Suburban World

Name: Suburban World
Brand: MNHS PRESS / INGRAM
SKU: 020939
Price: 27.95 USD
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The Norling Photos

Author Brad Zellar, Foreword by Alec Soth

Minnesota Historical Society Press (April 1, 2008)

An amateur photographer’s astonishing collection of images that showcase the often unexpected psyche of a developing American suburb in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Description

Men wearing suits jousting with sailfish. Head-on bridge collision. Men with linoleum. Kitchen murder-suicide. Firemen playing donkey baseball. Ideal woman in apron. Through more than 10,000 images, Irwin Denison Norling, the unofficial town photographer for Bloomington, Minnesota, captured the strange juxtapositions, incongruities, and dark corners of the developing suburban America of the 1950s and ’60s. A competitive amateur glued to his police radio, Norling spent years examining the light and darkness, tragedies and desolation, rituals of community and celebration through the lens of his camera, deftly capturing the uneasy dichotomy between the familiar and subversive—the familiarly subversive. “That was the way it was. And the way it was, that’s what I was after.”

In 2002 veteran journalist Brad Zellar unearthed Norling’s negatives from the archive of the Bloomington Historical Society. Compelled by the work of this man who had all but drifted into obscurity, Zellar collects the best of these images in Suburban World, a fascinating window into the uneasy contradictions in Norling’s unforgettable and unselfconscious, funny and gritty, not-too-distant past.

Author information

Brad Zellar is an award-winning journalist and writer. He has published hundreds of articles on topics ranging from life and the arts to Twins baseball. One his stories was recently included in Twin Cities Noir. He first wrote about the Norling archive in 2003 for City Pages.

Alec Soth is an internationally acclaimed photographer and the author of Sleeping by the Mississippi and Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth: Paris, Minnesota.