My book arrived!

Today I heard from Jason Landry over at Panopticon Gallery that my book Harold Feinstein: A Retrospective has arrived! I haven’t yet had a chance to lay my hands or eyes on it, so this picture will have to do for the moment even though I’m beside myself with antipication! I can smell the ink and feel the pages just from the photo! My friends at Nazraeli Press have done a beautiful job!

While this is my eighth book, it’s my first black and white book, and I’m so thrilled about it. Most of the photographs were from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s when I was “just a kid.”! I love looking at them now and appreciate how that young man saw the world.

I’m grateful to some wonderful friends who contributed their own advance praise for the book. Here’s a wonderful message from Mary Ellen Mark whose work I admire so much. We met in the early 60’s when I was teaching at the Annenberg School of Communications in Philadelphia. I’ve followed her career since then and am grateful for her support!

Harold Feinstein’s black and white street photographs are absolutely beautiful. They combine powerful content with a perfect sense of graphics. Harold’s photographs are proof of the magic of realism. He has the ability to find something incredible in the ordinary. He is a great artist with the rare gift of a great eye.

Other quotes from Howard Greenberg, A.D. Coleman, Mason Klein, Senator John Kerry and Linda Benedict-Jones, are on my website.

I’m also grateful to Phillip Prodger, curator of photography at the Peabody Essex Museum who wrote the introduction. Here’s a snippet:

“If Diane Arbus took photographs of ordinary people to demonstrate how flawed humans can be, Feinstein reveals how hard circumstances can be transcended. There is nothing critical or anxious about his pictures. His subjects are alive, thinking, feeling human beings. For Feinstein, it does not matter what people do, where they come from, or what they look like. Their faces light up just the same, and their eyes sparkle with excitement. His subject is us — all of us — and our better nature.”

Finally, Jason Landry and Jim Fitts are the real heroes behind the book. From the time we sat down at my home last fall to discuss the idea of a Kickstarter Project up until this very day they have fed the dream. Sky’s the limit my friends!

If you’re in the Boston area, please come to my opening at the Panopticon Gallery on September 14th and take a look at my new book!