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Angels at the Arno

by Eric Lindbloom

Preface by Linda Pastan

Introduction by Ben Lifson

  • Format: Hardcover
  • ISBN: 978-0-87923-974-9
  • Pages: 84
  • Published: 1994

The Florence revealed in Eric Lindbloom’s Angels at the Arno is almost startling in its intimacy and quiet solitude. Lindbloom’s view of the city—rendered exclusively through the plastic lens of a Diana camera, virtually a child’s toy—brings this venerable city to new life and light. With unabashed subjectivity and an offbeat, oneiric sensiblity, Lindbloom conveys his sense of an unveiled Florence, filled with views striking for the beauty they contain rather than for the history they suggest. This is a city not so much of paintings and trattorie as of mysterious, hidden sculptures, emerging from the ancient architecture like stone made flesh. As Linda Pastan writes in her preface, Lindbloom’s Florence is “transformed from a city of blaring car horns and leather vendors, impressive piazzas and forbidding facades to a quiet place of small streets and courtyards, of homespun angels whose wings throw light and shadow over everything, even at high noon.”

Eric Lindbloom was born in Detroit and educated at the University of Michigan. After earning his B.A., he studied photography under the renowned Paul Caponigro for two years. Lindbloom’s work has appeared in dozens of solo exhibitions and in many public collections, including the Alinari Museum in Florence, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the New York Public Library. He was one of the founding members of the Center for Photography in Woodstock, where he continues to hold photography workshops.

Linda Pastan, now a poet,was raised in New York City but has lived for most of her life in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In her senior year at Radcliffe College, Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she decided to give up writing poetry in order to concentrate on raising her family. After ten years at home, her husband urged her to return to poetry. Since the early 1970s, Pastan has produced quiet lyrics that focus on themes like marriage, parenting, and grief. She is interested in the anxieties that exist under the surface of everyday life.

Pastan’s many awards include the Dylan Thomas award, a Pushcart Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in 2003. Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for 20 years. She is the author of over twelve books of poetry and essays. Her PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (1998) were finalists for the National Book Award; The Imperfect Paradise (1988) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent collections include The Last Uncle (2001), Queen of a Rainy Country (2006) and Traveling Light (2011). She lives in Potomac, Maryland.

Ben Lifson was among the most influential minds in late-twentieth-century photography criticism. He taught at Yale, Harvard, Bard College, and the International Center of Photography in New York, and founded the photography department at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, in 1970. He was the photography critic at New York’s Village Voice from 1977 to 1982, the peak of its prestige.

During his career, Lifson wrote for Art in America, October, Artforum, Art on Paper, and ARTnews. He also published catalog essays on Samaras, John Coplans, Garry Winogrand, Frank Gohlke, André Kertész, Eugéne Atget and others. Lifson also produced prolific amounts of his own photography, some of which was published in magazines such as Look, Ramparts, Saturday Review, and New York. He is best remembered for his criticism, however, which helped to establish the then-new medium of street photography as genuine art in the eyes of academia.