
Uncle Charlie
- Publisher
- Contrasto
- ISBN
- 9788869654244
- Specifications
- Hardback
21.3 x 29 cm
408 pages
300 pictures
English
Italian translation by Maria Baiocchi as a separate booklet
Texts edited by Beau Freelander
From the early 1980s, when Asnin began studying photography, the life of his uncle fired his imagination. Charlie and his five children live together in Bushwick, Brooklyn; fragile, depressed and emotionally unstable, unable to work or even to leave his apartment, Charlie Henschke is a kind of human wreck. The book is an exceptional visual document of texts, pictures and documents forming a diary of his life: his struggle with mental illness, isolation, poverty, his family ties. Asnin uses photography for a journey that becomes almost an obsession, a will to understand truths, even unpleasant ones, about his uncle and his family. The complex layout links words, private documents and images; the texts come from long recorded conversations. "After thirty years this book is life, naked and indecipherable. A story of broken dreams, of finding flakes of happiness in the most oppressed life, of obsessions and grief, of the relationship between two men and two generations."