THE FIRST TIME I GOT WHAT I SAW | RYAN HERZ

The First Time I Got What I Saw
Photographs by Ryan Herz
Afterword: Anthony Friedkin in-conversation
with Ryan Herz

13" x 11" 232 pgs
Hardcover Imagewrap
146 b&w/color images | 2021 | Ed. 100
#140 Mohawk proPhoto Gloss Photo Paper

ISBN: 978-0-692-95261-0

Free shipping to USA

The First Time I Got What I Saw, the beautifully massive new photo book by Ryan Herz, goes beneath the surface of one-dimensional images like an pathological X-ray of the heart and soul. We know what we see at a glimpse but there is something deeper to be found here, something that forces us to carefully peruse these images, and keeps them alive long after you have closed the covers.

This is not a book one flips through but rather a document of single-image stories; abstract fighters in the ring, their violent movement recorded like a Francis Bacon painting; a bleached white Jesus on a park bench, like a playground pervert passing out candy to the kiddies or a rainy world through the windshield like a shimmering Robert Frank Jukebox. There are the portraits of emotionally and physically challenged kids, a subject generally viewed with apprehension and melancholy, becomes joyous; a celebration of who they are to themselves and their families. And deeper still into the book we find a short series of exposures of nude dancers with a focus less on the hard working women and more on the audience of shadowy men covertly looking for quick prurient kicks.

The First Time I Got What I Saw is a visceral tour of America from the unique mind's eye of Ryan Herz.

--Scot Sothern