CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/4/2014

Charles Traub: Dolce Via: Italy in the 1980s

In his introduction to Dolce Via: Italy in the 1980s, Damiani's eye-opening new monograph on New York photographer Charles Traub, Max Kozloff writes, "He describes the pleasures of the senses and of the flesh in a playful manner too serious for the vacationer. What attracts his eye is at the expense of the monuments, though they play a sly and necessary role as background. Traub's chief motifs are youthful, supple, contemporary bodies in summer dress or undress. Behind them can be glimpsed the nudities of the gods in their more oracular exchanges. The interplay between animate and inanimate forms is carried out in chance and sometimes in droll combinations, not always on an elevated level." Traub launches the book Wednesday, April 9 at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, NYU.