Book review.

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As you are reading this on a computer you are a user of Bill Atkinson’s work, whether you know it or not. You see, Bill was the designer of the original Macintosh graphical user interface almost three decades ago, building on the work done by Xerox at PARC (who were clueless as to what they had) and it’s one used by every Mac and PC today.

But chance does not distribute talent evenly, so in addition to being one of the greatest software engineers of our time, Bill can also lay claim to being an immensely talented photographer.

‘Within the Stone’ is a picture book of 72 photographs of naturally occurring stones. That’s the prosaic description. The reality is that this is simply gorgeous abstract photography, conveyed through the best color reproduction in any book I have seen. It’s not enough that Bill researched his subject over many years and migrated from medium format film to a large sensor scanning digital back to make his pictures. In the process he got deeply involved in researching the reproduction of color on paper and to say that the result is a revelation simply fails to do it justice.

Until now the touchstone for me of abstract photography of naturally ocurring colors and shapes has been Roy Hamman‘s superb Boatscapes, pictures of weathered boat hulls, four of which I am proud to say hang on the dining room wall here. Well, Roy finally has some competition!

If you buy the book, please buy it from Bill directly, not from Amazon. This is a labor of love and I would bet it’s a big money loser for the photographer. Support the arts for just a few dollars more than the WalMart of online sales demands. And, as you might expect of the designer of the Mac’s elegant interface, the packaging is perfect too, with the cardboard shipping container’s flaps overlapping just so, preventing a careless knife from damaging the contents. But then you probably would expect no less from Bill Atkinson, a man not given to doing things by halves.