Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2437499 in Books
• Published on: 1986-05-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 96 pages

Review
Charles Harbutt has been a New Photojournalist for some time, as Travelog, his inner voyage through urban existence, made clear in 1973. Progreso, about a town in the Yucatan, looks as if he began with a study in journalistic formalism but was too enamored of life to give it up for photography. Harbutt balances old means and new, traditional and more contemporary attitudes; the result ... is solid, quiet, and thoughtful.

Within the photographer..., there beats the heart of a romantic...there are photographs that are truly affecting.

The New Photojournalism sometimes trades on style at the expense of its subjects. Harbutt keeps saving himself from such indifference by close attention and by...(an) affection for the things of this world. In Travelog, he wrote, "If you want to judge a good photograph, ask yourself: Is life like that? The answer must be yes and no, but mostly yes." -- AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER, July 1987 Vicki Goldberg

In Progreso, Harbutt says] he was seduced by the Mayan notion of progress, "that time is cyclical; things don't get better and better day by day, they just swirl around like dust in the street." In his pictures, too, Harbutt is caught up in that metaphoric dust and yet is still able to see through it. Harbutt has a distinct style, a sophisticated ability to realize design within the frame, and a very clean technique. His vision seems open to new possibilities.

"How beautiful is the world; it is a pity that I must die," Harbutt quoted a traveler in Progreso. The choice fits perfectly with his own photographic approach, for he has captured life as a series of small pities and pleasures. One suspects that Harbutt will never close the book on life as if he already knows the ending. His work will continue to be an inquisitive turning of pages. -- AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER February 1988 Kathryn E. Livingston

From the Author
I first went to the Yucatan 1976. I'd been working in Miami and wanted to relax. The Yucatan was a short hop away: I like Mexican food and always shoot a lot in a new place. I've managed to get back there every year since. The Yucatan is a gentle place: less frantic and hidden than the big cities of the world. My days in Merida lounged from plaza to Cafi Express to market to plaza to Cafi Express - all in four short blocks. Sometimes I drove to a ruin or the beach. The food, happily, was not only Mexican, but Lebanese - from Levantine traders in the Caribbean. There was a great deal of fresh fish - Gulf shrimp, conch and sea turtle - a lot of garlic and a wonderfully creamy , dark beer. I think I was seduced by Mayan notions of progress: that time is cyclical; things don't get better and better day-by-day, they just swirl around like dust in the street. Mostly, the pictures remind me of the small, northern New Jersey towns where I grew up, where days were filled with finding a girl or a job or a pleasant way to fill the time until tomorrow. Maybe, because I'm short and stocky, I felt at home: most Mayans past first blush tend to be chunky, so Merida is a city of chubby cops and chubby robbers, chubby Romeos and chubby Juliettas. I was the tallest man around. Maybe, just maybe, I was once a Mayan.

From the Back Cover
Charles Harbutt was born in Camden, New Jersey and became a photographer in Teaneck, New Jersey at thirteen. An internationally know photojournalist, his work is in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Stedjlik Museum and the Corcoran Gallery. His first book, Travelog (MIT Press), won the Arles award as the best photographic book of 1974. In 1981, leaving Magnum, he helped start the international photo agency, Archive Pictures, Inc. He lives in New York with his wife and three children.