Mrs. Bento hasn't done housekeeping for the upstairs library for almost three weeks, busy helping Ginger with her school project, and spending time with the photo museum team in the pursuit of creating that Little House of Something on Photography. Since the project took flight, her sense with everything related to photography sharpens greatly, and it would not be a surprise to find her overcome with excitement when she rediscovers several shelves in the library are actually filled with photo books. Why haven't I noticed this before? She asks herself. Sometimes one can be so blind. she brushes the spine of each and every book with her fingers and tilted her head to read the titles.
Limelight, The Family of Men, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus Magazine Work, May Ray, Conserving: Fuchs, Henri Cartier-Bresson Photographer, Photography A Facet of Modernism, Image World Art and Media Culture, Critical Landscapes, Boyd Webb, Truth & Fictions Pedro Meyer, PhotoDiscovery, Irving Penn Passage, Sudek, Thomson's China, Photo Manifesto, Dieter Appelt, Bourke-White, Annie Leibovitz Pilgrimage, Sarah Moon Vrais Semblants, Ice Box Ushioda Tokuko, The Royal Portraits, Karsh Portfolio, Wandering in China Shimao Shinzo, Weighing The Planets Olivia Parker, Gilbert & George Ginkgo Pictures, William Eggleston's Guide, Mike And Doug Starn, large stack of Life Library of Photography, Wolfgang Tillmans, Morimura Yasumasa The Sickness unto Beauty - Selfportrait as Actress, Helmut Newton World Without Men, Andy Warhol's Exposures, Shoji Ueda, Nobuyoshi Araki Skyscapes • From close-range, City Vibrance: Hong Kong, Mixed Moments David Bailey, The Pictorial Landscape in Japanese Photography, Daido Moriyama stray dog, Italy One Hundred Years of Photography, Hong Kong Yamauchi Michio, Fotografie Am Bauhaus, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America.
Memorial Photography? She pulls the black, hard cover book out and turns over the pages. These are photographs of…dead children? She turns a few more pages. No, there are also men and women, mostly in beds or coffins. A small girl sat stiffly on an armchair, she wore a crown with small white flowers on her hair, her eyes closed, mouth slightly opened, both hands folded in a prayer on her frock. Another photograph shows an older woman in mourning clothes holding a baby, who seemed to be sleeping peacefully, holding a small bouquet against its chest. From the description of the photographs, these images are almost eighty years old. Why would people want to photograph the dead? We almost can't bear to look at a corpse in the funeral, let alone posing and being in the same photograph with them. Mrs. Bento shivers slightly. In her memory, she has not seen too many dead faces, or, did she deliberately avoid them? She squeezes Sleeping Beauty back to the shelf and starts to examine the lower rack, which consists mainly of DVDs and CDs.
Ephemeral Films 1932-1960, Cina Chung Kuo by Michelangelo Antonioni, Joni Mitchell Painting With Words and Music, Foodstall soundtracks, Phantom Museums by Quay Brothers, A History of Britain, Glass - A Picture of Philip in twelve parts, Antonio Gaudi, The Order from Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3, The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, Grant Gee: Innocence of Memories, A Large Slow River: Janet Cardiff, A Conversation of Five Photographs in our Bedroom.
A Conversation of Five Photographs in our Bedroom? Sounds intriguing. She pulls out the jewel case and notices the text on the cover insert: An on-going research on the photographic culture in a series of recordings - #2001 - A conversation of five photographs in our bedroom: The Rose, The Kiss, The Blue Banjo, The Apple, Two Women.
