Praise for Shattered Dreams Revisited

"Lauren Pacini's Shattered Dreams Revisited is a powerful document of hope. This book tells the story of the rebirth of Cleveland with engaging photographs and the moving poetry and prose of students. Pacini's creative dialogue between image and word allows us to see and understand Cleveland in new and startling ways that superimpose the past, present, and yet-to-be-dreamed-of future. Shattered Dreams Revisited offers us a memorable testament to the resilient spirit of Clevelanders and their city."

David Hassler, Director of Kent State University's Wick Poetry Center
and author of Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community

"In Shattered Dreams Revisited Lauren Pacini captures the defacement, neglect, and flinty beauty of Cleveland's built environment. His striking black and white photographs are grist for the poetry of his Cleveland students. One young poet finds the shape of a staple in the stark lines of a housing project, another calls the inscrutable graffiti on a crumbling wall "a color pop in a grey world." Pacini's lens finds beauty and structure in what others choose not to see. In addition to his students' poetry, his photographs are accompanied by an accurate and insightful text that amplifies and finds evidence of rebirth in the detritus of the city's past."

Virginia P. Dawson, Ph.D., local historian and author

"If ever there was a book that looked at urban decay—and all of its related sorrows—squarely in the eye, and yet emerged with an honest belief that something beautiful would rise up in its place, Shattered Dreams Revisited is it. This lucid, brave and tender book just might be one of those first phoenixes. Tightly written and poetically photographed with loving attention paid to the play of light and dark in complex industrial spaces, Lauren Pacini begins by showing us the ruins of a more prosperous time in the life of Cleveland. The beauty of damage accentuates the tragedy. Neglected buildings and monster industrial machines now covered with ivy and peeling paint are painful to look at because they are portraits of the waste of human energy and of lives spent in those places.

"But Lauren Pacini's message isn't a fixation on despair and nostalgia. Rather, his haunting black-and-white photographs of injured Cleveland expose the powerful bones of marvelous structures that are still standing here, worthy of being seen, studied, and perhaps reclaimed for some new purpose by the creative imaginations of a new generation. As the book unfolds, instances of adaptive reuse are celebrated in another section of photographs. Shattered Dreams Revisited culminates in the most perfect way imaginable, with poems by young people written in response to seeing these photographs of Cleveland's past. They are meditations on what had been, why it all fell apart, and what to do about it."

Marianne Berardi, Ph.D., Cleveland-based art historian
and Senior Fine Art Specialist, American and European Paintings
Heritage Auctions, Dallas, Texas

"Shattered Dreams Revisited is stunningly beautiful! Photographer Lauren Pacini captures the many sides of industrial geography, from the architecture of the buildings to the machines that fill them. Through his photography Lauren has turned them all into story-telling works of art. On top of that, the student poetry is icing on the cake."

Diahann Lohr, Adunate Word & Design, Madison, Wisconsin

"My first reaction to Lauren's photos is memory of working in and wandering around through the empty buildings at the south end of Ellis Island. There is a sense of a profound past of human energy and industry, of hope, and of fear of the unknown future. And here we are with this book of photos and stories in that future of the past. We are at a place where we look back on that which has been and we dream, even as those before us, to that world which could be just one more move beyond the bend ahead. . . What I see in this book is not only Cleveland, not only the Midwest, not only an urban landscape; what I see is what I see of America every day all over this land."

Ken Follett, Follett PCLS, Mastic Beach, New York.

"Everyone who loves photography, especially black and white pictures with a story, will find Lauren Pacini's Shattered Dreams Revisited full of entertaining images and text. It is all presented with the raw undercurrent of truth as the frankness of the imagery will reveal. Photographs of hulking factories and buildings being torn down come straight from the present day, but offer a glimpse into the magnificence that once was. The artist has worked to present much of the imagery of the shattering of the industrial dream in the stark and compelling negative space necessary to convey the sensibility along with the sense. Black and white is clearly the best choice. This work stands out ultimately because it blends a mature artist's perceptive work in the first half of the book with the viewpoint provided by children writing poetry about the images in the second half. The writings of the children offer a contemporary and youthful testimony to the many currents ebbing about the collapse and rebirth of an industrial empire of old.

"If falling into disuse were to be the only story, it would be a distillation similar to other works of its kind, but Shattered Dreams Revisited takes the viewer on the next part of the journey--one showing the struggle to recover the use of these industrial works for a modern post-industrial use. Pacini helps to ensure there will indeed be future interest, not only for the gifted child writers and their peers who make potential future residents, but for all viewers who give Shattered Dreams Revisited the chance to influence their own lives."

David Perlman-Hall, fine art photographer, Cleveland, Ohio

"As I viewed the images in Shattered Dreams Revisited I was compelled to imagine the human being standing in the street, the room, the home, the business, that were no longer there. Lauren has the ability to conjure up the magic that puts "humanity" back into the image after they have been absent for a long time. You can feel the immense loss not to the city, or the real estate,or the tax base.. .but to the human being that once called these buildings home, work, school, church, business. Thank you Lauren for putting essential humanity back in the frame of the industrial ruins. A lesson for us all."

Patty Izzo
Patricia Izzo Fine Art Photography Studio and Gallery
Detroit, Michigan