Histories Tales from the 70s by Henry Horenstein

Henry Horenstein is raising funds for Henry Horenstein, HISTORIES: TALES FROM THE 70's, a photobook. on Kickstarter. In order to receive contributions, the project must be funded in full by Sun, Dec 14 2014. To help: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...

From Henry: I’m Henry Horenstein, a Boston-based photographer who grew up in New Bedford, MA. I began college at the University of Chicago in the late 60s, but later transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to study photography. Today I teach at RISD, and have been taking photos, publishing books, and teaching for the last four decades. Yikes!

The book I’m asking you to help fund is called HISTORIES: TALES FROM THE 70s. It will showcase some of my favorite work taken from 1970-79. I originally studied history at the University of Chicago, but was drawn to photography because it was more fun and interesting to interact with real subjects out in the world, than to sit in a library studying the past. Despite changing majors (and schools), in some ways my focus did not change at all. Rather than an historian with written/typed notes, I became an historian with a camera. My teacher Harry Callahan at RISD encouraged me to “shoot what you love.” So I did.

HISTORIES: TALES FROM THE 70s will chronicle a time when I was photographing almost everything I could find. Anything that smacked of history, especially cultures that might disappear or change, was fair game: stock car racing, horse racing, boxing, old rural routes through Rhode Island and Massachusetts, country and blues musicians in Nashville and elsewhere, and my close family and friends were just a few of my subjects.

This Kickstarter project aims to fund the first in a series of books, all called HISTORIES, that will contain images through all the decades that I have been making work. Some of this work has been published in individual books over the years, but there are so many other photographs that have never been seen before. These are the pictures that I want to include in HISTORIES: TALES FROM THE 70s. The images show a cross-section of America at the time: big cars, plaid pants, long hair, and all. I hope that this will serve as a chronicle of the past – a snapshot of the time and people who were not famous or rich but were a fundamental part of the culture of the 70s.

The two videos included, some photographs below, and these websites highlight much of my 70s work:

RACING DAYS, the people and places of thoroughbred horse racing. http://www.racingdaysbook.com

HONKY TONK, country music musicians, fans, and venues. http://www.honkytonkbook.com

CLOSE RELATIONS, family and friends from the 70s. http://www.closerelationsbook.com

SPEEDWAY72, portraits and cars of stock-car racing in 1972. http://www.speedway72.com