A remarkably slim premise for a book (especially when considering the original price) with thirty-six photos more or less related to gas stations. They are all from newspaper photo morgues, discarded now that papers have switch over to a digital format. The author has been picking them up here and there.
Individually I don't think the photos are of any consequence and collectively they just about hang together because of the common element of the red grease pencil or white paint cropping marks used by the layout artists to tell the production staff where to trim the photos. To non-newspaper folk these photos, with their casual scribbles and actually on the photo as well, probably seem quite intriguing and if they were to turn the print over they'll see more information that only makes sense to the news desks.
The book's format is as odd as the photo selection. The thirty-six photos fill up the pages until a four-page black paper insert, the spread of this has an interview with the author and George Kaplan (and printed in silver ink). This is followed by the backs of the photos to the end of the book. I would have thought it better to show the front and then the back on a spread because in many cases the backs contain pasted captions from the paper explaining the photo. The pages are unnumbered so flipping backwards and forwards to find out some detail about the pictures becomes rather tedious.Also the photos are printed on a very slightly rough paper where as the backs are printed on much more smoother paper. They are all printed with a two hundred screen.
The title has a slight curiosity feel to it because the images are from the media but real gas station fans should consider David Freund's four book box-set 'Gas stop' with 574 photos taken across the US during the late 1970s.
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| Inside back cover |
A wonderful collection of type that is basically company names on their products. Bill Rose says in his Foreword that so many of the items he photographed are not much bigger than an inch or two wide so there are lots of initials like REG.U.S. PAT. OFF., MFRS., EST., PAT PEND., CAT. NO., REG. TRADE MARK to get the message across to the customer. The type and design depends on the material it's printed on, paper can produce a reasonable image but embossed out of metal or plastic, frequently with curves, reduces the sharpness of the letters, then age for a few decades until Rose found them to photographed and they assume a warm, well used patina. Because of their small size the designs were probably created locally to the manufacturers and virtually all the type is sans serif for ease of reproduction.
Another really nice thing about the book is it's square format (eight inches) and the layout with three hundred images works for the reader, some pages have just one badge, others have five, six or seven separated by a white margins. I doubt anything in these pages would kick-start any creativity for similar company logos, they are just too old for that. I regard the book as a lovely collection of typographic company names from the last few decades.
Industrial ruins have almost become a photographic genre by now, photographers swarm over collapsing structures, especially in America and Eastern Europe to capture man-made decay and frequently taken over by nature. David McMillan's photos reveal all of this but his work takes it to another level.
The two hundred photos in the book concentrate on the effects of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl but what makes these remarkable photos interesting is that, starting in 1994, they have been taken during McMillian's twenty-two visits to the area and especially the city of Pripyat. By the nature of the place, it's a no-go zone and deserted except for officialdom and scientists though a few of the photos show some locals who still live within the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone.
By returning so many times McMillian has been able to capture the same buildings slowly falling apart and the natural world taking over. A good example of this are two photos on a spread of a bookstore with a partially collapsed roof, one was taken in 2011 showing the rubbish-strewn interior the other, taken in 2017, shows a mass of foliage totally covering the floor and growing up chunks of concrete and twisted strips of metal. Another spread with two photos shows a 1996 shot of an undisturbed swimming pool (used by officials and the military) but by 2017 the water was gone, tiles are slowly falling off the pool and nearby trees and bushes growing into the interior through broken windows. McMillian is particularly attracted to floors of a school, the kitchen, classrooms, gymnasium, kindergarten with their mixture of rubble, books, paints, toys all mixed together and in some photos almost creating abstract patterns because the items are nearly unrecognisable.
I thought the coverage was particularly impressive. general shots of Chernobyl, vehicles (and a helicopter) used in the clean-up slowly rusting, trees and other vegetation and of course many images of decaying buildings inside and out. There is an excellent illustrated essay by Claude Baillargeon about McMillian's many trips to the area, this really should have been in the first pages rather than at the back of the book.
The book's production is the usual Steidl high standard. 175 screen printing on a creamy matt art. A nice touch is having all the captions centred under the photos. There are five fold-out pages as well.
