Shards of America - Dust Jacket Copy

ISBN 1-59372-010-6

$25.00 ( Can. $36.00)

PHOTOGRAPHY

A shard is a fragment of broken pottery, often used by archaeologists to reconstruct objects from past civilizations. In Shards of America, Canadian photographer Phil Bergerson has gathered a richly detailed collection of over one hundred images from neglected corners of American’s towns and small cities, and created a fascinating mosaic.

Businesses, religious sects, and community groups announce their presence, offer their services, and pitch their messages, while commercial signs, graffiti, posters, and public notices blanket the surfaces of buildings and public spaces. From abandoned storefronts with remnants of decades-old advertisements, to present-day New York City newstands shouting their headlines over the noise, Bergerson’s outsider’s eye brings us up close to the tiny details of streets and roadsides that can be so easy to miss when you pass by them every day.

The minutiae of daily life—paintings and movie posters, dime-store novels and daily newspapers, figurines and mannequins, decals and stenciled graffiti—here are laid out as artifacts pointing to a bigger vision of the world as we know it. Patriotism, consumerism, censorship, nostalgia for a simpler past coupled with a desire for a less complicated present . . . touching on all these themes, Bergerson’s quietly ironic but empathetic tone encourages the reader to imagine how our own ordinary surroundings might appear in a hundred or more years’ time.

Phil Bergerson has been a professor of photography at Ryerson University in Toronto since 1972. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and can be found in many prestigious collections including the National Gallery of Canada and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. A travelling exhibition of images from Shards of America, organized by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, will tour North America beginning in September 2004.

David Harris is an independent curator and photographic historian. He is the author of Eugène Atget: Unknown Paris, Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880, and other books.

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