Snowmen
By David Lynch
2007
First Published
3.73
Average Rating
22
Number of Pages
As his Spring, 2007 Cartier Foundation retrospective, The Air Is On Fire, made plain to all who saw it, the talents of the great American filmmaker David Lynch reach far beyond his acknowledged achievements in he is also an excellent painter, draughtsman and photographer. His photography to date has fallen loosely into four distinct genres or nudes (Bacon-esque images of digitally distorted Victorian photographs), still lifes (spark-plugs, dental machinery), industrial landscapes—and snowmen. Published to accompany the Cartier show, this compact volume brings together Lynch's black-and-white photographs of snowmen, all taken in the suburbs of his hometown of Boise, Idaho. Exhibiting his characteristic preoccupation with ominous beauty as these ephemeral folk sculptures decompose in front of snow-covered tract houses, Lynch pays scant regard to the cheerier and more genial properties of snowmen, and indeed some of these images will remind viewers of the shadowy black-and-white tones of Lynch's 1977 film Eraserhead . "If you have some shadow or darkness in the frame, then your mind can travel in there and dream," he has stated. Lynch's indisputable gift for teasing out the sinister flipsides of the props and rituals of American suburbia is beautifully evidenced in this small, gift-worthy book.
Avg Rating
3.73
Number of Ratings
30
5 STARS
50%
4 STARS
0%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
7%
goodreads
Author
David Lynch
Author · 14 books
Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married, and fathered future director Jennifer Chambers Lynch shortly after he turned 21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired ERASERHEAD(1977), a film that he began in the early 1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on obsessively for five years. The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasable, but thanks to the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, it secured a cult following and enabled Lynch went on to make such cult films as THE ELEPHANT MAN, DUNE, BLUE VELVET, WILD AT HEART, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, LOST HIGHWAY, and the television series TWIN PEAKS. Lynch is also a renowned painter and author.
