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"Orvell, Miles"
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The Death and Life of Main Street
For more than a century, the term \"Main Street\" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. InThe Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis.Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.
eBook
Rethinking the American City
Whether struggling in the wake of postindustrial decay or reinventing themselves with new technologies and populations, cities have once again moved to the center of intellectual and political concern.Rethinking the American Citybrings together leading scholars from a range of disciplines to examine an array of topics that illuminate the past, present, and future of cities.Rethinking the American Cityoffers a lively and fascinating survey of contemporary thinking about cities in a transnational context. Utilizing an innovative format, each chapter opens with an iconic image and includes a brief and provocative essay on a single topic followed by an extended dialogue among all the essayists. Topics range from energy use, design, and digital media to transportation systems and housing to public art, urban ruins, and futurist visions. By engaging with key contemporary concerns-public and private space, sustainability, ethnic and racial divisions, and technology-this volume illuminates how global society has imagined American urban life.Contributors:Klaus Benesch, Dolores Hayden, David M. Lubin, Malcolm McCullough, Jeffrey L. Meikle, David E. Nye, Miles Orvell, Andrew Ross, Mabel O. Wilson, Albena Yaneva.
eBook
Photographing Disaster: Urban Ruins and the Destructive Sublime
Photographers have recorded disaster and ruins for over a hundred years, but more recently the spectacle of material destruction has been a central and disturbing feature of American culture. This essay focuses on three sites of massive urban destruction: the city of Detroit, which has been succumbing gradually to decay under the weight of its economic collapse; the city of New Orleans, partially destroyed by the force of Hurricane Katrina in 2005; and New York City, whose World Trade Center was subject to attack and obliteration by AI Qaeda in 2001. Examining the work of documentary photographers Camilo Jose Vergara, Andrew Moore, Robert Polidori, John Woodin, James Nachtwey, and Joel Meyerowitz, I argue in this essay for the existence of a new category of visual representation: the destructive sublime. Exploring the range of aesthetic approaches taken in representing catastrophe, I also analyze the mixed response we have to such images—a response that combines moral and ethical revulsion with aesthetic wonder and awe. The essay concludes with the claim that photography has worked against our tendency to amnesia, functioning in the twenty-first century as the necessary cultural historian of our distressed time.
Journal Article
The Absolute Power of the Lens: Zoe Strauss and the Problem of the Street Portrait
Whatever the quality of Strauss's work, the story itself has an incomparable drama and appeal - a rags-to-riches Cinderella story that matches the American dream as closely as the Rocky statue that graces the grounds of the museum (removed from the top of the stairs by order of the museum's board some years ago). To read the reviews, one could only conclude that Strauss is the greatest living photographer: the claims are large and rest on a body of work that, one must assume, can bear close examination, for what is at stake is the place of social photography in the twenty-first century as well as the role of aesthetic and moral judgment.
Journal Article
Review: Beyond the Architect's Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment by Mary N. Woods
Reviews \"Beyond the architect's eye : photographs and the American built environment,\" by Mary N Woods.
Journal Article