An extraordinary book by Peter Keetman.

What the Leica is to rangefinder cameras and the Nikon F to SLRs, so is the VW Beetle to cars. Each is an icon which transcends time and criticism. Each was the very best that its respective designers and engineers had to offer.

The photography in this book is exceptional. The cover picture is a foretaste of what is to come. Keetman, who spent a week in the VW facory in 1953 without a commission or pay, does not document workers toiling in tough conditions making thousands of cars. Social statements are not his interest. Rather, everywhere he points his camera he sees geometrical forms, shapes repeated, industrial beauty of the highest order.

Hundreds of differential gears look like so many flowers in a meadow. Stacked body panels create beautiful, repetitive designs. Cylinder heads look like nothing so much as immense, expressionist buildings – think of the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles or the BMW headquarters in Munich.

An exceptionally honest essay by Rolf Sachsse pulls no punches as to the provenance of the Beetle and Armin Kley provides a useful technical piece on the development of this cultural icon – the iPod of its day.

You do not need to like cars to love the great photography in this ninety page paperback, first published in the US in 1992. Amazon lists used copies for very little. Rush out and get one before they are gone.

Mass passing as class.

You either like Ralph Gibson’s work or you hate it. The pretentious Latin title is certainly a warning. And you really need the nude on the cover?

I’m OK with it, but anytime you see a book published by Taschen, be assured there will be lots of gratuitous nudity, and this one is no exception.

Gibson does have a strong, identifiable style and that has me coming back to this very thick book time and again. And every time I like it a little more. Or hate it a little less.

Too bad he didn’t exercise more critical editorial judgment when deciding what to publish.

768 pages of Elliot Erwitt I can handle, but 768 pages of Ralph Gibson?

Worth a look, I suppose; Amazon has it.

A book by Chris Steele-Perkins.

By the time I was old enough to think or remember, Teddy Boys were a thing of the past in England. These disenchanted youth made their home in the Fifties, affecting a distinct form of clothing – long Edwardian coats with velvet collars – and strangely shaped hair.

‘Teddy Boys’, the collective noun used to describe them, purportedly stems from the association their choice of clothing had with the grandest of British eras, the Edwardian, named after that wanton wastrel, Edward VII. Old ‘Teddy’ had waited most of his life to succeed long-lived Queen Victoria to the throne of England, (like the current monarch she was too wise to the ways of the world – and of her son – to abdicate) amusing himself in the meanwhile by bedding most of Europe’s eligible women and eating and drinking his way through a modest fortune in gustatory delights. Prince Charles should bone up, if you pardon the verb, on his history, lest he continues repeating it.

However, Teddy, short and worthless as his reign was, enjoyed the height of luxury that the British Empire had procured for the country in four centuries of conquest. It was all over by then, of course, but it would take a while, and Queen Victoria’s German relatives, to make sure everyone in England knew that. It was called World War I.

Anyway, the fifties’ Teddy Boys emulated at least some facets of Edwardian dress and proceeded to spoil what little they had going for them with foul hair, dipped in axle grease.

Not a lot to like, then, except that Chris Steele-Perkins’s pictures do a great job of conveying the feel of that era. There’s almost a careless sort of snapshot quality to much of the work here and it seems especially appropriate to what would prove to be a transient fad.

Recommended.

A fine book of pictures by Don Normark.

Click the picture.

This wonderful book, published in 1999 and available from Amazon, showcases the pictures taken by Don Normark when he stumbled upon a Hispanic area of Los Angeles near what is now Dodger Stadium. Little was he to know that one year later the slums there would be condemned to be replaced by a public housing development. Characterless slums replacing charismatic ones.

Only many years later did Normark realize what he had; he tracked down the former residents of Chavez Ravine and documents their recollections here – a place with vibrant memories illustrated with his superb photographs. That this tightly knit community of Latinos allowed a white boy into their midst is wonder enough. But his photography makes it clear just how blessed his many visits would turn out to be.

Mercifully Normark avoids the trait of most ‘photojournalists’, who somehow think their training in darkroom chemicals qualifies them to be political commentators. In much the same way that Hollywood actors and singers suddenly conclude their fame empowers them to pontificate on geopolitics, once that Oscar is on the mantle or the platinum selling CD is on the wall. Hey, it’s free publicity, no?

None of this sort of nonsense is to be seen here. What you do see is a sensitive, no, more than that, dignified, portrait of a vibrant community of tightly knit people, shortly to be cruelly replaced by a development crafted in a smoke filled room by corrupt politicians and their paymasters, corrupt developers.

This is a very special book which deserves to be on every photographer’s bookself.