Michael Lesy

A shocking portrait of a small town crumbling-socially, morally, physically and emotionally-under the impact of the great depression of the 1890s.

"In this unconventional, lyrical biography, Lesy traces Evans's intimate, idiosyncratic relationships with men and women--the circle of friends who made Walker Evans who he was. 'Wonder and scrutiny produced the portraits Walker made in his prime,' Lesy writes. Evans's photographs of Agee, Berenice Abbott, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Lesy's telling of Evans's life stories. 'Wonder and scrutiny, suffused with desire...

"In 1900 the stereograph was king. Its three-dimensional optics created a virtual presence for the viewer. Millions of Americans, especially schoolchildren, absorbed ideas about race, class, and gender from such 3D images...Drawing on an enormous, rarely seen collection of some 300,000 stereographic views spanning the first decade of the twentieth century, Michael Lesy presents nearly 250 images displaying a riot of peoples and cultures, stark class...

Based on authentic historical records, this gives a chilling account of the disaster that befell one small town in Wisconsin in the 1890's. Black River Falls seems gripped by a peculiar madness, and its weekly newspaper is full of bizarre stories of violent death and wildly eccentric behavior. As epidemics decimate the infant population and the local economy collapses, the townsfolk are haunted by ghosts, possessed by demons, and terrorized by a cocaine-snorting,...