Congratulations go out to Douglas Gayeton on the sale of his beautiful book, SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town, which has been acquired by Welcome Books, publishers of a  number of  fantastic illustrated books such as  American Farmer and The Oxford Project.

PBS originally contacted Douglas when he was living in the Northern Italian town of Pistoia (near Florence) and asked if he’d be interested in documenting Italy’s burgeoning Slow Food movement. Gayeton told PBS that most Italians didn’t know what Slow Food was, but since their lives exemplified the principles that define the movement, why not document the lives of the people of Pistoia?

Gayeton added handwritten notes to the resulting photos, initially to remind him of the things he’d seen and heard, but he quickly realized that telling his subject’s stories with words and phrases added enormous power to the images themselves. PBS agreed and the resulting website was named Best Broadband website of the year. You can see some of the photos here: http://www.gayeton.com/photoworks/ When you see the images you may notice that each one is not a single picture, but is instead made up of many different images (sometimes dozens) taken over a period that sometimes stretched out over several weeks. It produces an effect that some critics have called “flat film” for its ability to compress time and add an almost narrative flow to the final image.

Douglas’ images were also featured in a retrospective at Slow Food Nation, the Slow Food movement’s first ever event in the US, where over the three days of the event more than 50,000 people passed through the exhibit. Both Alice Waters (bestselling author and famed founder of Chez Panisse) and Carlo Petrini (the founder of the Slow Food movement), will contribute to SLOW, which will be the definitive book capturing both the rapidly disappearing charm of small town life in Italy and the principles that define the Slow Food movement.

Douglas and his terrific editors at Welcome Books are already well underway on the book, which will be published this Fall and distributed by Random House. Congratulations, Douglas!