As a child, Joshua Lutz watched his mother search for patterns in license-plate numbers. At night, she would unscrew the phone looking for hidden recording bugs. Lutz’s book “Hesitating Beauty” is a meditation on his relationship to his mother’s mental illness, told through the reworking of archived family images, imagined correspondences, and his own photographs. 

Here, Lutz writes about his experience, plus a slideshow of photos from his book: http://nyr.kr/XWWxhg 

(Source: newyorker.com)

“Most educated people can name half a dozen poets who are more famous for their messy lives and deaths than for their poems… The narratives endure because they align with the popular understanding of what it is to be an artist.”

Sarah Manguso writes about Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago today, and looks at the changing way we talk about mental illness: http://nyr.kr/1576DDa

Photograph: Contrasto/Redux.

(Source: newyorker.com)

In the early eighties, the Brooklyn-born photographer Marc Asnin started taking photographs of his uncle and godfather, Charles Henschke, for an art-school assignment. Now complete in the form of a book and gallery show, Asnin’s series of gritty, black-and-white photographs offer a intimate look at Charlie’s life and struggles, and also chronicle Asnin’s evolving perceptions over three decades, from his boyhood admiration of a man he viewed as his street-savvy, gun-wielding uncle to the reality of an aging man man tormented by mental illness, drug addiction, and strained relationships. Click-through for a slideshow: http://nyr.kr/Uqh7Xk

(Source: newyorker.com)