Awards and the Royal Photographic Society Progress Medal. He published a retrospective of his photographs, John Szarkowski: Photographs (Bulfinch, 2005), in conjunction with a traveling exhibition launched at SFMOMA, San Francisco in 2004. Szarkowski lives in New York.
From Publishers Weekly:
Inspired by a photographic project he did for Steve Buscemi's film Animal Factory, Roma (whose last book, Sicilian Passage, was photographs of his ancestral Sicily) returned to Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison to photograph its vacant cells. Szarkowski drafts Kafka, Conrad, Homer, Caesar, Napoleon and 19th century sailors into his rolling free-associative foreword, though what, exactly, he's trying to communicate remains a mystery. There is more insight, thankfully, revealed in the scrawled prayers, calendars and sketches expertly captured in Roma's photographs. One image preserves a sketch of a front door with a prominent handle labeled "pull" and a plaque drawn near it with a quotation from Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol, from which Roma also takes his title ("The vilest deeds like poison weeds / Bloom in prison air / It is only what is good in man / That wastes and withers there"). The cell walls, all marked by sheets of peeling paint and ethereally lit by overhead air shafts, run the gamut from unadorned to murals featuring icons like dragons and barely dressed (and large-breasted) women. Several tell stories, such as the drawing of one man shooting another ("Ah, I'm hit," reads the dialog bubble next to the wounded character's head). Readers would do well to skip the foreword and immerse themselves instead in Roma's captivating photographs.
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