Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

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Levi Fisher Ames

Levi Fisher Ames decided to make his environment portable. A Civil War soldier, musician, carpenter, maker of musical instruments, prolific woodcarver, and animated storyteller, Ames hand carved his own impressive menagerie of over 600 domestic, wild, and mythical animals, carefully encasing each in a glass-fronted folding box. He exhibited them at regional fairs as a comprehensive sideshow in the belief that they needed to be seen as an interrelated work and that his storytelling was a central component of the whole.

Brazilian Adventure

In 1925, British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett, along with his son and another companion, disappeared while searching in Brazil for the Lost City of Z. Not long after, Peter Fleming, who was literary editor for London's The Times, answered a small ad seeking volunteers for an expedition to find out what had happened to them. Fleming's story of that 1932 expedition is told in Brazilian Adventure. Despite a great deal of fanfare, the expedition seems to have been very poorly organized. Fleming and his companions do not seem to have done much preparation, not even bothering to learn any Portuguese. They left everything up to the leader they hired, an eccentric American, Major George Lewy Pingle, who lived in Brazil. They sailed from England, met Pingle, and followed him to the Araguaya river and down it, with Fleming, an admirer of Hemingway, blasting away at the wildlife for sport as they went.

Jacob Holdt

In the spring of 1970, Holdt set off to Canada where he had been invited to work on a farm. From here he planned to hitchhike to Chile where he intended to support Salvador Allende’s democratic struggle for social justice. But on his way through the United States, he was held up at gunpoint by young blacks and instead quickly got involved in the black struggle for the next four years. Arriving with only $40 in his pocket, Holdt was shocked and fascinated by the social differences he encountered. He ended up staying in the USA more than five years, criss-crossing the country by hitchhiking more than 100,000 miles and making photographs. He sold blood plasma twice a week to buy film. He stayed in more than 400 homes – from the poorest migrant workers to America's wealthiest families (for instance, the Rockefellers) - recording these encounters on over 15,000 photographs taken with a cheap pocket camera. He would live with people who were so hungry they ate cat food and dirt, often in rat-infested shacks. His work captured the daily struggle of the American underclass and contrasts it with images of the life of America's elite. Upon returning to Denmark in 1976, Holdt began lecturing on social differences in the United States and published a book: American Pictures. He later presented his slideshow at over 300 college campuses across the United States.