We Sort of People - Hardcover

by Henry Horenstein (Photographer), Leslie Tucker (Author), Henry Horenstein (Text by (Art/Photo Books))

The last descendants of a little-known American clan of multiethnic origin

Journalist and Writer Leslie Tucker and photographer Henry Horenstein began working together in 1997, when she invited him to Maryland to shoot a mysterious multiethnic family, the little-known Wesort clan: We sorts are different from you sorts. The project started as a genealogical search for a family whose roots stretched back to the founding of the first Catholic colony, it grew into a mystery about the multiethnic origins of America, then became a race against time as the Wesorts and their descendants disappeared and their stories died. While Horenstein photographed the last generation of Proctors and their disappearing world, Tucker recorded the conversations she had with the wise women of the family. A living archive emerges, with voices that portray the complex realities of their lives in their own words, as seen through their eyes.

Author Biography

Henry Horenstein has been a professional photographer, filmmaker, teacher, and author since the 1970s. He studied history at the University of Chicago and earned his BFA and MFA at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he studied with legends Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. His work is collected and exhibited internationally and he has published over 30 books. In recent years, Henry Horenstein has been making films: Preacher, Murray, Spoke, Partners, and Blitto Underground. He is professor of photography at Rhode Island School of Design and lives in Boston.

Leslie Tucker worked in book and magazine publishing, children's television, and broadcast journalism. She was a freelance field producer for CNN Manila. After the Soviet Union collapsed, she managed thirty regions in Russia, teaching radio and TV journalists how to produce Western-style economic news. Leslie majored in English literature at Princeton University, where she studied with award-winning playwrights Romulus Linney, Mar? Irene Forn駸, and Adrienne Kennedy, who encouraged her to leave America in order to see it more clearly. She lived in Moscow for nearly two decades and now lives in northern Virginia.Shannon Thomas Perich is curator, Photographic History Collection, Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. She has authored books, curated exhibitions, written blogs, and given lectures that cover the earliest of photography to the most current. She is a history of photography adjunct professor at Maryland Institute College of Art. She and Horenstein have worked in collaboration several times across two decades.