Encountering Florence

Author, photographer, and professor Susan Hacker Stang explores the city of Florence and the way it has affected those that have allowed themselves to be touched by its beauty and its history. Stang utilized the Polaroid Emulsion Lift process to give the images a lyricism and sense of the past that she finds to be essential to Florence. The photographs are accompanied by quotations by Camus, James, Brodsky, Forster, Cecchi, Luzi, Stendhal and many other novelists, poets and essayists, who speak of the way Florence has touched their lives. The text was researched by Andrea Burzi and Susanna Sarti, both from Florence, and they along with Stang selected the combinations of image and text, finding echoes and resonances between the words and the photographs. The text is in both English and Italian throughout. Co-published by Webster University Press (St. Louis, MO; www.webster.edu/wup) and Palombi Editori (Rome, Italy; www.palombieditori.it)

ISBN: 978-88-6060-072-1

"In the work of Susan Hacker Stang... one discerns the capacity to express a widely held sentiment, conveyed by one who, though coming from afar, observes the city attentively; the photographs ...express all the longing that many from other places feel when confronted by the marbles, the peeling walls and statues of the city, magnificent and ancient artifacts that suggest the inexorable passage of time and the frailty of existence.  A city as not yet seen and perhaps a bit unsettling..."

(translated from intoscana.it  11.5.07)