A Bart’s Book Talk on Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists with author Rebecca Bengal in conversation with Emma Bailey on Saturday, September 21 from 6 - 7 pm
“A photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the time of its subsequent rediscovery.” —Rebecca Bengal
In Strange Hours, Bengal contemplates the narrative power in Judith Joy Ross’s transcendent portraiture and imagines a short story accompanying Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. She travels with Alec Soth in Minneapolis, searching for the houses where Prince once lived, and revisits Chauncey Hare’s 1979 protest against the Museum of Modern Art. She speaks with Dawoud Bey about his evocative early portraits in New York, explores Diana Markosian’s cinematic take on her family’s immigration to the US, reconsiders the legacy of Walker Evans and James Agee in American culture, and traces the line between fiction and truth in the writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets’s profound meditation on the war in Ukraine.
As the acclaimed novelist Joy Williams writes in her foreword to the book, “The photographs that accompany Rebecca Bengal’s texts in Strange Hours make an often elusive, if satisfying, pairing with her nimble insights, interviews, encounters, and assessments of an eclectic range of artists from brash William Eggleston to melancholy William Gedney, from the rough downtown hipster scene of Nan Goldin to the Argentine animals in the work of Alessandra Sanguinetti.” Featuring vivid, full-color reproductions of classic images by Eggleston, Goldin, Curran Hatleberg, Ming Smith, RaMell Ross, and others, Strange Hours announces Bengal as one of the most compelling writers about photography in our time.
“In this collection of thoughtful and elegant essays, Bengal, writes about pictures and picture makers but also about the history of the medium over the course of the last half a century.”—Robert Sullivan, Vogue
“In each piece, there is a free-flowing association between photography and literature, music, poetry, memory, and rediscovery.”—Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair
“Photography lives in the tension between intimacy and voyeurism, and Bengal brings readers to this nexus by familiarizing them with the artists themselves, pressing on photography’s unique power of storytelling.” —Alyse Burnside, Brooklyn Rail
“Besides being a tidy time capsule, Strange Hours serves a crash course in the enormity and importance of photography. It plunges quickly beneath the surface to reveal just how deep the image can go.”—Kat Herriman, Cultured
Rebecca Bengal is a writer of fiction, essays, and documentary journalism about art, literature, film, music, and the environment. A regular contributor to Aperture, her writing has been published in the Paris Review, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Oxford American, Southwest Review, the Believer, the Guardian, and the Criterion Collection. A MacDowell fellow in fiction and a former editor at Vogue, Bengal holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. Originally from western North Carolina, Bengal lives in Brooklyn.
Emma Bailey is the director of Bart’s Books events. You can find her in the courtyard in conversation with authors and readers and online with her bookselling newsletter 10,000 Books. She has been a bookseller at Bart’s since 2015.
The conversation doesn’t need to end when our event does! Enjoy a free glass of wine at Sam's Place when you buy a book after our event. Stroll from our courtyard to theirs, located next to the tunnel between Ojai Avenue and the Arcade Plaza. At Sam's Place, their philosophy is simple: cook like it's for family (charcuterie, anyone?!) and pour like it's for friends.