Dolly Parton, Symphony Hall, Boston, Massachusetts, 1972
Henry Horenstein is featured in Rebecca Bengal's recently published collection of essays on photography, Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists.
In this collection of thoughtful and elegant essays, Bengal, a former editor at Vogue (where some of these essays first appeared), writes about pictures and picture makers but also about the history of the medium over the course of the last half a century. We meet well-known and not-known-enough photographers, as introduced by a writer whose experience in the world of editorial photography is rooted in time spent at the legendary and now defunct magazine DoubleTake.
There are conversations with William Eggleston, as colorful as his saturated slides; Henry Horenstein, who cites E. P. Thompson as his hero (“he was all about the importance of preserving the culture and not about the big stars of the day”); and Alessandra Sanguinetti, whose dramatic photos of rural life in Argentina read like medieval etchings made liquid. And in what feels like a trick with mirrors, Prince appears in Strange Hours, glimpsed photographing a house he once lived in.