Shards of America
by: Bergerson, Phil and David Harris

Hardcover. New York, Quantuck Lane Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 136 pages, color plates. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Canadian photographer Phil Bergerson has gathered richly detailed images from neglected corners of American's towns and small cities, and created a fascinating mosaic. Businesses, religious sects, and community groups announce their presence, offer their services, and pitch their messages, while commercial signs, graffiti, posters, and public notices blanket the surfaces of buildings and public spaces. Paintings and movie posters, dime-store novels and daily newspapers, figurines and mannequins, decals and stenciled graffiti, and children's letters and drawings are laid out as artifacts of a greater whole. Patriotism, consumerism, censorship, nostalgia for a simpler past coupled with a desire for a less complicated present...touching on all these themes, Bergerson's quietly ironic but empathetic tone encourages the reader to imagine how our own ordinary world might appear to viewers in a hundred or more years' time. 119 color photographs.