Difficult Beauty

"Difficult beauty: Rambles, Rants and Intimate Conversations" by photographer and writer Lauren Crux, has 66 full-color digitally remastered photographic images, each accompanied by some short text, offering the reader bits of daily life which conveys a powerful sense of the spiritual and the hilarious. This book, in which little things go vast, is a visual and contemplative balm to the spirit, and who in these times cannot use a bit of comfort, intelligence, and good humor? "The rambles balance intimacy with openness, artistry with colloquial thought and speech. Crux's gaze is simultaneous vast and minute (which I am coming, I think, to understand, is the way of the soul of Lauren Crux). Just when we think we've come on a silly throw away line, or a cliché, or a normal point of view, she turns the phrase and raise the stakes on us. But she's not showing off. She's just talking to us." -Camille Dungy