Review by Booklist Review
Frazier photographs, in black and white, what he knows from growing up in Iowa near the Mississippi. He shows activities and contexts tangential to work: hunting, going to church, breakfast at a café, a wedding, Memorial Day cemetery-visiting, partying indoors and out, a rodeo, retirees at home, snow shoveling. Spacing those images are roadscapes, building portraits, auto-windshield views, children, shots of water and ground surfaces, and migrant workers harvesting produce. He favors odd angles, kineticism, graininess, and quite often, high contrast. He goes for candor more than obvious composition (the exceptions are stunning, though; see the panorama Frazier found through a gap between some boards). His pictures of people recall the street-kid photos of Helen Leavitt, the active group images in Ben Shahn's FSA work, and the famous book The Americans (1959), by Robert Frank, who judged the competition this book won. Elegiacism and a certain bitterness inform the album as a whole. No one looks prosperous; even the young partiers don't seem cheery. Maybe they'll all be living in cities in a year. Powerful stuff.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
