Jonas Mekas — I Seem to Live: The New York Diaries (1950–1969), Volume 1

The first of two volumes of Jonas Mekas's New York diaries, covering 1950 to 1969 and published after his death.

These were the years in which the city's avant-garde film scene took shape and a counterculture grew around it. With his brother Adolfas, Mekas shot his first experimental films and worked out the diary film as an essayistic form. The brothers started the magazine Film Culture in 1954, and from 1958 Jonas wrote a column each week for the Village Voice. The entries sit alongside his own visual material, some 800 illustrations in all, 460 of them in colour.

The book follows I Had Nowhere to Go, his diaries of 1944 to 1955, which Spector Books published in 2017. A second volume continues from 1969 to 2011. Anne König edited the text.

Spector Books, 2019. 824 pages, thread-sewn softcover, 16 x 21.5 cm. In English.