Endurance and Suffering
Narratives of Desease
in the 19th Century
John Wood

Editor: Alexander Scholz
Design: Denise Avayou
Lithography: PhotoTek/Lake Charles, Louisiana
Ralf Lenk/Scancolor, Leipzig
Printing Ralf Lenk/Scancolor, Leipzig
Binding: Müller, Leipzig
Letterpress: Thomas Siemon
Production Design: Alexander Scholz, Susanne Weigelt

 

"Endurance and Suffering” is the finest book in the history of our publishing house - a risky, poignant, bold and absolutely modern book, yet one wedded to the humanist tradition. It takes its inspiration from photographs of people with dermatological diseases, taken for the purposes of George Henry Fox’s medical research. Endurance and Suffering is a multi-media book that includes epigraphs with notes from Dr. Fox’s case studies, the photographs themselves, and poems written by the prize-winning poet John Wood to accompany them. A warning: the images are graphic in that they reveal living people with all their abnormalities and emotional vulnerabilities. The fact that these people lived two centuries ago does not lessen the impact of their photos.

The design and decoration of Endurance and Suffering follows the original book design by George Henry Fox but utilizes a very modern language. Many classic bookmaking details are combined with the highest quality contemporary techniques of photographic reproduction and printing.

The book is partially printed in letterpress and contains many fine bookbinding details. The limited edition is signed and numbered by the author John Wood and contains an original page of his manuscript. Customers may choose a handmade acrylic table for displaying the book.

 

“Endurance and Suffering” avanciert zum bisher schönsten Buch in unserer Verlagsgeschichte – ein gewagtes, ergreifendes, mutiges und absolut modernes Buch, das wahrhaftig den Werten der humanistischen Tradition verhaftet ist.

Seine Faszination geht von Fotografien aus, auf denen Menschen mit Hautkrankheiten dargestellt sind. Diese Fotos entstanden im Rahmen der medizinischen Forschung des amerikanischen Hautarztes George Henry Fox. Die Edition erscheint multimedial; so sind Epigrafe mit Notizen aus Dr. Fox’ Fallstudien, die Fotografien selbst und schließlich Gedichte des preisgekrönten amerikanischen Lyrikers John Wood enthalten, die dem in diesem Buch dargestellten Leid gewidmet sind.

Eine Warnung sei vorausgeschickt: die Abbildungen sind sehr explizit; sie offenbaren Menschen mit all ihren Missbildungen und ihrer ergreifenden Verletzlichkeit. Der Umstand, dass dies dargestellen Personen bereits vor 2 Jahrhunderten lebten, mindert nicht die dramatische Wirkung der Fotografien.

Das Design und die Ausstattung des Buches folgt der Originaledition von George Henry Fox, verwendet jedoch eine sehr moderne Sprache. Klassische Buchmacherkunst geht einher mit Fotoreproduktions- und Druckverfahren höchster Qualität.

Das im Buchdruckverfahren hergestellte Buch wird abgerundet durch ausgezeichnete buchinderische Details. Die limitierte Ausgabe ist nummeriert und signiert vom Autor, John Wood, und enthält eine Originalseite seines Manuskripts. Wahlweise dazu gibt es ein in Handarbeit gefertigtes Acrylpult.

Author

John Wood is a known photographic historian and critic whose books have won major awards, but he is also a distinguished, prize-winning poet. Wood has lectured on photography at many museums in the U.S. and in Europe, and he co-curated the exhibition Secrets of the Dark Chamber at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art. John Wood is the only individual to have twice won the prestigious Poetry Prize of the University of Iowa Press, and among the more than 20 books he has written and/or edited on photographic history and contemporary photographers, five have won major awards, including a 2005 Lucie Award (the equivalent of an Oscar in photography) for ‘Sally Mann’; the New York Times Book Review Best Photo Books of 1995 for ‘Secrets of the Dark Chamber’, published by the Smithsonian Institution Press; and the American Library Association's Choice Outstanding Academic Books of the Year 1992 for ‘America and the Daguerreotype’.

He held Professorships for over twenty-five years in both English Literature and Photographic History and served as Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at McNeese University in Louisiana. He has given readings and lectures at many universities and museums, including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art, Spain’s National Art Museum of Catalonia, the Boston Athenæum, Harvard, Penn State, Florida State, the Oakland Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Museum of New Mexico, and others.

