George Saunders & Joshua Lutz: Orange Blossom Trail
Edited by Nicholas Muellner, Catherine Taylor. Text by George Saunders. Photographs by Joshua Lutz.
A call-and-response between Lutz’s photography of labor conditions in America and Saunders’ writings
In Orange Blossom Trail, American writer George Saunders (born 1958) and American photographer Joshua Lutz (born 1975) offer an alternately poetic and searing evocation of the cruelty and tender beauty of contemporary American life. Lutz (whose photobooks, including Mind the Gap and Hesitating Beauty, have been named Best Art Books by Time and PhotoEye) and Saunders (Man Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and MacArthur Award recipient) first met on a magazine assignment, where they discovered a shared interest in both the psychological and material conditions of the laboring individual and the Buddhist teachings of attachment and the sacredness of existence. Through Lutz’s photos and three texts by Saunders, the book asks: When do we zoom in and when do we zoom out from the individual lives whose labor supports other lives? Orange Blossom Trail is a meditation, in two voices, on the alienation of the industrialized landscape and the brutality of American inequality. Replete with a cover printed in four-color silkscreen, white foil-stamped text and textured colored endpapers, the volume is treated with special touches while remaining affordable.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The New York Times: Arts
Walker Mimms
Not quite an illustrated Saunders, nor an annotated Lutz, this bizarre almost-collaboration confronts the demoralizing American grind with an attitude between sympathy and resignation. An attitude that’s rare in art because we seldom admit it to ourselves.
The Eye of Photography
In 'Orange Blossom Trail,' American writer George Saunders and American photographer Joshua Lutz offer an alternately poetic and searing evocation of the cruelty and tender beauty of contemporary American life.
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Featured image is from Orange Blossom Trail, a hybrid book weaving together photographs by Joshua Lutz and stories by noted American writer George Saunders. Addressing labor conditions along a stretch of big-box highway running between Georgia and Miami, it’s a poetic meditation on industrialization, inequity and humanity. “High shutter speeds hide road workers’ faces in shadow,” Walker Mimms writes in The New York Times. “Corporate storefronts and commercial vans appear without ceremony, as if snapped from a camera phone. Commuters wait for a bus, reduced and sad, while a sign for ‘Mighty Wings’ floats mockingly above them. Though not without dignity—see Lutz’s portraits of fruit inspectors, as they glance up from a conveyor belt of tumbling oranges—his photos lack any social agenda. They find an unlikely manifesto in the three previously published texts by George Saunders, our Chekhov of suburban realism, threaded through the book.…” continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 7 x 9 in. / 150 pgs / 30 color / 25 duotone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $40.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $56 GBP £35.00 ISBN: 9781733497152 PUBLISHER: Image Text Ithaca Press AVAILABLE: 10/15/2024 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
George Saunders & Joshua Lutz: Orange Blossom Trail
Published by Image Text Ithaca Press. Edited by Nicholas Muellner, Catherine Taylor. Text by George Saunders. Photographs by Joshua Lutz.
A call-and-response between Lutz’s photography of labor conditions in America and Saunders’ writings
In Orange Blossom Trail, American writer George Saunders (born 1958) and American photographer Joshua Lutz (born 1975) offer an alternately poetic and searing evocation of the cruelty and tender beauty of contemporary American life. Lutz (whose photobooks, including Mind the Gap and Hesitating Beauty, have been named Best Art Books by Time and PhotoEye) and Saunders (Man Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and MacArthur Award recipient) first met on a magazine assignment, where they discovered a shared interest in both the psychological and material conditions of the laboring individual and the Buddhist teachings of attachment and the sacredness of existence. Through Lutz’s photos and three texts by Saunders, the book asks: When do we zoom in and when do we zoom out from the individual lives whose labor supports other lives? Orange Blossom Trail is a meditation, in two voices, on the alienation of the industrialized landscape and the brutality of American inequality. Replete with a cover printed in four-color silkscreen, white foil-stamped text and textured colored endpapers, the volume is treated with special touches while remaining affordable.
