This sumptuous hardbound edition features 26 black and white photographs, each corresponding with letters of the alphabet. Pulled from Caffery s deep archive, this book reimagines in an open and creative way that essential experience of every childhood our ABCs. A unique and beautiful book, able to reach hearts and minds through the playful interaction between the alphabet and photography.

FORWARD
"As a Curator of Photography, I have an abiding love for the book as an exciting medium for presenting artist' work in thought full and playful ways. Alphabet, by Debbie Fleming Caffery, is a special volume that transcends the beauty and interest one typically expects of a compilation by a master photographer. This is a book to savor not just on one's own, but also with family. I imagine sitting down with my young daughter, Scarlett, who will soon be one and a half years old, to discover this book. Turning page after page, we will unearth together how letters, words, and powerfully evocative pictures drawn from the everday world can lead our imaginations to soar, unlocking the power of creativity in the process of learning and discovery.

Debbie Fleming Caffery is considered one of the great contemporary photographers of the American South. Known for an exceptional and broad body of work, spanning haunting image of sugar cane harvesting in Louisiana to striking portraits and landscapes in Mexico and the Mississippi Delta, her picutres are collected by museums and art enthusiast around the world.The wonderful lyricism of her images evoke an open-ended sense of mystery that provides the perfect avenue through which to discove the possibilites of our surroundings and their creative relationship to the building blocks of language."

-Brett Abbott 
Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Forth Worth, Texas

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www.falllinepress.com
meghan@falllinepress.com

My photograph of "Polly’s Hand" was published in the the Washington Post Inauguration Issue in 2009 for President Obama. The image was used by the magazine to illustrate the poem "Fleshing — out the Season" by Yusef Komnyakaa 

Having Polly’s photograph in this Issue honoring Obama’s inauguration has been one of the greatest joys in my photographic career. The time I spent with her resides in my heart. – Debbie Fleming Caffery

“Polly Joseph and Debbie Fleming Caffery are women of southern Louisiana. Together they formed an intimate, isolated bond initiated by photography and matured into an unlikely friendship. The details of Polly’s life, present and past, became a collection of fables Caffery drank in like the dust-filled air and the deep, articulated shadows that surrounded them. Caffery’s photographs transmit mystery and truth through the story, body, and home of Polly: they are a collective portrait of unspeakable power.”
— Trudy Wilner Stack

Limited Editon
Edition of 25 copies laid in a clamshell box
8 x10 silver-gelatin photograph signed by the artist

9 x 10 inches • 25 duotone plates • 60 pages

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Under the auspices of a grant from the Open Society Initiative, native Louisianan Debbie Fleming Caffery explored the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, a small portion of which is compellingly captured here. Focusing primarily on the Lower Ninth Ward, Caffery photographed the debris left behind in the wake of mass evacuations - wrecked cars, a steak knife and an eggshell, photographs tacked to walls, a pair of dentures - and the journey of many displaced residents from the overcrowded and increasingly dangerous New Orleans Convention Center and Superdome to a shelter in Baton Rouge.

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The third in a fantastic little series from Filigranes Editions. Superbly edited, with numerous images that have rarely been seen before, this wonderful collection has sparse text in French only.


OUT OF PRINT – Copies available at Amazon

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In 1990, the Smithsonian published a softbound monograph on a photographer born and raised in Louisiana by the name of Debbie Fleming Caffery. Her dark, haunting images of sugar cane workers nearly overpowered the book, creating a yearning by all who purchased it to see more. But no publications were forthcoming, and the book, Carry Me Home, became one of the most sought after out-of-print books on the market.

Debbie Fleming Caffery has photographed sugar cane workers in her native southern Louisiana since the early 1970s. Her images convey the sense of mystery and foreboding that surrounds the sugarcane culture. Figures rise out of smoke and fire, a disembodied pair of legs marches out of the mist, menacing looking machines loom over the sugar mill. The photos in the second and third sections of the book are softer and more tender. Caffery's subjects here are her friend Polly, photographed in the almost total darkness of her one-room cabin in the woods, and Caffery's three children at play. The portraits of Polly and the still lifes of her few possessions are remarkable in their simplicity and intensity. The photos of Caffery's children reflect her young subjects' imaginations and rejoice in their games. This striking collection of silver prints, reproduced in rich duotone, is both a documentation of a particular way of life likely to vanish soon and a testament to its enduring significance.

OUT OF PRINT – Copies available at Amazon

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