The ideal book for the amateur photographer who has a reasonably sized garden and wants to capture the changing fauna and wildlife through the seasons. The author has written several books on photography and I expect they all start, like the first seventy-two pages of this one, with an explanation of how a camera works, the various controls, basic equipment you might need, lenses, lighting, color and composition. This is written, as is the rest of the book, in an easy to understand conversational style.
The four seasons are illustrated with about two hundred photos, mostly of flowers but including wildlife that comes and goes through the year. All the pictures have detailed captions about what's in the frame and ending with technical information, for example the peacock butterfly on page 137 had an exposure of 1/60 f11 90mm macro lens ISO 100. I think the strength of the book is that all the photos are straightforward shots that any amateur could take with practice, there's nothing 'arty' here, that would make the photos very personal to the author. Another plus is that each flower is described so that the book is also a handy botany lesson (the author is a professional biologist)
The book is printed with a 200 screen on a nice matt art but unfortunately the paper is a bit too thick for the book's dimensions which prevents it from opening flat and it created a minor annoyance while I was reading and looking at the photos.
The book is published on the hundredth anniversary of the creation of Czechoslovakia (and since 1993 it changed back to the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and it's a celebration of photobooks published in the country from 1912 to 2018. I thought the contents provided an excellent overview with 580 titles considered, each with the cover and a couple of inside spreads and usefully quite technical captions detailing the publisher, price, pagination and the number of photos, size, editor, photographer, designer, languages, printer and printing format.
The ten chapters look at some rather interesting subjects. After Manfred Heiting's intro the Spartakiads physical culture mass gymnastics movement is covered with twenty-one books. Founded in 1862 to symbolically show the strength of the small nation using mass displays of thousands of men and women. The Communists high-jacked the movement for their own ends with the first state-run exhibition in 1955 and the last in 1985.
So many of the countries photobooks were printed by the Neubert company who developed a unique gravure printing process and though the quality of their work can't physically be seen on these pages the thirty books in the chapter about the company do reveal some very creative looking art books. Josef Sudek and Josef Koudelka are probably the most famous Czechoslovak photographers and rightly get a chapter each. Sudek has seventy-seven books and Koudelka one hundred and four. He has several pages of remarkable photos taken during the 1968 Prague uprising. The books from both these photographers include many published in other countries after their deaths.
Two chapters cover the years when Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Nazis and later the Communists. The Nazi destruction of Lidice produced several powerful photobooks published after the war and during the Communists years I was surprised to see plenty of titles revealing publishers could still put out very creatively designed photobooks despite state control of the economy.
This is the third superb photobook in English from Steidl and Heiting and it follows the visual style of the previous two (Soviet and Japanese books) with well over a thousand images in colour and mono each with a drop shadow to make them float on the page and printed with a 175 screen. For a small landlocked country in the eastern part of central Europe Czechoslovakia had some extremely talented photographers and publishers.
