Alan Klug

These photographs are about the literature, music, art and architecture that define the stream of Western Civilization, and attempt to picture the enormous varietal richness of that civilization. The effort is in part, documentary, since a good deal of that richness is being lost. I have returned to places as little as a year later to find them modernized, “improved.” Modern communications and transportation simply through speed, and what is more important, mass, tend to homogenize the world. Regional differences disappear, then national differences. A sense of sameness creeps in, and everything gets blended to a sort of vanilla tapioca norm. The human spirit has less and less richness to feed on, but it can’t.I expect this efficient sort of blending will continue, that its pace will in fact quicken, and that it is important to have a view of the way it was before.