A rather slim landscape book of twenty-eight photos, page size of Googie style commercial buildings in LA. As the photos (technically) are nothing special I thought this was an expensive buy. Most of the buildings have been taken at night, which shows up the dazzling range of neon these premises need to attract motorists but it means the darkness hides the overall feel of the buildings and in some cases more or less obscures the style altogether (page thirty-three: Flamingo Motel, fifty-one: Simply Wholesome food store, fifty-five: Woodlake Bowl). The cropping of the photos could have been a bit better, too. Some photos have a building cropped with plenty of the rest of the location in the picture.
I thought the book could have been a lot more interesting if there were other photos of each building on the spreads. Each right-hand page photo faces a nearly blank left-hand though there is a brief caption about the location and architect but five pages at the back have an alternative photo and the address of each place. This information really should have been on the nearly empty left-hand pages. The photos are printed with a two hundred screen on standard matt art paper.
These exuberant buildings deserve better than these rather ordinary photos.
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