Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists (Aperture Ideas)

In her collection Strange Hours, the writer Rebecca Bengal considers over a century of photography that has defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous and in-depth essays, profiles, reviews, and interviews, Bengal contemplates photographys narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldins New York demimonde to Justine Kurlands pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Bengal brings us closer to several pioneering artists and the personal, political, and poetic stories that surround their photographs. She travels with Alec Soth in Minneapolis, searching for the houses where Prince once lived, and revisits Chauncey Hares 1979 protest against the Museum of Modern Art. She speaks with Dawoud Bey about his evocative early portraits in Brooklyn and explores Diana Markosians cinematic take on her familys immigration to the US. Throughout Strange Hours, Bengals prose is attentive to the alchemy of experience, chance, and pioneering vision that has always pushed photographys potential for unforgettable storytelling.