John Willis is Professor of Photography at Marlboro College and a co-founder of the In-Sign Photography Project and Exposures Cross Cultural Youth Photography Program. His photographs are in more than sixty collections, including the Amon Carter Museum, George Eastman House International Museum, Heard Museum, High Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, National Museum of the American Indian, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University Gallery of Art. His other books are Recycled Realities, with Tom Young, and Mni Wiconi: Honoring the Water Protectors and the Ongoing Struggle for Indigenous Sovereignty. Tom Young was born in 1951 in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977. He is currently a professor of art, emeritus, at Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts. He has been awarded an Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and four Artist Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Polaroid International Collection in Offenbach, Germany, and Harvard University's Fogg Museum. Young's work has been exhibited internationally, including the International Center of Photography in New York City, the Frans Hals Museum in Harlem, The Netherlands, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, and the National Museum of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. In addition to Recycled Realities, he is the author of Timeline: Learning to See with My Eyes Closed (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2012). His photographs have also appeared in a number of publications, including Artworks: Tom Young (Williams College Museum of Art), American Perspectives (Tokyo Museum of Photography), Goodbye to Apple Pie (DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts), and 2 to Tango: Collaboration in Recent American Photography(International Center of Photography). He resides in Buckland, Massachusetts.
"In this wonderful book, the momentary and continually changing
reality of the physical present is displaced by the ubiquitous and
seemingly permanent static image: the photograph being the most
disquieting of these. In Recycled Realities, evolution is witnessed
as an inevitable process whereby all things and beings are recycled
by the one true--and apparently eternal, but still largely
unknown--reality: nature, the ultimate recycler. And nature is an
extraordinary visual event, as is revealed in these remarkable
photographs. Recycled Realities is ultimately a sad story, but
happiness abounds along the way."--Carl Chiarenza, Fanny Knapp
Allen Professor of Art History, Emeritus, University of
Rochester
"John Willis and Tom Young find surreal juxtapositions among texts
and images pressed together in bales. Their long views emphasize
our voracious consumption of paper products and the industry it has
spawned, while close-ups form an exquisite corpse of collected
waste. Together the photographs in Recycled Realities imbue the
discarded stuff of everyday life with beauty, significance, and
grace."--Syvia Wolf, Director, Henry Art Gallery, University of
Washington
"John Willis and Tom Young's haunting photographs transform a New
England paper mill factory and its mounds of raw
material--recyclable printed matter cast off from the insatiable
publishing industry--into an evocative archeological landscape, a
contemporary Babel."--Deborah Martin Kao, Chief Curator of the
Harvard University Art Museums
"Recycled Realities is a book by two true visual poets, and it is
difficult to imagine a richer or more fortunate collaboration. At a
time when population and excessive consumption are deeply serious
concerns worldwide, John Willis and Tom Young have made splendid,
positive, lyrical images out of the waste and debris left over from
our busy lives. 'Man buys what he destroys, ' Frederick Sommer
reminds us, and then goes on to assure us that it is the nature of
the poetic act which secures our place in a world we do not
control. Recycled Realities is such a poetic act and a marvelous
visual accomplishment, all at once."--Emmet Gowin, Professor of
Photography, Emeritus, Princeton University
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