Category Archives: Book reviews

Photography books

Cristobal Balenciaga

Book reviews

In a class of one.

The cover says it all

If you love severe sculptural form – whether in your women, buildings or clothes – then there’s a strong argument to be made that fashion starts and ends with the Basque designer Balenciaga.

If you love great photography of the most beautiful women and clothes ever seen, then there’s every reason to get this very large and very expensive book about the designer.

The core of the book addresses Balenciaga’s output through 1968 when he closed his eponymous couture store in Paris. The last third deals with the resuscitated Balenciaga name from 1999 on and it is rubbish – ugly people in T shirts and poor make-up. The book is still worth it for the first two thirds.

The 1950s saw the nascent flowering of the supermodel who would henceforth have a name and with it fame and fortune. The only snag is that Balenciaga’s designs demanded a perfect figure. Size 8 and up need not apply. And in the likes of Lisa Fonssagrives (Mrs. Irving Penn), Suzy Parker and the impossibly perfect Dovima (she of Avedon’s ‘Dovima with Elephants’) Balenciaga had all he needed to best show his creations. The Basque with French and Spanish in his blood and the sureness of line last seen in Matisse tolerated nothing less than perfection.

There was another significant change in the 1950s – the rise of the supermodel coincided with like ascendancy of star photographers, and their work is on show in a big way here – Cartier-Bresson (some priceless dressing room snaps which are new to me), Avedon, Penn, Clarke. The best of the best.

Here’s my favorite of Dovima in a stunning Balenciaga creation, appropriately taken by Richard Avedon.

Balenciaga and Dovima, 1950

And if the following raises a question it is a simple one – Where have all the lovely women gone?

Balenciaga and Georgia Hamilton by Avedon, 1953

Edward Hopper and photography

Book reviews, Paintings

Even if you don’t care for painting, check him out.

I have written before about the American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and of both the love I have for his work and the strong influence he has exerted over my way of seeing as a photographer. For Hopper is that most photographic of painters. And I don’t mean photographic in the dry, sterile, rather sick sense of the photorealists (gee, if you are going to kill yourself making a painting look like a photograph, why not just photograph the bloody thing and save some time?). No, I mean it in the sense that with his people-in-the-city paintings there are all the elements of photographic composition with the painter’s singular advantage that distracting clutter can simply be blended out with some brushwork.

Case in point:

Edward Hopper, Two on the aisle, 1927

You get a touch of realism in the ‘decisive moment’ timing of the picture, a touch of surrealism in the detailing of the woman’s face and a touch of Degas (also a fine photographer) in the back of the woman in the box on the right. The perspective is gently skewed in the best Bonnard tradition.

Invariably, when it comes to people, Hopper trends to the lonely vision of the American Experience, as here:

Edward Hopper, New York Ofice, 1962

I know exactly how he felt.

Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64, Anchorage, 1978

Nor is that vision unique to American cities:

Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, Kodachrome 64, Paris, 1974

There are many fine books on Hopper. One I recommend is “Edward Hopper: Light and Dark” by Gerry Souter, Parkstone, 2007. Barely published and already remaindered, it’s replete with many illustrations (over 140) and Souter’s text makes for interesting reading, devoid of pomposity. Any photographer looking to sharpen and refine his vision could do worse than plonking down $25 for a remaindered copy.

Click the picture for Amazon.

Italy from Above

Book reviews

A superb book.

The most beautiful women.

The world’s greatest art.

The finest fashions.

The most beautiful cars.

The magic of opera.

The best wines.

The most sublime architecture.

The deepest possible contempt for government and taxes.

The realization that you work to live, not vice versa.

And if that wasn’t enough, why not throw in the most gorgeous landscapes?

That is Italy and to say that the photography in this large book is spectacular is to do the photographers – Antonio Attini and Marcello Bertinetti (names to conjur with!) – an injustice.

No fewer than 423 pages grace this book which comes with a DVD of the Alps. Aptly enough, the foreword is by Franco Zeffirelli, and if you haven’t seen a Zeffirelli staging of an Italian opera, well, you haven’t lived.

Mine came from Edward R Hamilton, a tad shopworn, for $19.95, DVD included. Sure, they don’t take web orders but at that price, what’s your hurry? Get an envelope and a stamp. And don’t ask. Just go out right now and get this fabulous book.

As an adjunct, if you want to learn how Brunelleschi worked his magic on the dome in Florence, add this while you are at it.

Real Chicago

Book reviews

Book review.

One of the reasons I so like Chicago is that I have never had to visit it in the winter. Add the fact that is is the quintessential American city, has mid-west standards and values, not to mention America’s finest architecture, and you have a place well worth visiting. No one who has lived there could remotely think of New York, by contrast, as anything but a European city.

