Matthew Naythons: Light in Dark Places

photography monograph for Matthew Naythons / Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin

texts by: Judith Thurman, Jon Lee Anderson, Don Carleton, Matthew Naythons

From the Introduction by John Lee Anderson: As I look at Matthew Naythons’s photographic life—the collection he has assembled here—a word in Spanish comes ineluctably to mind. It is frenesí, a term that translates into English most often nowadays as “frenzy,” but which, once upon a time, was employed to describe a passionate state of being, a “furious delirium.” That definition, or perhaps the more modern-sounding “derangement,” feels right for the world that Matthew documented over a quarter-century span of time, from 1963 to 1988—the period encompassing his images represented here.
This remarkable selection of photos shows us the United States at the very apogee of its Cold War–era prowess, but paradoxically also engaged in a seemingly endless continuum of fateful stumbles in the world and at home. How else but derangement to define the years of America-in-the-world witnessed and documented by Matthew Naythons? It’s a collection that begins with John F. Kennedy’s funeral in 1963, takes us through the fall of Saigon, the Nicaraguan Revolution, and Jonestown, and then trails off in the Reagan era, with the United States stepping back into the breach with its invasion of Grenada and its interventions in Central America.

288 pages
10 x 12inches