About The Picture that Remains

Praise for The Picture that Remains


"Will Brown's photographs are absolutely astonishing, like the best of Rudy Burckhardt or Aaron Siskind or Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Thomas Devaney's poems pay stylish and profoundly even-gazed attention to Brown's wonders. The evenness of Devaney's gaze its unwavering honest regard for the "poignant and stubborn"—is a marvel." —Wayne Koestenbaum

“. . . this project—a collaboration between the photographer Will Brown and the poet Thomas Devaney—was the product of something genuinely artful, and good. Who could not love a project like this?”—Beth Kephart

To read the review by Beth Kephart in its entirety click here

Will Brown lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Montville, Maine. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania (BFA, 1967). His interest in photography developed as a result of his relationship with teacher and mentor Rudy Burckhardt. Brown’s photographs were featured in Common Ground, Eight Philadelphia Photographers of the 1960s and 1970s (2009) and 35mm: Photographs from the Collection, (2012), both at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Making Magic: Beauty in Word and Image, at the James A. Michener Museum of Art (2012). Brown's works are held in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and in numerous private collections.

Thomas Devaney lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He earned his BA in English Literature at Temple University and his MFA in Poetry at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His books include the poetry collections A Series of Small Boxes(2007) and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (1999) as well as the nonfiction book Letters to Ernesto Neto (2005). Projects include “Dead Tired: Sleep Text” with Patty Chang at Momenta Art (2011); poems written for Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960s and 1970s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2009). Projects with Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia include: “Tales from the 215” for Zoe Strauss’s Philadelphia Freedom (2006) and “The Empty House” at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site for The Big Nothing (2004). Devaney currently teaches creative writing at Haverford College.

Vincent Katz is a poet, art critic and curator. He is the author of eleven books of poetry and of Alcuni Telefonini, a collaboration with Francesco Clemente. His art criticism has been published in numerous books, catalogs and journals. He curated Street Dance: The New York Photographs of Rudy Burckhardt for the Museum of the City of New York (2008), a retrospective of Burckhardt for the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain (1998) and co-curated Rudy Burckhardt and Friends: New York Artists of the 1950s and 60s for the Grey Art Gallery, New York University (2000). He currently teaches in the MFA Program in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

In November 2012, WHYY featured this project in a segment of Friday Arts about Thomas Devaney.

—Wayne Koestenbaum