The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005; 189 pages
A few years ago the photographer James DuSel asked John Dorsey, Baltimore's premier art and architecture critic, if he would consider doing a book with him.
Dorsey recalls saying "yes" without a second's hesitation.
The result is this book, a long meditation by Dorsey on DuSel's evocative photographs and on art, architecture and life - in a volume handsomely published by the Johns Hopkins press.
The book has an elegiacal tone. DuSel is a photographer of fragments from unexpected angles: the corner of a room, the base of a column, a cluster of rooftops, empty doorways. His photographs sometimes seem like shards from civilization lost or soon to be lost. Most of the buildings he has photographed date from the 19th or early 20th century.
DuSel and Dorsey note that the haunting photographs of a long-vanished fin de siecle Paris by Eugene Atget are "the single most important model for [DuSel's] works."
The text by Dorsey has the quality of a summing up of his long career as a critic for The Sun, where he not only wrote with clarity about art and architecture, but also reviewed restaurants with the same consummate taste.
His comments are learned, witty and written with authoritative ease, short essays not only about architecture but also about what he has found meaningful in life.
In his text for the first picture in the book, the stairway that greets you when you enter the main building of the Maryland Institute College of Art, he notes its "limitless possibilities of symbolism, grandeur and drama."
In a pyrotechnic display of learning to support his judgment, he marshals the grand staircase of Antonio Rizzo at the Doge's Palace in Venice, Bernini's Scala Regia at the Vatican, Pirro Ligurio's Villa d'Este and Piranesi's prison etchings. And he swoops on from there through the rest of the book.
He's amusing, too, when he labels as "The Silly Flying Buttresses" the wooden braces in DuSel's photograph of a corner of the old church that is now The Chimes school in Mount Washington.
"But it's fun," Dorsey writes, "fun to look at fun, to write about, fun to have around. It has personality, which rescues many a gawky individual from the oblivion of social neglect, and which puts it a step ahead of all the correct but dull architecture one sees everywhere.
"And more than a little of that personality comes from the presence ... of what must be the silliest-looking flying buttresses in the history of architecture."
This is a fun book to read - and look at - and full of wisdom, too.
