Book review.

Click the picture to go to Amazon US where you will also find a video presentation by Allard.

Photographers like National Geographic’s William Albert Allard and Sam Abell pretty much put the nail in the coffin of tired and increasingly pretentious hack monochrome work. We live in a world of color and refusing to see it thus mostly testifies to the skill of the photographer, or lack thereof. Sure, every now and then something works better in black and white but mostly that’s for the artsy-fartsy set or for collectors of vintage images. Yes, HC-B is better without color, but he is in a class of one.

This is a magnificent book. The color photographs, their reproduction, Allard’s text – the whole thing is as good as it gets. Allard never pulls punches but that does not make his work in any way crude. Some of the slaughterhouse pictures will offend tender sensibilities.This is a great color photojournalist at work.

Highly recommended for anyone wanting to broaden his vision.

Allard writes:

“I think I can feel color … I can’t explain it, but I can feel it. In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color”. Bravo!

My favorite? ‘Outside my window’ taken in, where else? Paris, Le Marais on page 153. The cover picture of the Sicilian beauty Benedetta Buccellato, above, is interestingly not especially representative of his work, so don’t expect a book of fashion pictures. However, I can only agree with his friend’s comment on seeing the actress’s portrait gracing the cover of National Geographic: “A beautiful woman on one cover is worth ten months of monkeys”. You can keep the monkeys and you won’t find any in this book. The work here is that of a color street snapper par excellence.

Book review.

Click for the Amazon listing.

This book profiles four famous National Geographic photographers spanning the transition from large format glass plates to 35mm Leica Kodachromes. The sense of arduous discovery, the difficulty and danger of the expeditions these men undertook and the unstinting commitment of the National Geographic Society to exposing its readership to the unknown is hard to convey.

The men profiled – Maynard Owen Williams, Luis Marden, Volkmar Wentzel and Thomas Abercrombie – are all exceptional. Whether polyglots, great writers (true photjournalists), technologists (Marden was an expert pilot and scuba diver) or humanitarians (Abercrombie became a Muslim, so committed was he to the Arabic way of life from his travels), all were superb photographers.

There are many fascinating tidbits here, such as NG’s reluctance to take Marden’s Leica negatives seriously. Then Kodachrome came along and all that changed.

But the prevailing memory from reading this beautifully printed book is of the photographs, never less than special, often breathtaking.

You can pay up at Amazon for this $40 tome or get one from Edward R Hamilton, as I did, for all of $3.95. I order books there by the dozen and whether you buy one or a hundred, shipping is $3.95. That’s quite a bargain had you tried to lift the last delivery into your home as I did. I’m going to need the money saved on shipping to pay the chiropractor.

The economics of art books continue to leave me befuddled. Why would anyone want to lose so much money? Thank goodness they do, though, as it makes for an inexpensive library.

A fine street photographer.

The Swiss photographer Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) wisely chose New York as his home, well away from the stolid burghers of his place of birth. There he found the excitement of the streets as can only be found in a few of the great metropolises of the world – New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, London – where else is there? His street snaps take three guises – candids, vernacular works (contemporary advertisements and the like) and architecture.

Click the picture for Amazon US.

All are done with a lovely gentle touch, with none of the occasional brutality of fellow traveler Walker Evans.

Recommended for all enamored of the street photography genre. This generously illustrated book is some $32 from Amazon, but I found mine for all of $11.95 at Edward R. Hamilton – they may have a few left, so hurry. The book includes an interesting essay on Burckhardt by Phillip Lopate.

Book review.

Click for the book on Amazon

This slim book of some ninety photographs presents a current documentary on the cruel, decaying prison on Alcatraz Island in the bay of San Francisco. Cruel in so many ways, from the views of both the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges, from the sounds of freedom wafting from the mainland on the prevailing wind, for the views of America’s most beautiful city so close yet out of reach. It’s as if it was located to enhance the suffering of the inmates for some sadistic purpose, purportedly in the service of man. The Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment and while there’s no excusing the actions of those who ended up in Alcatraz, there’s even less excuse for the sheer brutality of the concept.

Clint Eastwood starred in a fine movie Escape from Alcatraz which speaks to the only successful escape, by three inmates, which shows well the inhumanity of the place. Short, sharp and well acted by all, it’s an excellent companion piece to this book, whose Foreword by Peter Coyote is startlingly well written. What sort of person has it in him to become a prison guard, let alone a governor of such an institution?

This book has current pictures, many of which show the merciful decay of this horror story, and contains many memorable images. Perhaps the most poignant is also the simplest. It’s by Peikwen Cheng, appropriately enough a resident of a prison to over one billion souls, and appears on page 40. Titled ‘Days Go By’ it shows the scratches made on a cell wall by an inmate, counting the days of his incarceration. Nothing could be simpler or more powerful.

A mix of well reproduced color and monochrome images, the book is recommended if you like atmospheric photography with a message.