Book Review: Off the Bookshelf

Milan Sklenar: Photographs

University of New Mexico Press, 177 pp., $65

So often, when photographers document the impoverished, the result is stark and gritty or romanticized images of "the salt of the earth." Photographer Milan Sklenar does something entirely unexpected and remarkable: His black-and-white photos are at once simple and straightforward images of ordinary people doing mundane things, but extraordinary in how they capture something deeper and unspoken. The positioning of figures and objects takes on an almost absurd quality the way line, shape, and figures are dramatically set against each other -- or rather, how he finds them set against each other. He had to have seen them beyond the mundane façade, which is itself a remarkable feat. The photos included in Sklenar's first published collection of his work represent nearly 30 years of output, and what the photographer calls "the weigh stations" of his life: Prague, Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, Thompson, Mexico, and Gallup. What the photos show, according to Sklenar, is that "life is the same everywhere, people suffer and are happy in much the same way." His assessment is correct. However, the extraordinary gift he has for revealing the extraordinary cannot go without mention.