Look Again in Baltimore - Hardcover

Dorsey, John; DuSel, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801874157 ISBN 13: 9780801874154

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005

A marriage of photography and criticism, this elegant volume celebrates details of Baltimore's fine architectural heritage and explores both familiar and unnoticed places. Photographer James DuSel and art critic John Dorsey have created a book that leads from images to thoughts, and they invite readers to follow the same path.

DuSel's mesmerizing black-and-white photographs focus sharply on details of larger images: the bottom of a doorway, the corner of a portico, the wall of a shoe repair shop, the substructure of a bridge. Dorsey ruminates on these images, and he draws striking connections between Baltimore's visual vocabulary and the tapestry of civilization. He carries us from a window in Roland Park to the triumphal arch of Constantine in Rome, from a stairway at the Maryland Institute to the Doge's Palace in Venice, from a vine at the Baltimore Museum of Art to Shakespeare.

DuSel and Dorsey, through a studious appreciation of detail, encourage us to look at our built environment afresh and discover a new and more meaningful relationship with our surroundings. Shaking off what DuSel calls "the anesthesia of daily life," Look Again in Baltimore offers arresting insights into the richness of the everyday world.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

John Dorsey, retired art critic of the Baltimore Sun, has written and lectured extensively and curated several exhibitions on art and architecture. James DuSel is a distinguished photographer and teaches Latin and Greek at Loyola- Blakefield Upper School. Both live in Baltimore.

From The Washington Post:

"Have serious sun," advises the introduction to Look Again in Baltimore (Johns Hopkins Univ., $35), which marries James DuSel's architectural photographs of Charm City with commentary by John Dorsey, former art critic of the Baltimore Sun. What struck Dorsey about the photos was their telling selectivity, how they "so often . . . caught the essence of a building or an aspect of architecture that a more inclusive picture would have missed." Thus, DuSel can find details in and about the Baltimore Museum of Art or the Walters Museum that even regular visitors may overlook, such as how, in Dorsey's words, the webbing of vines stretching across an exterior wall of the Baltimore Museum suggests "rushing movement as of white water cascading down a rock-filled riverbed."

One photo, of a building on South Charles Street, poses a mini-mystery: What could account for the nine bars of light plastered on a side wall not reached directly by sunlight? After running through several possibilities, Dorsey makes his "best guess . . . that the sun is bouncing off of some strips of shiny, reflective metal on a neighboring wall." And so the collaborators advance the purpose underlying their slantwise perspective on their city: to show how "the experience of art can stimulate original thought, which is at once the deepest purpose of art and the greatest joy of life."

View of a City by the Bay
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.