Photogravures by Tom Baril
Short story by Ann Beattie
Introduction by John Wood
Edition: 75 portfolios
12 unbound signed photogravures
24 x 20 inches
Handcrafted in New England
No American writer better captures the spirit of our times than Ann Beattie does, and no American photographer has better captured the look of our principal city than Tom Baril has...What is most striking about Baril’s photographs is his sense of the complex drama at work, which is also what always marks Beattie’s work and gives it its striking and characteristic tone of uneasiness. Theirs is not an instantaneous art, not a matter of merely recognizing the decisive or dramatic moment and recording it. Baril’s art involves the drama of soliloquy, of waiting—even for hours or on different days—for the camera’s full image to form and speak: for the clouds or the light or the dark in concert with the shapes themselves to call out with a single voice. Similarly, the Beattie moment comes following what might have seemed a random accumulation of meaningless details, but they are the details that create the texture of her characters’ lives, so that at the decisive moment she can reveal the humanity of the ordinary... - John Wood