Fifty Houses: Images from the American Road

I'm a big fan of architectural photography and heard an interview with the author months ago on NPR. This is a beautiful book with a great layout. Makes a wonderful addition to my coffee table.

This is the fascinating tale, told through pictures and words, of one woman's odyssey, looking for -- and finding -- those houses that best illustrate the regional diversity that is too quickly disappearing from America. Sorlien's beautiful photographs manage to be nostalgic and contemporary at the same time, and her crisp narrative provides the perfect accompaniment. Highly recommended.

Nothing disturbs the ethereal stillness of the house portraits in "Fifty Houses." Sorlein creates a ghostly reality, where the buildings are bathed in a silvery wash resembling moonlight and her photos seem to glow from within. And though it's easy to become absorbed in the stylized, sublime beauty of the photography, her writing also demands attention.It's almost the opposite of her formal house pictures--like prose snapshots from a point & shoot, but still with her photographer's skill in framing and shaping the raw material. A good travel writer, like a good photographer, makes us see things for ourselves--they show, they don't tell, and Sorlien is adept at showing us everything from landscapes to people to animals with a great sense of humor and sense of the significant bit of detail or dialogue. Out west, Sorlien introduces us to a guy who shoots rattlesnakes and freezes them in their final postures. On automobile-free Mackinac Island we see a band of big, tool-belted construction workers dwarfing their bicycles which they leave piled outside the bar they hit for a "drink for the road and a six-pack for the boat." Great stuff! And in the leisurely fashion of Least Heat-Moon in "Blue Highways," the fifty vignettes accumulate until, in the end, she makes you feel you've made her journey with her.I love the way this book works. Strange places and pictures recast us in their own images, and Sorlien's transcendental house portraits are so beautiful as to make us painfully aware of the pervasive, intensely consequential loss in our built environment. Her chipper tales from the road subtly take a different emotional route, calling our attention and thought to the problem with entertaining good humor and grace.