Sunday, November 28, 2010

Hard Ground

According to this story in The Guardian last week, Tom Waits has collaborated with photographer Michael O'Brien on a portrait of homelessness. The book, Hard Ground, will be published in the spring.* Regular readers will know from my serial postings that I hold Waits in high esteem. I really don't know O'Brien's work at all (except for some of the images he's made for Waits album covers.) But this seems like an auspicious partnership, even if it might be setting expectations just a smidgen high to compare (as the publisher does) the collaboration to Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In any case, I've linked to the publisher's page below where you can find a sample of the images from the book.
__________
* Hard Ground. Photographs and Interviews by Michael O’Brien, Poems by Tom Waits. University of Texas Press. (March 2011).