The title of this book says it all. Divided into decade chapters from the forties to the nineties, it comes as no surprise that the best work here is in the first two chapters. When you realize that five frames per second is discounted as slow in the world of modern DSLRs, think about the working stiff with his Crown Graphic and a couple of film holders. He generally had but one chance to capture the decisive moment, and you see lots of that in this book. Something about these old pictures speaks differently, too. Maybe its their dignity, grace and composition. They move you in the way modern photojournalism seldom does.

My remaindered copy cost all of $15 and I recommend you add this book to your photo library.

And if you think I have glossed over the decades of machine politics and corruption in America’s second city well, I learned everything I ever needed about Chicago’s law enforcement from the succinct words of the humorist P. G. Wodehouse. “At least when you buy a Chicago cop, they stay bought”. Honor and integrity. Got to love that in your local police force.

You can see my library of photography books by clicking here.

For a fabulous evocation of what the city must have been like in the early post war years, click here.

Architectural photography

Architecture, Book reviews

An under-appreciated field.

While I cannot remember a time when I did not think about photography on a daily basis, an interest in architecture did not seriously take seed until the age of 29. That was the year I moved to New York City. While its inherent bias on the editorial pages sadly infects the news reporting in the New York Times, no such favoritism was evident in the writings of Paul Goldberger and Ada Louise Huxtable. Their topic was architecture.

Before I knew it I was attending lectures by prominent architects, fascinated by the melding of big business, art and massive budgets with all the related logistical complexity which is what results when you try to build in New York. I mean, look at the realities. Those seeking to do you harm include the Mob (concrete to this day costs 20% more in NYC than anywhere else), the City of New York (relatively cheap to buy, after the Mob is accounted for), Albany, Washington and just about every other government apparatchik you can think of. The only difference between the Mob and the government is that the latter wrote the laws. If you can make a tall building in Manhattan you can make one with impunity anywhere.

Absorbing Huxtable’s and Goldberger’s teaching I cemented my relationship with architecture by visiting Chicago for the first time. Simply stated, Chicago’s finest buildings are to Manhattan what Ferrari is to GM. But New York’s winters were tough enough, thank you, so it wasn’t as if I was about to move there, much as I love the people of the mid-west. And those writers’ teachings made an indelible expression. Give me those charming moments of partial consciousness that define falling asleep and, likely as not, you will find my mind straying to New York City architecture.

You can say an awful lot about a building by measuring your desire to touch it. Not metaphysically. Walk up to it and touch it. And for me there were always three which made that distinguished cadre. The Flatiron Building. Philip Johnson’s AT&T. And Seagram. Johnson again.

So bad did this habit become that I made a point of walking past the last two on the way home just to be able to brush them with my fingertips. Maybe some of the magic would rub off?

No secret that I would make special efforts to entertain clients at lunch in the Four Seasons at the plaza level of Johnson’s Seagram masterpiece. From there I could gaze at the no less wonderful Lever House, airily perched on stilts on the west side of Park Avenue. It was my privilege to watch AT&T grow from my 40th floor office in the so-high-tech Citicorp Center, sloping roof for solar panels and all. Still not installed last I checked. Like the corporation, the architecture was crass, vulgar and ethically challenged. AT&T was so beautifully made that you just had to touch it. And they had that Apollo chap in the lobby, all gilded, with massive transatlantic cables draped about him.

As for the Flatiron, forget about all those schoolboy statistics about it being the tallest, the first with a steel frame, the first with elevators, etc. All you had to know was that Stieglitz had photographed it in 1903.

I was lucky to be reminded of all of this by the loan of a book on architectural photography from a friend. There, on page 113, Stieglitz’s masterpiece of the Flatiron is annotated thus:

Stieglitz’s ethereal view of the Flatiron, taken with a hand-held camera, typifies the Pictorialist approach to architecture.

That got my attention. I am of that school, after all. And here is that snap:

The book is Building with Light by Robert Elwall. American architecture is remarkably well represented (the author is the Curator of the British Architectural Library) with not a trace of condescension, and the whole 240 page tome is a breathtaking survey of architectural photography from the early nineteenth century through today. (Note: Architectural photography has not improved in the last 150 years).

Some of my favorite images are, unsurprisingly, from California residential architecture. Shulman and Neutra are amply represented as they adapt the new international style to a smaller scale. The photography changes too. What was once formal documentation is now pure pictorialism. It’s the effect of the building, not its technical detail, that fascinates.

Sieglitz would be proud.

All of which gives me two suggestions. First, get the book if buildings speak to you. Second, stay tuned for some of my architectural pictures ….