Favorite reads for National Author’s Day 2019

The Americans by Robert Frank

Nelson Chan, an assistant professor of Photography at CCA, describes the slow-burn effect of Robert Frank’s The Americans, a landmark book that challenged the status quo of mid-century photojournalism:

“In my opinion, The Americans is foundational to photographic education. The book teaches us how pictures can be made, read, and sequenced into something contemplative and intelligent that talks about the world that we live in—past and present. This book has a place in nearly every course that I teach.

In the 1960s, people misunderstood Frank’s looseness for a lack of technical prowess, his unforgiving and unflinching eye as being something hateful, and managed to completely ignore his most important contribution to the medium of photography, the book's brilliant critique of post-war triumphalism and conformity through sequential precision. I have to be frank though (pun intended), his book was a slow—decade-long—burn for me. This was partly because the photographs didn’t depict an America that I grew up in, but once you gain that cumulative knowledge from constant reads of the sequence, the narrative built becomes an emotional cinematic history lesson wrapped in an enigmatic poem. It’s incredible that 60 years later, a book of this magnitude is still politically, socially, and culturally relevant. I'm saddened by his recent passing, but am encouraged to know that his legacy and influence will continue in classrooms all over the world.”

Graffiti Grrlz by Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón

Jennine Scarboro curates the Capp Street Project Archive and is the CCA/C Archives assistant. With a “crazy working-mom schedule,” reading is her guilty pleasure. “Sometimes,” she says, “it’s the guilty pleasure.” Her top books to read include one by a Latina feminist performance studies scholar and one by two licensed marriage and family therapists:

“A couple years ago, I got involved in the Art+Feminism Wikipedia movement, and, since then, I keep an eye out for books that might inspire some Wikipedia article editing; Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora is one of those. It tells the experiences of women graffiti writers around the world—their creative practices, their resistances—and it gives author Dr. Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón’s take on the intersections of these works with feminism. If you want to check it out, the CCA Libraries have a copy.”

Companion text: Now Say This

“Graffiti Grrlz,” says Scarboro, “is my ‘hard’ book, but then I also always have a trash-mystery-novel or parenting book going too. Right now, it's Now Say This: The Right Words to Solve Every Parenting Dilemma by Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright. There are a zillion parenting books out there, some cruddy and some decent. This one I really like—it’s so good I’ve used the tips on grown-ups too!”

The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse by Joanna Zylinska

Leslie Roberts is the chair of the MFA in Writing program and co-founder of the ECOPOESIS movement, “an interdisciplinary exploration of messaging climate change and ecologies as writers and form makers.” For those interested in a fresh perspective on contemporary eco-political crises, Roberts’ recommendation is a must-read:

“This is a brilliant little book by the dynamic eco-thinker Joanna Zylinska, professor of new media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. I’m teaching The End of Man in the fall 2019 MFA Writing ECOPOESIS seminar. She writes with such power and playfulness, offering an ironic look at the apocalyptic narratives that have been used by males to control everything else. ‘By chipping away at the apocalyptic habit that is also the foundation of man’s always fictitious unity,’ says Zylinska, ‘The End of Man, together with its photofilmic component, Exit Man, aims to help us rethink and resense the Anthropocene and ourselves as humans in and with the Anthropocene.’”