Trager, Philip 1935-

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TRAGER, Philip 1935-

PERSONAL: Born February 27, 1935, in Bridgeport, CT; married Ina Shulkin, 1957; children: Julie, Michael. Education: Wesleyan University, B.A., 1956; Columbia University School of Law, J.D., 1960; selftaught in photography.

ADDRESSES: Home—20 Rolling Ridge Road, Fairfield, CT 06430.

CAREER: Trager and Trager counselors-at-law, Fairfield, CT, attorney, 1960—; independent photographer, Fairfield, CT, 1966—.

AWARDS, HONORS: Book of the Year Award, American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1977; Twenty-five Best Books Award, Association of American University Presses, 1977; Recommended Book of the Year citation, New York Times, 1977, 1980; Distinguished Alumnus Award, Wesleyan University, 1981; Lay Person Award, Connecticut Society of Architects, 1981.

WRITINGS:

Echoes of Silence, Scroll Press (Danbury, CT), 1972.

Photographs of Architecture, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1977.

Philip Trager: New York, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1980.

Wesleyan: Photographs, text by Vincent Scully, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1982.

The Villas of Palladio, text by Vincent Scully, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1986.

Dancers, essays by Joan Acocella and David Freedberg, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1992.

Persephone, text by Ralph Lemon and Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, poems by Eavan Boland and Rita Dove, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1996.

Changing Paris: A Tour along the Seine, commentary by Thomas Mellins, Arena Editions (Santa Fe, NM), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS: Philip Trager is a renowned photographer of architecture, capturing the aesthetic essence behind New York City brownstones, Italian villas, and Parisian monuments, both old and new. From the anonymous, modern buildings of Manhattan, crowded together and forming a whole, Trager turned to the monumental works of a famed Italian Renaissance architect in The Villas of Palladio. "If buildings could be, so to speak, unclothed, then what Trager has done is analogous to rendering Palladio's architecture nude. He has taken some of the most familiar buildings of the Renaissance and jarred that familiarity by creating at once an atmosphere of intimacy and detachment," wrote a reviewer for Progressive Architecture. For this reviewer, "the forms seem to contain the memory of many human experiences, whose presence is felt in the sounds of former life that hang hauntingly in the air."

Trager brings history and modernism together in Changing Paris: A Tour along the Seine. In recommending the book in Library Journal, Thomas Fry wrote, "Trager moves through the city following the Seine in an attempt to show the . . . particularly effective juxtaposition of varying architectural styles."