The Likes Of Us

Housed at the Library of Congress, the archives of the Farm Security Administration constitute an essential visual record of American life from the late 1920s through the onset of the Second World War. Guided by the adroit hands and watchful eyes of the master photo editor Roy Stryker, the FSA archive includes the work of dozens of photographers, from acknowledged giants like Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange to Marion Post Wolcott and Russell Lee, whose names and work may be less familiar. Stryker's approach to his photographers' assignments was a bracing mix of structure and improvisation. He sent his artists across the country to shoot for a few weeks, mostly in small towns and rural areas. They worked from what Stryker called shooting scripts - laundry lists of possible subjects and situations - but were always free to explore their own perspectives on a locale, its inhabitants, and their activities. When negatives and prints arrived, Stryker would guide his artists with suggestions, advice, and sharp-eyed criticism, all designed to elicit their best work. This book collects work from nine of these trips - Evans in Louisana and Alabama, Shahn in West Virginia, Lange in California, and others - uniting them with Stryker's shooting scripts, letters, and other relevant archival documents. What emerges, beyond the images themselves, is a complex and vital overview of the FSA at work, not just the work, but how the work evolved and matured under Stryker's guidance. The book concludes with photographs of New Orleans, the only city photographed in depth by the FSA artists. Reproduced in duotone, the 175 photographs in The Likes of Us, all printed from the original negatives at the Library of Congress, offer a rare opportunity not only to see a choice selection of famous and little-known images but also to understand the working of one of the government's most original and creative pre-war initiatives.

Once they were portrayed as the salt of the earth. Nowadays, they take to the streets when paedophiles and asylum seekers are in their midst; they expose their lives in TV documentaries; they love Gucci and hate the Euro; the broadsheets cast them as xenophobes and exhibitionists and mock their tastes and attitudes. But who are the white working class and what have they done to deserve this portrayal? The Likes of Us is a fascinating and wholly original examination of London's white working class.

Largely autobiographical, this is a book about an unusual life. It begins and ends with Luke, the author's son, adopted in Brazil in 1976. It addresses the distressing process of sub-fertility and the difficult and frustrating process of adoption in the UK and follows the author's journey to Brazil and the subsequent and distinctly illegal adoption of her son Luke. It covers the instant motherhood experienced by the adoptive parent and the touching moment of bonding with the baby. It then goes back in time and traces the author's working-class background and growing up in South East London during the war and evacuation. The subsequent breakdown of her marriage to her French husband, coping with single parenthood, alcoholism and the re-shaping of her life constitutes a major part of this book. In 1982, whilst living on a houseboat on the Thames with her son Luke, she followed a full-time Bachelor of Arts degree at Kingston Polytechnic. Island life on a houseboat at Hampton Court is fully explored and it was during these years that she met her current partner, professional musician Tony Bell. In 1998, they retired from London and led an idyllic life in the South of France until 2002 when she discovered a lump in her right breast. Eight years later following radiotherapy, surgery and anti-cancer medication, she is apparently cured. The final part of this book is 'Luke's story'; how he coped with the knowledge that he was an adopted third-world child, the breakdown of his parent's marriage and their subsequent divorce and his mother's cancer.

Poetry. "In Michael Gottlieb's new book, THE LIKES OF US, each phrase is like a shady character. Each disqualifies itself, somehow, leaving us where we really are: in a landscape composed of doubtful moral states. What lies in wait for the reader of THE LIKES OF US? Disturbing complicities? "Monstrous discoveries?"--Rae Armantrout. "Michael Gottlieb's poetry eliminates the distinction between traditional elegiac lyric and the avant-garde poetic impulse. Incessant detail, along with mental and social phenomena--now-blurred, now razor-sharp--build gradually into a richly dissonant, inviting resonance. As beautiful as it is exacting, THE LIKES OF US will reward the energy you give it many times over"--Drew Gardner.