Camera Lyrica

Book excerpt: Camera Lyrica navigates the intersection between realism and naturalism, locating moment by moment--the only way it can--the artful, necessary, and always mysterious transformation that occurs between the perceiver and perceived. Amy Newman's subjects range from Audubon's drive for precision, Michelangelo's unfinished Pietá, Darwin and forty-year old Barbie, to a meditation on the diversity of Type itself. With grace and dexterity, her intelligent eye dips into Catholic Mysteries, and the quiet but momentous domesticity of a backyard quince tree. Hers is a language both lush and spare, as she filters it and the world through a lucid imagination, transforming both into something beautiful, challenging, and wholly new.