Books
Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia, Photographs by Dick Blau, Text by Charles and Angeliki Keil, Soundscape by Steven Feld. (Wesleyan University Press, 2002). Blau's black-and-white photographs of Romani residents of the village of Iraklia create an enthographic portrait of a Balkan community.
Polka Happiness, a full-length study of Polish-American music and culture (co-authored by anthropologists Charles and Angeliki Keil) was published by Temple University Press in 1992. This book explores the dance music of generations of Polish Americans and emphasizes the shared sense of belonging embodied in "polka sociability."
Living With His Camera, Text by Jane Gallop/Photographs by Dick Blau (Duke University Press, 2003). Features photographs of Blau's own family alongside theoretical essays and personal reflections by Jane Gallop who invokes famous formulations of photography such as Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida and Susan Sontag's On Photography.
Skyros Carnival by Dick Blau, Agapi Amanatidis, Panayotis Panopoulos, and Steven Feld. A VoxLox Book, 2010. An experiment in art and anthropology documenting two trips to the oldest Dionysian carnival in Greece, the Goat Dance of Skyros. This multi-sensory book is made up of pictures, text, sound and video.
His most recent project Thicker Than Water: My Family in Photographs (1968–2012) (as yet unpublished), collects decades of personal family photography. Covering as much of the variety of family experience as he can in a range of settings that includes (among others) the kitchen, the bathroom, and the backyard, Blau looks at both the ordinary and the extraordinary aspects of family life. This book provides Blau's perspective on the material narrated by Gallop in Living With His Camera. He writes, "These pictures are spontaneous transcriptions of my experience, an ethnography of family life, a phenomenology of domestic emotion...By selecting a moment, then stilling and framing it, I try to retain some feeling of the event itself. At the same time, I use the abstract nature of the picture-making process to clear a space for reflection. These photographs are my part of a discourse. Notes to the people I live with and love".
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Much is your reading, but not the Word of GOD....”
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)