Main Street: Towns, Villages, and Hamlets of the Great Plains - Hardcover

Singer, Danny

9781938086076: Main Street: Towns, Villages, and Hamlets of the Great Plains

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1938086074 ISBN 13: 9781938086076

Publisher: George F. Thompson, 2013

The Great Plains is one of Earth's greatest ecosystems. Comprised of short- and tall-grass prairie, it extends from the Canadian Arctic south to Texas and from the Rocky Mountains in the dry west to the north-south corridor of I-35, I-29, and Canadian Highway 6 in the humid east. Although some of North America's great cities are located on the Great Plains - Canada's Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton, for example, and Denver and Dallas in the United States - the region is best known for its isolated small towns, villages, and hamlets whose livelihood, historically, is based on converting the native prairie into ranch land and agriculture. Working in the tradition of documentary photography and using contemporary photographic techniques, Danny Singer here records, as no other Canadian or American photographer previously has, the Main Streets of those tiny settlements that define the Great Plains. In grand panoramas, we sense what it is like to live in these prairie towns that offer their residents the essential services for living - a bank, food store, co-op, gas station, and garage, post office, school, church, watering hole, public park, you name it. But when we look down the side streets of a Danny Singer photograph, we see what lies beyond: the infinite space and big sky that not only establish the character of the Great Plains landscape, but also overwhelm all but the hardiest of citizens. Danny Singer's Main Street offers an original and lasting view of the heart and soul of the North American Great Plains: its small towns, villages, and hamlets at the turn of the twenty-first century. Here we rediscover that, far from the maddening noise and traffic, hectic life and polluted air of the city, rural life in the hinterland still matters. A concluding essay by the renowned art critic and curator, Grant Arnold, establishes Danny Singer's place among the continent's great visual artists of all time. This beautiful book comes slip cased and shrink wrapped. (See the publisher's website for further information: http://gftbooks.com/books_Singer.html ).

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Review:

The shape of this book is noteworthy: the width is 15.25" and the height is 9.25". This ultrawide landscape format accommodates the photos, which are also long horizontals. Some stretch across one page and occupy only a couple inches vertically; others occupy three pages - a double page spread with a foldout page - with images six inches tall and 45 inches wide. Singer is a photographer who grew up in Edmonton, Canada and although he now lives in Vancouver, Canada, he has driven many miles across the Great Plains to photograph the buildings of the "Main" streets of small towns. An essay by art historian (and fellow Vancouver resident) Grant Arnold complements the images.--Book News, Inc.

About the Author:

Danny Singer is a photographer living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1945, Singer began his career working in the Film Department of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but, in 1970, he moved to Montr�al, where he made the transition to still photography. Singer's photographs have appeared in exhibitions and art fairs across Canada, Europe, and the United States, and they are part of numerous public collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Denver Art Museum, Crown Collection for the Official Residences of Canada, Canada Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Canadian Embassy in Berlin. His photographs have also appeared in publications such as Canadian Architect, The Paris Review, Prism, and Prefix Photo, and he has received awards from the British Columbia Arts Council, Canadian Council for the Arts, Montreal Art Directors Club, Ontario Arts Council, and Portfolio magazine, among others.

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