A stunningly-illustrated interweaving of first person narratives, photographs, cultural commentary and soundscapes, Bright Balkan Morning provides an unprecedented view of settled Romani lives in the Balkans and the unique roles of "Gypsy" instrument players in the region. These Romani instrumentalists from Iraklia, an ancient Greek Macedonian crossroads and market town that is home to about 2,000 Roma, provide the sounds that facilitate parties and rites of passage, performing an essential and highly valued service for their multicultural neighbors. At the heart of the book are ten first-person Romani life stories. Charles and Angeliki Keil situate these personal accounts within the cultural, historical and economic setting of Greek Macedonia, and provide an overview of musical events in diverse localities. The 161 black and white photographs by Dick Blau include parades, parties, weddings and wrestling matches; portraits of the musicians and their families; studies of domestic life in the Romani neighborhood; reproductions from Romani family albums and other historic images. Steven Feld's soundscape CD features the voices and instruments of people whose stories are told in the book. Familiar sounds of markets, church, neighborhood and countryside set the context for exuberant performances at home and at parties, cafes and nightclubs. CONTRIBUTORS: Angeliki Vellow Keil, Charles Keil, Steven Feld, Ian Hancock.

Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia

Arts & Photography

Dick Blau

Charles Keil

Steven Feld

Angeliki Vellou Keil

Photography & Video

Wesleyan University Press

Exposures: A White Woman in West Africa is a photographic book by visual artist Virginia Ryan. The 60 images of herself in diverse domestic, private, and public situations were taken by African and non-African acquaintances and passersby between 2001 and 2005, when Ryan lived and worked as an artist and member of a diplomatic mission in Ghana. To situate the images in a dialogue of art and anthropology, Ryan invited anthropologist Steven Feld to write a text about photographic realism and the representations of whiteness in art and anthropology. Feld's text focuses on the complex and highly charged questions raised by these provocative and often unsettling pictures. Speaking of the book's first immediate first impression, he writes: Each image unleashes immediate questions about what might be going on in the frame, both socially and visually. What social dramas are on display about race, power, and gender? About masks, ritual, and ceremony? About bodily adornment, clothing, and appearance? About social interaction in public? About skin, gesture, and movement? Simultaneously, what photographic dramas are viewers witnessing? Images of people caught unaware? Images more deliberately posed but made to look off-the-cuff? What complicities unite those exposed and those behind the camera? In all: what kinds of performances are presented in these photographic juxtapositions of Virginia Ryan with strangers and intimates, innocents and collaborators? Does their viewing allow one to gaze through the transparency of racial difference? Does their viewing make one feel trapped in, or liberated from, the banalities of political correctness and transcendental universal humanism?

Exposures: A White Woman in West Africa (English and Italian Edition)

Virginia Ryan

VoxLox

The wildest carnival in Europe explored in sixty color and black and white photographs by Dick Blau, a revealing historical and cultural essay by Agapi Amanatidis and Panayotis Panopoulos, and a complimentary CD and a DVD by Steven Feld.

Skyros Carnival

Agapi Amanatidis

Panayotis Panopoulos

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Steven Feld. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Steven Feld