Visible Light

Lesy, who has taught both photography and American history, combined the two disciplines for his startling book, Wisconsin Death Trip. Now he examines the act of photography itself in this study of the lives of Angelo Rizzuto, Bill Burke, John McWilliams and Andrea Kovacs. These relatively little-known photographers found in their craft a way out of despair and anguish. Their bizarre, compelling biographies range from the paranoid recluse who envisioned a vast cumulative portrait of New York City to the woman who created mosaics out of her obsessive photographs of herself. Lesy's sinuous, incantatory prose brilliantly evokes their work, its influences and its implications. Photos not seen by PW. November