Word: pratt
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After Susan Sontag's intricate cerebrations on photography, Maude Pratt's observations seem like flash cubes going off at Disney World. "Photography lied and mistook light for fact." "Ubiquity -that's what photography's all about. Locomotion. Not thought-action." And, "I began to doubt that photography was an art. It was a way of life, the best vocation for a single gal to get out and meet people, find a husband, make a few bucks. 'I want to be a photographer' was a plea for love...
Maude Coffin Pratt, focal point of Paul Theroux's latest novel, is a septuagenarian who has taken pictures ever since "a friend of Mama's bought me a camera because she thought I wasn't getting enough fresh air." Maude's picture taking became a career; she herself eventually became a legend to the millions who work and play in the form that is a billion-dollar synapse between technology...
...Maude Pratt is keenly aware of her role as an American original who, as Sinatra says, "did it my way." This sense of independence is focused during the months before a retrospective of her work is to open in New York. It is being hung by a twerpy careerist named Frank Fusco, who moves into Maude's Cape Cod house to rummage through thousands of forgotten prints...
...Pratt meanwhile riffles through the "picture palace" of her memory, superimposing an exotic, lapidary interior life on the grainy black and white surface of a public image. Dominant tenant in the palace is Maude's brother Qrlando, the grand, unconsummated passion of her life. Maude, in fact, has only consummated once, in an unbelievable case of mistaken identity. Thereafter, she is the professional virgin, indistinguishable from her Speed Graphic with its ever renewable unexposed plates...
...doubt the U.S.'s Eximbank will make loans to SIA, and that may cause a touch of embarrassment for both Boeing and United Technologies, the parent of Pratt & Whitney. Only last month executives of both companies blasted Eastern Air Lines' $778 million purchase of 19 European-made A300 Airbuses, charging that the deals had been "unfairly subsidized" by the German, French and Spanish governments. Boeing never had strong grounds for complaint anyway-it accounts for more than half of all commercial plane sales in the non-Communist world. To keep up with traffic growth and meet noise...