Sunday, 5 April 2026

The reel black art 4/5
















This is Taschen's second Noir book. Same title, same authors (though a slightly different cover typography) published in 2015 with 686 pages (ISBN 978 3836543569). This new edition has 896 pages but both books consider the top hundred movies. I  found it odd that Noir movies, at least in this book, start with the 1920 'The cabinet of Dr Caligari' and run up to 2019 with 'Uncut gems' and 'The Wild Goose Lake'. 

For me, Noir style involves a certain kind of screenplay, direction, lighting, location etc and is basically an American genre. Starting around the 1940s ('High Sierra' or 'The Maltese Falcon' for example) and fading by 1960 ('Odds against tomorrow'). Anything either side of these dates I would class as non-Noir crime movies.

The format for the hundred is the same throughout the book. Each movie starts on a spread with technical details on the left and a poster on the right-hand page; the following six or eight pages have captioned stills and a worthwhile essay about the title. The first fifty-two pages have three illustrated essays about the chosen hundred. Ten back pages list a thousand movies in year order; no doubt you'll find your faves in this listing.

This is a memory-jogger of a book for fans of Noir (or crime) movies. A slight downside is that all the pages are black, which shows up finger marks. 

Fans of Noir will enjoy this marvellous book of posters, which you can see here:

UK


 

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Sunday, 29 March 2026

Space: the final frontier illustrated (5/5)






















Author Dallas Campbell has pulled together over five hundred photos and graphics to reveal, in six lively chapters, the story of our fascination with what's out there. Space (and there's a lot of it) has intrigued humans for centuries. In chapter two the author suggests that Galileo Galilei was probably the first person to seriously think about what was beyond our planet way back in the early sixteenth century. Isaac Newton continues the theme with writings on gravity and motion, published in 1687. Two, rather obscure people, Percival Lowell and Mary Ward contributed a huge space boost by making telescopes to see into the unknown. Canadian astronomer Sara Seager went one better by using a radio telescope to create theories of planetary science.

Chapter three considers the pioneers of rocket science and the US/USSR space race. Despite the work of Werner Von Braun for the Americans the Russian, Yuri Gagarin, was the first person in space. With the creation of NASA in 1958 landing on the moon became a priority for the US. There are several fascinating pages in chapter four about making space suits with plenty of photos. Page 198 has a picture of a lady using an old fashioned Singer sewing machine stitching a suit of aluminized plastic.

As humans managed to conquer space ("...one small step for mankind") chapter five wonders if there is life out there and how to make contact. Astronomer Jill Tarter helped found SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) which has continuously listened and looked for the slightest bit of evidence of something living. The book ends with a chapter about space dreamers. The subject is now part of popular culture and the commercial concerns of Musk and Bezos. In past decades it was only the State that could afford the millions and millions.

I thought the book was an excellent read, though well-chosen images (all captioned) probably take up more than sixty percent of the pages.

UK
US

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Wednesday, 18 March 2026

Helen Levitt had a special way of seeing (5/5)

























Although Levitt (1913-2009) didn't join the Photo League, she was inspired by the members who concentrated on taking spontaneous photos of everyday life on the streets of New York. A big inspiration, in 1935, was meeting Cartier-Bresson and joining him when he had an assignment in Brooklyn and when she was only thirty MoMA had a 1943 exhibition with fifty-six photos she took of children playing in the streets of the city. Some of these appeared in her well-known 1965 book 'A way of seeing.'

This lovely book of Levitt's photos is based on an exhibition by Fundación MAPFRE. As well as 365 photos, it has seven illustrated essays. I thought the one by Joel Sternfeld particularly interesting; he considers her colour work from the early Sixties onward. This essay and colour photos are printed on a gloss art paper  (the other pages are on a matt art stock).

Levitt is rightly considered an important American photographer from the latter decades of the last century and this finely produced book is a celebration of her work.

UK
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