Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists

In her collection Strange Hours, the writer Rebecca Bengal considers over a century of photography that has defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous and in-depth essays, profiles, reviews, and interviews, Bengal contemplates photography’s narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin’s New York demimonde to Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Bengal brings us closer to several pioneering artists and the personal, political, and poetic stories that surround their photographs. She travels with Alec Soth in Minneapolis, searching for the houses where Prince once lived, and revisits Chauncey Hare’s 1979 protest against the Museum of Modern Art. She speaks with Dawoud Bey about his evocative early portraits in Brooklyn and explores Diana Markosian’s cinematic take on her family’s immigration to the US. Throughout Strange Hours, Bengal’s prose is attentive to the alchemy of experience, chance, and pioneering vision that has always pushed photography’s potential for unforgettable storytelling.