CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/15/2019

Not a boring word or image to be found in 'Walks to the Paradise Garden: A Lowdown Southern Odyssey'

Guy Mendes's 1986 photograph of "Royal Robertson's House," Baldwin, LA, is reproduced from Walks to the Paradise Garden: A Lowdown Southern Odyssey—a book that is universally loved here at Artbook | D.A.P. Collecting the radically unpretentious chronicles of poet, photographer, publisher and "survivor from the Days of Highbrow Culture" Jonathan Williams, and the corresponding photographs of Roger Manley and Guy Mendes, made while the trio road-trip-surveyed the most outlandish and autonomous folk art of the American South (primarily during the 1980s), the book is dedicated to "the bright-eyed, non-uppity, autochthonous, wacko, private, isolate, unconventional, un-paved, non-commercial, non-nice (but very-nice), naive, outside, fantastic, demeaned, sub-aesthetic, home-style and bushy-tailed" artists the group encountered along their meandering journeys. There's not a boring word or image in the book, lovingly compiled by editor Phillip March Jones.