Author: Michael Hardy / Source: WIRED
Veteran photographer Robert Dawson earned his bona fides in the 1980s and ’90s shooting spectacular images of the American West, often intended to highlight environmental threats such as drought and overdevelopment. Around the turn of the millennium, though, Dawson refocused on a seemingly unrelated subject: libraries. He began traveling across the country, photographing hundreds of them from the modest to the monumental. The project culminated in 2014 with the publication of The Public Library: A Photographic Essay. The Library of Congress ended up purchasing the archive for its permanent collection.
“It wasn’t actually much of a leap for me to go from the commons of the environment to a different type of commons, in this case our cultural commons,” Dawson explains. “As our country gets increasingly commercialized, the library is one of the last real public spaces.
”After exhaustively documenting American libraries, Dawson decided to expand the project worldwide, starting with Europe. He’s spent the past few years criss-crossing the continent from Paris to Moscow, shooting a staggering array of libraries from the ancient to the contemporary, the mundane to the spectacular. Although Dawson included many famous libraries—such as the Baroque-style Abbey Library of Saint Gallen in Switzerland and the ultra-modern, all-white Stuttgart City Library—he had no interest in publishing yet another coffee table book.
“There are many people who photograph and publish books on beautiful libraries all over the world,”…
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