Resistance to Memory - Hardcover

Gerard Malanga who took the photograph of Andrew Wylie on the cover, was very much on hand in Andy Warhols Factory, from its earliest days, in the sixties. Often referred to as the Prime Minister of the Factory, he collaborated with Warhol on the artists early silk-screen paintings and starred in various Warhol films... This portrait of Wylie, which appears in Resistance to Memory, a new album of Malangas photographs of prominent cultural personalities in the seventies, was snapped in London. George Plimpton, New Yorker, April 6, 1998.

Malanga, one of Andy Warhol's collaborators, has produced a book of interest largely to those who followed the post-bohemian scene of the 1970s. These well-reproduced portraits were taken mostly in New York, although some were made in Europe and England. Mercifully, time has sifted the important from the highly forgettable, and perhaps that is the most powerful message of this book. The most interesting pictures here are not those of passing fads (Iggy Pop, Candy Darling, Alice Cooper) but rather of enduring talents (a young Sam Shepard, Lotte Lenya, Galway Kinnell, Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper). Malanga, finding himself amidst both great and lesser minds, took pictures of both without prejudice, resulting in this somewhat gritty minidocumentary of a single decade. Priola examines the effects of time more intentionally. Exquisite photographs of ordinary things, most of them against black backgrounds and many printed in circular format, evoke the passing of time, fragments of memory, and the highly ephemeral nature of visual experience. These rich images?which Priola calls "portraits"?are organized into three thematically and stylistically distinct sections: "Paradise," evocative objects that remind us of the passions of lives filled with optimism (a wishbone, a dead potted plant); "Saved," worn objects that suggest vanished lives and families (a mended dishtowel, broken figurines); and "Residual," things with brief lifespans, allowing just enough time to make a photograph (the traces of ivy's grip on a wall, smoke from an extinguished candle). Without Priola's dramatic composition and lighting, these would evoke little more than kitsch. In his excellent essay, Grundberg discusses the nature of photography and uses Priola's images to attest to the things only photography can do. Malanga's book belongs in a collection of works on popular culture; Priola's has a place in photography collections.?Kathleen Collins, Bank of America Archives, San Francisco
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.