About this item

This remarkable book joins the company of "self-work," deep acts of memory that serve to illuminate the present by shining the clear light of careful regard on the past. The book finds company in the work of D J Waldie's Holy Land, Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and the profound My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.In 1996 Neal Snidow found himself at a personal impasse as he and his wife struggled in vain to have a child. Locked in sadness at their predicament, in mid-career as a college teacher and unpublished writer, and at the first daunting steps of open adoption, as a kind of solace Neal began taking black and white photos of his old neighborhood in southern California. The film was slow, the camera on a tripod, the process awkward, and the goal no more than Garry Winogrand's famous dictum that he made pictures "to find out what something will look like photographed.