Light weight

The book is bound to appear as two titles.

Following the LA Night photos there are eight pages with a conversation between Michael Light and Lawrence Weschler where Light says he uses a Linhof Aero-Technika camera (that uses five-inch roll film) to take these interesting photos of Los Angles. The daylight ones were taken during two days and produced over nine hundred photos which makes me ask why there are only thirteen plus two more used as endpapers? The night section is equally sparse with twelve (and two as endpapers). With so few images in this large-size book it seems more of a vanity project for the publishers, more so as the photo sections are bound as two books in one, for no other reason than to show it can be done (from a printer's point-of-view it's no problem).

The few LA Day photos certainly have some visual charm especially those that reveal a sfumato feel to the city, Light deliberately shot into the sun to create this effect but it also means that all the photos have a grey cast with no real blacks. LA Night, of course, is seriously full of blackness and as such I don't think they are really worth looking at more than a couple of times. The extraordinary look of the freeways in real life with ribbons of white headlights and red tail-lights would have produced some quite stunning photos but in mono the magic evaporates.

The book is certainly a beautiful print job, excellent matt art paper for 250 screen printing. Both photo sections have a page each for the brief captions but there are no page numbers. Incidentally, three of the LA Day photos appeared in 2004 Metropolis book Looking at Los Angeles.