John Woods recent presentation of “Endurance and Suffering” at Harvard “(…) was the highlight of my year: brilliant and passionate and it inspired me to go back to his poetry, which is what the very best talks do."

(Dr. John Stuaffer,
Professor of English and Chair of History
of American Civilization at Harvard)

"John Wood is a poet of often harrowing candor, and at the same time a strange but unmistakable authentic sweetness pervades whatever he writes. For absolute integrity of feeling and expression, there is nobody like him."

(Amy Clampitt)

"Wood strikes a chord somewhat like Samuel Beckett's: however negative Wood's statements are, they are made with gusto and felicity, in exuberant long sentences full of energy, invention and baroque high-jinks."

(Richard Wilbur)

"John Wood's poems are at once elegant and easily approachable. He takes it as an act of faith that spirituality resonates in the temporal world and that the sublime may be best implied in the mundane. His voice is strong, original and pervasive."

(Ann Beattie)

"John Wood possesses one of the most original and vigorous literary voices I've ever read. He clamors and keens and bellows and proclaims and he sings with the greatest tenderness and sweetness and nothing escapes his critical and compassionate notice. When I want to sharpen my own perceptions of the world around me, I read John Wood's poems. He is, for me, essential."

(Robert Olen Butler)

“(…) The theme of this book is our SKIN, a subject rich in symbolism, but this book is not about

faultless beauty, and it is not about new diseases. Why does John Wood want to present this, this negation of beauty in a time we are all trying to reach unattainable ideals of beauty that are constantly set before us? We like to think nothing can destroy us, despite the World Trade Center disaster, the tsunami and hurricanes, and a pointless war we are in the middle of. The demographic supremacy of our patterns of behavior are changing because of virus. There is virus in our food; there are viruses online, in airplanes, and in the baggage of our fast worldwide business trips.

For centuries we have arrogantly excluded people who are not in step with our privilege and our censored education. And now strong, unprincipled gunmen are winning. They are shockingly ignorant, but nobody can hide the weapons from them, the weapons we have aimed at them before. They are the virus, and they were cultured by us. We profane the world with our aggressive, lopsided perception. We show no respect for the beautiful face of nature, which we have defiled, no respect for faces filled with childlike naiveté, and no respect for the faces of all the dead that lie around us. That is how the virus, which we ourselves have created, controls us.

We are hollow people in a hollow society, a society set on its own destruction. Now starts a new decade. We claim that wealth or the rich can save the world — a revolution from the top down. The instruments for killing the virus worldwide are benefits and excellent education. It seems like a new renaissance. But we still have no idea what we really use to feed a clueless world and what we destroy in the backstage while creating great performances for television. In the nineties everyone thought the great change was

coming. Now all we have found out is that the moon is still too far away. But we all must make a contribution to save our planet. We must develop a planetary awareness, and we must create values.

In 1853 philosopher Karl Rosenkranz in his „Ästhetik des Hässlichen (The Aesthetics of Ugliness)” wrote that “great connoisseurs of the human heart have sometimes plunged us into horrifying abysses” and that “the inferno is not only ethical and religious, but it is also aesthetic.” He said “the ugliest ugliness is not what might disgust us in nature” but human “egotism” that manifests itself in our baseness and crimes, in those very things I have just spoken of that are destroying us.

John’s book is a sensible, smart answer to many problems, a way to start thinking in another way with respect for the human race. This book does not want to create a sensation or present us with horrors, only to make us consider the diseases that are still in this world.

If we think we are indestructible, we should see this book. Endurance and Suffering shows our fragility in a very poetic way.(…)

(Alexander Scholz, in the foreword)

„(...) Von den vielen besonderen Büchern des diesjährigen Fotobuchpreises ist dieses vielleicht das ungewöhnlichste, in jeder Hinsicht. Technisch ist es von allerhöchster Delikatesse – Bleisatz, Goldprägung, marmoriertes Vorsatzpapier, die Abbildungen von Hand eingebunden und so aufwändig reproduziert, dass amerikanische Fotospezialisten dieser Ausgabe schon bescheinigt haben, sie sei

besser als das Original. Das klingt arg übertrieben, ist aber nicht unbegründet, denn die Vorlagen sind handkolorierte Collotypien. Das heißt jeder historische Print ist ein Unikat. Die heutigen Herausgeber

haben sich nun eine ganze Reihe dieser alten Bücher besorgt und daraus die jeweils besten Motiv-Varianten gewählt. Damit ist die moderne Ausgabe eine Art „Best-of“, wie sie unter den historischen Exemplaren nicht existiert.

