Fashion photographer Juergen Teller accepted the challenge of photographing, over five years, the building of Goldman Sachs new City of London headquarters. I believe architects and construction companies like to keep a visual record of their major projects, basically for internal use (though I have published books about the constuction of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, both in New York). The 412 photos in the book reveal Teller's fascination with building technology, he took some stunning shots of the London skyline with various tall office blocks in the distance and in the foreground part of Plumtree Court construction. Others capture beautifully the minor chaos of a building site with equipment at odd angles to the precise uprights of interior walls and horizontal girders.
I feel though that the editorial focus of the book has gone awry. I was expecting a sort of time-line photo book of the construction from a hole in the ground to the finished building. Instead this is Teller's artistic interpretation of putting up a corporate headquarters. There is no date sequence to the photos or captions explaining what is going on in the them (no page numbers either). Several pages have montages of quite technical but interesting photos within photos, which I thought looked rather confusing but as Teller designed the book (with Catalin Plesa) this is very much their interpretation of the commission.
The publication, with some excellent photos, seems more a keepsake for the staff of Goldman Sachs of their new offices.
At the back of book One there are eight pages with a list of the assignments Ed Clark (1911-2000) did for Life magazine, an amazing 1,365 between 1940 and 1965. With more than 260 photos in the book, mostly from these assignments in America and Europe the magazine's editors knew that Clark could deliver what they and the readers wanted, whether it was an expose of Georgia prisons, a wheat harvest on the Plains, the 1945 Nuremberg trials, Monroe and Russell on the set of Gentlemen prefer blondes or the politics of Washington during the Eisenhower, Nixon and Kennedy years. The book also includes photos from newspapers and other magazines.
Editor Keith Davis says in his illustrated essay that Clark instinctively understood how to get the best out of any situation, a sort of camera everyman and the book is full of his photos that tell a story. Especially his most famous shot of a tearful Chief Petty Office Graham Jackson playing the accordion as President Roosevelt's coffin passed him by at Warm Springs, Georgia in 1945, this surely must be one of the great pictures of American photojournalism. As well as the Life assignments list in the back pages there is a twenty-four page illustrated Timeline with photos of Clark at work and with friends.
Book One by itself would be an excellent look at Ed Clark's work but book Two adds an extra dimension to this photographer's work. Here are selected pages from ten scrapbooks compiled over forty-seven years by Clark's family. They collected his work from newspapers and magazines (especially Life) plus all kinds of printed material like letters, invoices, press badges, tickets and other ephemera. I found it fascinating to see how the images from the first book were used in newspapers and magazines with the headlines and copy (a lot of it is readable, too).
Both books reflect the usual Steidl production quality. Book One (344 pages) prints the photos with a 175 screen on an excellent very white matt art while book Two (328 unnumbered pages) uses a slightly off-white paper sympathetic to a scrapbook feel. A sturdy slipcase completes a package that sums up this camera everyman of news journalism.
