Books by Carol Mavor

Carol Mavor takes in the many shades and meanings of the colour blue, including those of science, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Slavery, gender, sex, ornithology, the literary past, and film.

A vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and femaleWhen photographer Coda Gray befriends a family with a special interest in a young boy, the motivation behind his special attention is difficult to grasp, ¿like water slipping through our fingers.¿ Can a man innocently love a boy who is not his own?Using fiction to reveal the truths about families, communities, art objects, love, and mourning, Like a Lake tells the story of ten-year-old Nico, who lives with his father (an Italian- American architect) and his mother (a Japanese-American sculptor who learned how to draw while interned during World War II). Set in the 1960s, this is a story of aesthetic perfection waiting to be broken. Nico¿s midcentury modern house, with its Italian pottery jars along the outside and its interior lit by Japanese lanterns. The elephant-hide gray, fiberglass reinforced plastic 1951 Eames rocking chair, with metal legs and birch runners. Clam consommé with kombu, giant kelp, yuzu rind, and a little fennel¿in each bowl, two clams opened like a pair of butterflies, symbols of the happy couple. Nico¿s boyish delight in developing photographs under the red safety light of Codäs ¿Floating Zendo¿¿ the darkroom boat that he keeps on Lake Tahoe.The lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda embody northern Californiäs postwar landscape, giving way to fissures of alternative lifestyles and poetic visions. Author Carol Mavor addresses the sensuality and complexity of a son¿s love for his mother and that mother¿s own erotic response to it. The relationship between the mother and son is paralleled by what it means for a boy to be a model for a male photographer and to be his muse. Just as water can freeze into snow and ice, melt back into water, and steam, love takes on new forms with shifts of atmosphere. Like a Lake¿s haunting images and sensations stay with the reader.

Postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement anchor this exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and comprehend the incomprehensible.

Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden produced over eight hundred photographs during her all-too-brief life. Most of these were portraits of her adolescent daughters. In this title, these pictures become windows into Victorian culture, eroticism, mother-daughter relationships, and intimacy.

Drawing attention to the interplay between writing and vision, this book is stuffed with more than 200 images. It is a meditation on the threads that unite mothers and sons and the ways that certain writers and photographers take up those threads and create art that captures an irretrievable past.

Lewis Carroll's photographs of young girls and Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs of Madonnas are two of the subjects in this book, which explores pleasures of all those involved in the creation of the images as well as the images themselves.