Was die Bilder aber zeigen, ist teilweise ziemlich erschreckend. Die Fotos zeigen dermatologische Krankheitsbilder. Aufgenommen hat sie O.G. Mason, ein New Yorker Fotograf, im Auftrag von George Henry Fox, einem der bedeutendsten Hautärzte der USA im 19. Jahrhundert. Von Fox stammen auch die knappen biografischen und medizinischen Notizen zu jedem der 25 Portraits (Krankheitserscheinung, -verlauf und-heilung bzw. -nichtheilung betreffend). John Wood wiederum, der ja als

Autor dieses Bandes firmiert, ist ein zeitgenössischer Lyriker, Professor für Fotogeschichte und Literatur. Inspiriert von der Ausstrahlung der historischen Patientenbilder, hat Wood die Lebensläufe der Patienten

recherchiert, und dann Gedichte verfasst, die weit über die medizinischen Fallstudien hinausgehen. Seine Texte umkreisen die großen Fragen von Schicksal, Leid und Sinn im Leben eines Menschen. So wird

aus großer Wissenschaft große Kunst.(...)“

(Aus der Rede zur Preisverleihung
zum Deutschen Fotobuchpreis)

“(…) Of the many special books of this year this Fotobuchvorlage price is perhaps the most unusual, in every respect. Technically, it is of the utmost delicacy - lead, gold lettering, marbled paper intent, the illustrations by hand and are expensive to reproduce so that American specialists photo of this issue have already certified that she was better than the original. That sounds terrible exaggeration, but is not unfounded, because the templates are handcoloured Collotypien. That means any historical print is unique. Today's editors have now a whole series of these old books and worried that the best motive variants elected. This is the modern edition a kind of "Best Of", as they are the historical examples does not exist.

But what the pictures show, is partially quite frightening. The photos show images dermatological disease. She has O.G. Mason, a New York photographer, on behalf of George Henry Fox, one of the most skin doctors of the USA in the 19th Century. Fox also come from the scant medical and biographical notes about each of the 25 portraits (illness appearance, history and healing or no healing on). John Wood again, as indeed the author of this volume trades, is a contemporary poet, professor of photographic history and literature. Inspired by the aura of historical patient images, Wood has the CVs of patients researched and then written poems that go far beyond the medical case studies go further. His texts revolve around the big questions of fate, suffering and sense in a person's life. Thus, great art becomes great science. (…)“

(From the laudation
for the German photo book price)

„(…) Scholz ist seit zehn Jahren auch Verleger - und die Bücher sind mindestens so ausgefallen wie die Häuser. Ihm geht es nicht darum, den Massengeschmack zu bedienen. Die von ihm herausgegebenen Bücher sind abgedreht, aufwändig gestaltet, hergestellt aus teurem Papier. Sie sind auf besonderen Maschinen gedruckt und manchmal wie eine alte Gutenberg-Bibel gebunden. Sie erscheinen in so kleinen Auflagen, dass es fast Einzelstücke sind. Sie haben ihren Preis.

Trotzdem - oder gerade deshalb - ist Scholz so erfolgreich. Soeben wurde eines seiner Werke ausgezeichnet mit dem Deutschen Fotobuchpreis 2009 in Gold in der Kategorie Fotogeschichte. Das Buch heißt "Endurance and suffering" (Dauer und Leid). Der Band zeigt Reproduktionen von Fotos aus der Zeit um 1890: Patienten mit Hautkrankheiten und ihre alten Krankengeschichten, dazu aktuelle Gedichte, die der preisgekrönte US- Autor John Wood für das verstörend-schöne Buch geschrieben hat (…)“

(Berliner Zeitung, 12.01.09)

Many historic photographic portraits have endured, but more often than not the narrative account of the portrayed person has been lost. John Wood, an award-winning poet and photographic historian, has melded 19th century photographs by O.G. Mason with case studies from pioneering dermatologist Dr. George Henry Fox and reimagined the portrayed patient's life in poetry. In his exquisitely produced book, Endurance and Suffering: Narratives of Disease in the 19th Century (Galerie Vevais, Germany; 2008), Wood fosters an intimate imaginative relationship with the subjects of the photographs.

