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| © Arthur Grace |
| Florida 2004 |
Arthur Grace's new book, State Fair (University of Texas Press, $35), shows what a documentary photographer with a keen eye for detail and a dose of surrealism in his soul can do while shooting even the most clichéd of events. "State fairs are weird and glorious," says Grace. "They represent everything that America is about—free enterprise, tradition, family values, as well as kitsch."
A collection of photographs made at 10 different state fairs over the past 30 years, the book was the most personal project Grace ever undertook. "It was all done on spec," he says. "It's funny, when you start out in photography, you pay for your projects yourself and hope someone notices you and starts giving you paid assignments. Now I've come full circle: I'm working on spec again, but this time it's to keep control over the project."
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Grace was well past the career stage of working on spec. Shooting for the Sygma agency, he covered presidential campaigns in 1980, 1984, and 1988. He documented Poland under martial law, and he photographed in China in 1985, when the country was still largely closed to Westerners. Then, after shooting a book about comedians in the early 1990s, he moved to Los Angeles to become a commercial photographer.
But the past has a way of catching up with you. "A couple of years ago I just felt this need to get back to reality-based photography," says Grace. "I needed to get back to my roots." Back in the late 1970s he had taken some pictures at the Minnesota State Fair during a layover there, and he'd always vowed to go back to the project.
In late 2005, just as he was completing his work on the state fair book, another aspect of Grace's photojournalistic past caught up with him. In December, a decision was handed down in a lawsuit he had brought against Corbis Corporation, which bought the Sygma agency in 1999. Corbis, Grace claimed, had lost 66,000 of his original images. If he had been compensated with the long-standing industry standard of $1,500 per lost image, he would have been a rich man. Instead, the judge in the case ruled that only 40,000 images had been lost, then assessed their value at $100 for selects and $1 for non-selects. In the end, Grace was awarded $436,000 for his lost photos. He is appealing the decision. "Those images represented 25 years' worth of work, but they also represented history," he says.
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