Alamo + Costello
[Dark Lark Press, 2008. 111 pages, $55.00 hardcover]
Reviewed by Kevin Riordan

This lovingly executed book is something of a genre bender, even as arty visual books go. The spare, snappy design and stand-out production values put it in the territory of a fine art monograph; but the artist, one man with a mathematically hyphenated name, is revealing more than his own photographic work. Bookended between an informal introduction by the author that invites a personal approach and a critical afterword by Robert Kotchen that intelligently parses nuanced significance from nearly every image and its sequencing, the work overflows with a century of everyday life.

Simply, GrandpaDanny is a visual tribute to the artist’s grandfather and his hardworking life as a war veteran, forge worker, and family man. Beyond the essays and thorough catalog of descriptions, the images teem with open-ended possibilities and pretty well cover the respectable uses of photography.

There are four sections: “Family Album” contains perfectly replicated postcards, scrapbook pages, news clippings, and photos that will make you cherish your own such material; “Snaps” comes even closer to bringing the viewer into this vintage world; “Recent Views” introduces the author’s own sensitive camerawork, placing him securely amid the great contemporary shooters that Columbia College seems to mint; and “Artifacts & Relics” catalogs the contents of Danny’s desk and workbench in a way that makes the book itself feel like a tool for remembering. Published by Dark Lark Press, and seemingly the only book with that imprint, this might be called vanity publishing if it weren’t so utterly free of that vice. Pride, yes; vanity, no.

It’s an Indiana thing, this rock-ribbed practicality, showing what anyone with a good eye and a grandfather or two could do if they put their mind, heart, and back into commemorating an exemplary, ordinary life.

Michael Christopher “Chester” Alamo + Costello earned an M.F.A. in photography at Columbia in 1998. He teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois.