Book Reviews Shelf 3 - Portfolios and Photograph Collections©opyright by James Ollinger. All rights reserved. Contents:
|
||||
Ansel Adams: Classic Images and Examples![]() The best metaphor I can offer for Classic Images is that this is a Greatest Hits album, complete with laudatory and biographical liner-notes in the form of a preface. I'm not complaining—there's a lot of great stuff here: Monolith, Rock and Grass, Frozen Lake and Cliffs, José Clemente Orozco, Surf Sequence, the ubiquitous Moon and Half Dome, and many others. Frankly, I would have liked it a little more if it had discussed more which "print" got chosen for presentation: Adams was an artist in the truest sense of the word, and his ideas changed over time; thus an early Adams print of his famous "Moonrise" was different from the prints he made from the same negative decades later (I am not an expert but they look like "late" images to me). SynopsisPros: Beautiful reproductions of his best-known works. Cons: Too small a format. |
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, Women and Olympic Portraits
Annie Leibovitz is arguably the most famous living photographer living of our time. Her photos of celebrities for Rolling Stone have often become the "definitive" image. She moves easily from slick, glossy color work to fine-art B&W. In short, she can do it all. Photographs is my favorite—a collection of celebrity photos. Many of these photos strike me as being gimmicky—Woody Allen wearing a plaid shirt, standing against a wall of red-and-white vertical stripes. Dolly Parton in full regalia striking a feminine, serpentine pose, Arnold Schwarzenegger's massive arms and legs extend outward behind her. Bette Midler lounges in a sea of roses. Tomlin weeps and Pryor grimaces. I am a notorious page-flipper and easily bored; my respect for Leibovitz comes finding it very difficult to turn past any page without giving it a serious look. I've never met any of these people and I do not pretend to get a sense of their true selves—what I get from this book is a great sense character—the person each is trying to be: Tom Wolfe the dandy, John Belushi the blue-collar joe you'd likely bump into at the bowling alley, Redford the cowboy beachcomber. Women is much more of a mix. There are celebrities and nobodies, B&W and color, some are obviously staged, but many are candids. The range appears to be as broad as possible—they only limit being that they are all women (including the obligatory gender-bender). American Music is a series of photographs of musical celebrities, grouped roughly by their genre (blues, country, hip-hop, rock, jazz, a nd their various flavors, shadings and fusions). Some are B&W, some are color; all are powerful. She has a great ability to create a great image, and such flexibility that she can put 100 photographs together without redundancy. They're an incredible synthesis of form, texture, tone and character. I don't follow popular music much—I recognized probably half the names and only a handful by image. But it doesn't matter—this could have been Livonian Music and I would have reacted the same way. Olympic Portraits exhibits Leibovitz's mastery of B&W, the only color is in the text. Again there is the great range—from posed portraits to action shots to a striking shot of gymnist John Roethlisberger's hands. There are a few famous atheletes here: track's Carl Lewis, boxing's Floyd Mayweather and basketball's Grant Hill; but most of the rest will only be remembered by their friends or ardent fans, which makes the images of the hopefuls, the people who strove in obscurity and never sniffed a shoe, cereal or chewing gum endorsement, a little more heroic. Even more admirable is the breadth of endeavor. In addition to the darling sports in the US, gymnastics and track, Leibovitz includes many images from the sports that only run on cable in the middle of the night, if at all—Alexandra Harbold prepares for kayaking, Lily Yip and Jim Butler play table tennis, Kevin Yip makes a spectacular jump in badminton, Sgt. Teresa DeWitt stands by with her 12-gauge in the double-trap event. Writing this review reminds me that I need to find more of Annie's books. SynopsisPros: Candy that won't make you gain weight or rot your teeth. Cons: Some of these books are very expensive, particularly Photographs, which is long out of print. |
||||
Previous shelf: Technical and How-To Next shelf: Stereo Photography Return to Book Reviews directory ©opyright by James Ollinger All rights reserved. |