Tom Young is a retired career art teacher at Greenfield Community College (MA). He is also a photographer of radical vision who continues to teach in four-year art schools, and whose work is represented in more than thirty permanent collections, including the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), and the Eastman Museum of Photography. This book of his work is produced by George F. Thompson, and distributed by International Publishers Marketing. Young's medium is photocollage. Each is a single subdivided image whose geometric format resembles a strip of film (the artist describes his childhood inspiration as a TV which had lost its vertical hold). Within the larger image, inset images involve staged objects, snapshots, interiors, landscapes, or manipulated photographs, all in black and white with understated, skillful color. The overall effect is haunting; domestic, revealing, and almost narrative, in ways reminiscent but not derivative of the work of Joseph Cornell. The artist calls the genre visual fiction. The book's design, by David Skolkin, keeps things rooted in a spare, ordinary space. The images juxtapose faces, bare branches, worn-out cloth, empty interiors, and other intimations of mortality, but Young's small deft evocations of casual moments in the everyday lives of people we might meet in the grocery store keep the work sad, lovely, and mysterious without falling into gothic extremity. The images carry great emotional weight. The book will be interesting to artists in many media, and to anyone who has been fascinated by that old box filled with photographs, faded letters, a medal for heroism in a forgotten war, and a mysterious scrap of cloth. Oversize: 10x13". Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)