Fair Witness, Street Photography for the 21st Century is the new book signed by New York City-based photographer David Lykes Keenan and published by Damiani Editore. Fair Witness presents the humorous and sometimes unsettling street, whose black-and-white photos, taken with a Leica rangefinder, recall Frank, Winogrand, Friedlander and particularly Erwitt.
We have among us a new wave of street photographers whose names may never be as familiar as Cartier-Bresson, Atget and Doisneau, or Friedlander, Winogrand and Elliot Erwitt, but they should be.
Peter Turnley in Paris, Keith Dannemiller in Mexico, and now David Lykes Keenan in the US belong in the Street Photographer’s Hall of Fame, if there is one.
Fame is often in large part hype, and we are living in an age when one of the first things to be truly democratized is hype. So, back to basics: this work speaks for itself, and as you flip through the pages, perhaps like me, you will find yourself speechless.
David’s unassuming personality belies all that is apparently going on inside of him. I was familiar with his abstracts and appreciation for materials and textures, but I had no idea he is in possession of superb clarity of social vision and an abiding sense of the absurd, humor and the ironic. And he is very, very smart.
If he is Heinlein’s stranger in a strange land, or Sack’s anthropologist from Mars, he must have had a Suzuki there, who taught him beginner’s mind. Mixed with the precision of the engineer that he is, and the timing of Cartier-Bresson, his heart and mind in every image will engage you.
Beverly White Spicer
BOOK
Fair Witness, Street Photography for the 21st Century
By David Lykes Keenan
Publisher: Damiani (March 24, 2015)
Language: English
Hardcover, 160 pages
0.8 x 9.5 x 8.2 inches
ISBN-10: 8862083890
ISBN-13: 978-8862083898
$45
