Sylvia Plachy’s Unguided Tour

Plachy’s photographs, regularly published in The Village Voice , are at once journalistic and personal. While presented here as an “unguided tour” of everything from portraits (parents, pets, musicians, and writers) to street photographs (markets, factories, accident sites, and demonstrations), the pictures have in common beautifully arrested motion and expressive emotion. Richly printed in duotone, 130 black-and-white photographs–accompanied by the artist’s statements and vignettes of dreams–weave in time and place from Plachy’s birthplace in Hungary to France, Sicily, Howard Beach, and Nicaragua. The collection is also notable for its humorous and striking juxtapositions. Tom Waits’s musical accompaniment (on a flexible record included with the book) is superfluous but perhaps emblematic: traditionally Hungarian in flavor, transformed into a unique creation. Unguided Tour is a traveling exhibition which opened this fall at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
– Ann Copeland, Champaign, Ill.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.