“I wanted to take these clinical photographs and case studies and infuse them with the humanity the lives of these people deserved,” says Wood. “None of them could have had easy lives — especially the poor lady who had lost her nose to syphilis. What could such a fate have been like? I wanted to know how she lived it, how she endured it. She was a wife, a mother. Like many women, she contracted it from her husband, who then deserted her.” (...)“

(Barbara Sibbald, CMAJ

“Dieses Buch ist so ganz anders als man es erwartet. Zeigen Fotobildbände häufig großformatig schöne Bilder, so gehen diese Fotos unter die Haut. Mit seinen Fotografien und Gedichten vereint das Buch die zwei Arbeitsbereiche des bekannten Professors für Geschichte der Fotografie und des mehrfach ausgezeichneten amerikanischen Poeten John Wood. Die Idee zur Gestaltung des Buches stammt von Architekt Alexander Scholz. Er hat mit seiner "Galerie Vevais" den Bildband herausgegeben, der vor einer Woche in Stuttgart Sieger des Deutschen Fotobuchpreises 2009 wurde.

Unsere heutige Gesellschaft hält sich allzu oft für unverletzlich, meint Alexander Scholz. Dabei sei sie es bei Weitem nicht. "Der jetzige Bankenskandal zeigt ihre Verwundbarkeit, aber auch Kriege oder Krankheiten wie Aids", sagt er. In einer Welt, in der alles nach äußerer Schönheit strebt, zeige er mit diesem Buch die andere Seite, die verletzbare Seite.(...)

Ebenso aufwändig wie früher medizinische Fachbücher oder Atlanten mit kunstvollen Stichen bebildert waren, hat er den Fotoband ausgestattet. "Das waren früher richtige Kunstwerke", sagt er. "Das Buch sollte besonders schön werden, weil wir ja etwas scheinbar Hässliches verpacken." Es gibt von dem Buch eine in Glanzleder gebundene Edition, die limitierte Ausgabe ist nummeriert, vom Autor John Wood signiert und enthält eines seiner Originalmanuskripte.

(...) "Ein neues Jahrhundert startet, doch wir haben nur herausgefunden, dass der Mond immer noch zu weit entfernt ist."

Es sind nur wenige Bücher, die Alexander Scholz jährlich mit seinem Verlag "Galerie Vevais" herausgibt, maximal drei im Jahr, und diese auch immer öfter für den englischsprachigen Markt. "Da werden solch hochwertige Bücher mehr angenommen", sagt er. "Wir verfolgen das Konzept, dass wir einige der wundervollsten Bücher der Welt machen wollen", so Scholz. Viele seiner Bücher haben bereits internationale Design-Preise gewonnen. (...)“

(Cornelia Hendrch,
Märkische Oderzeitung, 05. November 2008)

“It takes resolve to view the photographs and read the book (I had to read it in two sittings, days apart, due to the need for an emotional respite). The rewards, however, are great. Readers can expect to expand their capacities for sympathy and further their criticism towards normalized, Western standards for beauty. (Note: no mainstream U.S. publisher would accept the book, which is soon to be released through a German publisher.)

Wood’s poems have no equal. Their subject and treatment are as moving as they are stunning: moving in their tender, humanizing effect; stunning, for their graphic and often uncomfortable intimacy. The most tender of these is perhaps “A. C., aet. 19, U.S.: ELEPHANTIASIS,” in which a woman with enlarged thighs is, as we first see her, a shy, insecure disfigured woman, but also is shy, insecure everywoman, and finally is, as Wood says, no less than the very Earth Mother, fecund and beautiful as all creation.“

(Estella Ramirez)

Downloads

Download article about “Endurance and Suffering“ by Estella Ramirez
Download article about “Endurance and Suffering“ in CMAJ, January 6, 2009
Download article about “Endurance and Suffering“ in der Märkischen Oderzeitung
Download interview with John Wood in Eyemazing
Download interview with John Wood in Front Porch Journal

 

Links

www.artandmedicine.com
www.deutscher-fotobuchpreis.de/html/2009.htm
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2612074
www.photoeye.com/Bookstore/citation.cfm?Catalog=ZD529
www.anamorfose.be
www.frontporchjournal.com/issue60_poetry_wood.asp
www.eyemazing.info
www.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ne/fachlist.html?print=no&tf=99&monat=200908&fach=032