Dona Ann McAdams‘ latest book, Black Box, has been released by Saint Lucy Books. It is presented as follows:
Black Box, the memoir by photographer Dona Ann McAdams, combines fty years of black and white photographs with short lyrical texts that the photographer calls ‘ditties’. The book combines McAdams’ historic images with personal reflections that read like prose poems. Her photographs, taken between 1974 and 2024, document astonishing moments and people across decades of American life. Since 1975, McAdams has used a Leica M2 to observe and shape the world around her. She has called herself a ‘collage artist who works with time and light’ and her dedication to analogue photography goes hand in hand with her commitment to the community. Over the decades, McAdams has brought photography to small, underserved communities from the South Bronx to the southern Appalachians, empowering people living in adult homes, shelters, mountain towns and horse trails to take and make their own photographs. For McAdams, the personal is political. She has captured moments in the history of her community, from the queer liberation movement, the culture wars and the performance art scene of the 1980s and 1990s, to the intellectual insights of artists like Angela Davis, Meredith Monk and Maurice Sendak, and a host of other people whose paths she has crossed, such as Harvey Milk, David Bowie, David Wojnarowicz and John Malkovich. The book also includes a never-before-published photograph of the Twin Towers on the morning of 11 September 2001. Her relationship with animals, particularly horses, nourished from early childhood to late adulthood. In 2005, she became a licensed walker at Saratoga Race Course, a historic racetrack, to better understand horses and the people who care for them. ‘Dawn was the best time of day,’ she writes. ‘People came from all walks of life. Grooms and trainers, exercise riders, cooks. They spoke many different languages, but shared one: the horse. The back straight became my second home. It reminded me of the theatre, except that the performers were horses and the stage was big and round. The title Black Box brings together the themes touched on throughout the memoir. McAdams repeatedly refers to boxes – her mother’s box of black diet pills, the boxes her father packed as part of his job. The glass box of a petrol station, a telephone box, the black box of a theatre, a dark room, a camera obscura; and nally, like the device that records accidents after they have happened, the black box of the book itself, an object of beauty, memory and time.
Dona Ann McAdams
Black Box: A Photographic Memoir
Published by Saint Lucy Books
Afterword by Joanna Howard
Design by Guenet Abraham
ISBN 979-8-218-48684-6
https://www.saintlucybooks.com/shop/p/black-box-a-photographic-memoir
