Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream
by: Jennifer A. Watts

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages. As a prolific photographer for House Beautiful, Better Homes and Gardens, Architectural Digest, and Sunset magazine, Maynard L. Parker (1900-1976) was a pioneer in documenting residential spaces and landscapes for postwar America. His extensively published, sun-kissed brand of photography made him a critical contributor to domestic design culture from the 1940s into the 1960s. Parker's lens revealed the homes and lifestyles of affluent Americans and celebrities, including Judy Garland, Clark Gable, and Bing Crosby, as well as the interiors, gardens, and built works of Samuel Marx, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thomas Church, and Cliff May, offering an alluring template for living in a new consumer age. Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream is the first monograph to consider Parker and his work. Lavishly illustrated essays by leading scholars set Parker's photography against the backdrop of an unprecedented demographic shift, the Cold War, and a suburban society increasingly fixated on consumption.