#book review Nothing Personal Richard Avendon James Baldwin

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In 1964, Richard Avedon and James Baldwin published “Nothing Personal,” their collaborative exploration of American identity.

Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Joint Examination of American Identity

By Hilton Als  November 6, 2017       

View 15 photographs                                                                                   READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/13/richard-avedon-and-james-baldwins-joint-examination-of-american-identity

The Terror Is Constant: On Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s “Nothing Personal”                    

By Buzz Poole   FEBRUARY 5, 2018

“Nothing Personal is a book of Avedon’s photographs, edited to correspond with Baldwin’s four texts, making it, as Als sees it, “about remembrance and the Other,” as evoked by subjects inhabiting the realms of civil rights, celebrity, and mental health.”

“As reported by Baldwin biographer W. J. Weatherby, “They discussed a theme — the alienation of people, what keeps them apart.”

“As Baldwin saw it, from its inception America has been about diminishing the individual in order to make it easier to inculcate lies believed to be true:The poor white was enslaved almost from the instant he arrived on these shores, and he is still enslaved by a brutal and cynical oligarchy. The utility of the poor white was to make slavery both profitable and safe, and, therefore, the germ of white supremacy […] Two world wars and a world-wide depression have failed to reveal to this poor man that he has far more in common with the ex-slaves whom he fears than he has with the masters who oppress them both for profit. […] To be locked in the past means, in effect, that one has no past, since one can never assess it, or use it: and if one cannot use the past one cannot function in the present, and so one can never be free.“

READ MORE https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-terror-is-constant-on-richard-avedon-and-james-baldwins-nothing-personal/

A Lifeline for the Hour of Despair: James Baldwin on 4AM, the Fulcrum of Love, and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe

“I have always felt that a  human being could only be saved by   another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”

“Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits —    — are four stirring essays by Baldwin, the first of which gave us his famous sobering observation that “it  has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer)  to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”

first published in 1964       Reprint edition (January 2, 2018)  

READ MORE https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/04/23/james-baldwin-nothing-personal-4-am/?mc_cid=48f014c863&mc_eid=5f669a6cf1