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• Douglas Stockdale

Publisher’s Description
A bartender-photographer trains her eye on the patrons at McGlinchey’s bar

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and the regulars start to file into the perpetual twilight of a downtown bar in Philadelphia. Bartender Sarah Stolfa pours out the drinks then picks up her camera.

McGlinchey’s is a haven for drinkers from all walks of life: You’ll meet the rebellious college student with pink-streaked hair and a bottle of hangover-inducing brew; the sharply dressed businessman with a yearning look; the pensive loner carefully ignoring his newspaper and bag of chips; and the former prom king with his tie and V-neck sweater, double fisting a shot and a beer.

The urban bar experience is brought to life in these pages, topped off with an introduction written by best-selling author Jonathan Franzen and Stolfa’s own meditations on finding her inspiration while tending bar. For young hipsters, grizzled old-timers, and everyone in between, The Regulars is as elegant as an Old Master painting and as down-home as a bottle of Bud.

‘What I like very much about Ms. Stolfa’s photographs (though they don’t always make me comfortable, and don’t really seem to be portraits) is their effort at human acceptance within the boundaries of her own necessarily confined photographic vernacular. Photographs don’t say things; they just are. But Stolfa’s pictures-were they to speak to us in words-would, I believe, say yes.’ -Richard Ford

Buy at http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=zd950&i=&i2=&CFID=7296016&CFTOKEN=11949120