Brooklyn Fire Proof News
The New Yorker: Goings On About Town: FOLK (listing)
The New Yorker
August 7, 2006
“Goings On About Town: Art”
Galleries – Brooklyn
"FOLK"
Alan Lomax (1915-2002) is best known as a folklorist and musicologist who made field recordings, most notably of the blues, bluegrass, and gospel music that flourished in America's rural byways and backwaters. His black-and-white photographs, exhibited alongside cumbersome recording equipment, capture the faces of subjects like James Carter, a Mississippi State Penitentiary inmate whose rendition of "Poor Lazarus" made him famous when it was included in the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack. Lomax's photographic style mimics the grand social documents of W.P.A. practitioners like Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott, but mostly it serves as an accompaniment to his recordings (which can be listened to here on headphones) and illuminates how much American culture has changed since the days before air-conditioning, when people of every race, class, and gender amused themselves by sitting on porches making music. Through Aug. 6. (Brooklyn Fire Proof, 101 Richardson St. 718-302-4702.)