Eduardo Del Valle
Autor/a de Eduardo Del Valle & Mirta Gomez: Witness Number Four (Joy of Giving Something)
Sobre l'autor
Obres de Eduardo Del Valle
Almost free : 100 photographs 1 exemplars
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Data de naixement
- 1951-
- Gènere
- male
- Nacionalitat
- USA
Cuba (birth) - Professions
- Professor of Photography (Florida International University, Miami, Florida)
- Biografia breu
- Eduardo Del Valle (b. 1951, Havana): Working in collaboration with his wife, Mirta Gomez, since 1973, Del Valle’s photography often documents the life and geography of Yucatan, Mexico. He is the recipient two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as fellowships from the New York State Council for the Arts, the Florida Arts Council and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the California Museum of Photography and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. His work was included in the Cuba-USA: The First Generation traveling exhibition. . Del Valle and Gómez’s books include Fried Waters published by Nazraeli Press in 2005 and, most recently, Between Runs, which consist of photographs made at the Hing Yip printing plant in Dongguan, China. Del Valle holds a master of fine arts degree from Brooklyn College and a bachelor of fine arts from Florida International University. He is an associate professor of photography at FIU (Cintas for art, 1989-90, 1995-96)
Membres
Ressenyes
9 
richardderus | Aug 18, 2013 |
richardderus | Aug 18, 2013 | Estadístiques
- Obres
- 6
- Membres
- 22
- Popularitat
- #553,378
- Valoració
- 3.8
- Ressenyes
- 1
- ISBN
- 5
The Publisher Says: Inside America’s Pit; rebuilding Ground Zero…
Below Zero is a collection of poems, haibun and haiku, written by architect Eduardo del Valle, beginning with his first day on the Ground Zero job site in 2007 and ending when the tower’s ground floor slab reached street level. The poems are inspired by a wide range of project experiences and events, all the complex emotions and activities going on in and about the site of reconstruction in the wake of one of America’s— and the World’s— greatest disasters. Del Valle’s architectural training and practice lend a unique vernacular and insight to the poems as they chronicle the progress of this monolithic undertaking.
My Review: I don't want to alarm anyone, but I read and liked a book of poetry.
No, really. I did.
Good gracious, a lot of people seem to have needed naps all at once. But the floor? Is that comfortable? Hello?
Not only that, it's related to the 9/11 attacks, which I've been pretty clear is a subject I find all too ripe for cloying sentimentality and self-important bloviation. This book resorts to neither.
I lived on Rector Place in 1993, when the first attempt was made to topple the Twin Towers. My living room window, which faced the South Tower, was cracked and the dishes came out of the cabinet. I said then, "These idiots are not gonna stop til they succeed." My friends said oh pooh that's piffle no one will ever do that.
Hmmm.
I left New York in 2000, a year ahead of the events of 9/11. Damn good thing I did, too, since my apartment on Maiden Lane, a block and a half from the North Tower, had two seven and a half foot tall, nine and a half foot wide plate glass windows, made of 19th-century unsafety glass, that slivered into spears that were embedded in the walls of that apartment. (The super, a friend of mine, told me this as we were talking about the deaths of his wife and kids in the PATH plaza.)
So to hear people yim-yammering about the events who weren't there, or weren't involved, has never held any appeal for me. Del Valle started work as an architect on the site in 2007, and doesn't make any pretenses to making A Larger Point in writing his poems. He makes the emotional point that he experiences and lets you experience it with him, adding such layers as you can or care to:
I've added the underline to make it clear, in this small and unpaginated context, that the title of the piece is "Orientation."
That's a personal observation, a moment in the poet's life, and it's also evocative of the nature of the 9/11 disaster as an interruption of quotidian activity, that is repaired by quotidian activity, that is mundane in its consequences, and is still proof that the bombers couldn't have been more successful in their effort. After this event, the most everyday of activities have been circumscribed by a sense of being Under Threat, of Waiting for Disaster, of Manufactured and Absurdly Baseless ANXIETY.
They won.
The city itself, the physical plant of it, has never been completely still and untouched. That's accelerated since 9/11, but only back to 1960s levels. In that time, the city was massively building itself upwards and gigantically reimagining itself as a post-industrial place. The docks were buried under the basement dirt of the Twin Towers, and the result was called "Battery Park City." (That's where Rector Place is...the area is a lovely little garden suburb sticking into the Hudson River. I loved living there.) Typical of New York City, the corrupt and venal politicians, unions, and general all-around naysayers held up construction of and use from Battery Park City for a decade or so after the first plans were created, which needless to say resemble the finished buildup very very little.
Now the World Trade Center, Ground Zero, is being rebuilt, and the wrangling, infighting, graft, and corruption endemic to our "free" society has taken...why look at that...a bit more than ten years! Conservative and religious bigots and fools have screamed blue murder about this and that, most recently the presence of a mosque near the site. STFU, right-wingers, freedom of religion means just that.
This, of course, has made an impact on the architect/poet, as he tells us in this excerpt from "Under Vesey Street":
I relate to this. I have experienced so much bureaucratic inaction-coupled-with-interference-combined-with-legalistic-nonsense that the litany of his built world and its ridiculous, overbearing rules in contrast to the simple reality of color, shape, sound gongs my inner bell.
So yeah, I liked the book. It took me a month to read, because all said and done I don't like reading poetry any more than I like reading plays. The rare piece that gets past my guard becomes more and more valuable to me as proof that I'm set in my ways like hair is set, not like concrete is set.
The publisher sent this book to me with [The Wisdom of Ashes], as an unsolicited bonus gift. I hope he realizes how lucky he is that I liked this book! It goes unpanned, a very rare occurrence when I'm asked (however indirectly) to read poetry. I find the rhyming stuff intolerable, and most of the rest insufferably pit-sniffing self-absorption.
That makes happy discoveries like Eduardo del Valle's collection so much more pleasurable and important to me than to genre fans.… (més)