Just your type

 

Inflation, the same idea in the watching words move book(right)

The rules are simple: Use only bits of letters to create a word's visual meaning. There are some wonderful examples here, who would have thought that ISRAEL and PALESTINE could be created by combining the letters in blue and dark orange or Good with the d becoming a thumbs up symbol. Ji Lee has about a hundred examples in this small square book.

Not exactly a new idea though, New York designers Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar created a little book in 1959 called watching words move with the same idea but they only using one typeface and size. Their book had examples like sawwww, f1rst, +dd, mamMoth, nO!se, ?uestion (it was republished in 2006 by Chronicle Books ISBN 9780811852142).

Anyone who picks up this book will be intrigued the wordplay and nicely Ji Lee provides a few pages of guidance at the back of the book to kick-start your creative thoughts to do your own ideas.

A slight look at a big subject

The sixty-eight photos in the book are from the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena.
collection and featuring twenty-one American photographers with most work dating from 1945. Though the names are all well known I found the selection rather disappointing. Turn the pages and the overall impression is of dark, obscure looking mono photos with the natural world providing thirty-three of the total. Can sixty-eight photos really sum up the American photographic scene -- probably not especially when several photographers only get one image but this is an inherent problem when a collection tries to build up a representative sample of a genre. No doubt everyone will have their favorites that are missing but there is no Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Eugene Smith, Joel Meyerowitz or any of the FSA photographers in these pages.

I think the book is only worth getting if you can find a cheap copy. What is included is certainly well printed. There are only four actual four color photos though the remainder are mono they have been printed using four colors and the paper is a gorguous silky semi-matt art. Each photographer has a short essay with the back pages having a bibliography (which really should have been included on the essay page).

There are far better overviews of American photography with 'An American century of photography' by Keith Davis probably the best (ISBN 0810963787).

A bright new Day

There probably weren't too many houses in Britain during the fifties and sixties that didn't have a fabric, wall covering, carpet or plastic laminate not designed by Lucienne Day or at least influenced by her work. She designed unique and eye-catching fabrics and wallpapers for the leading companies as well ceramics (for Rosenthall and John Lewis) and interior design (for BOAC).

Andrew Casey reveals in this fascinating monograph how her creativity sprung to life in the late forties when she set up a design studio with her husband Robin Day (he was a product designer). The 1951 Festival of Britain established their design practice and Lucienne became known for original and innovative modern designs. The London store Heals used her fabric designs for twenty-five years and she and Robin Day were design consultants for John Lewis for over twenty years.

The book is heavily illustrated and in two parts. The first historically looks at Lucienne Day's professional career with contemporary photos, graphics and colour photos of her designs but it is the second part where I think the book comes alive with a 112 page portfolio of patterns. Page after page of shapes and colour reflecting design styles from the mid-fifties onwards, many of these are page size or run over a spread so the reader can appreciate the beauty of the work. All of them have detailed captions.

Overall the title is well designed and printed and nicely the many footnotes are on the same page as the relevant text. There is the odd quirk of only having page numbers on right-hand pages. The Appendices include a four page biographies of artists and designers mentioned in the text, bibliography and index.

Lucienne Day will interest any one connected to the creative side of the textile market.

Misses the photo beat of the city

Too many photos had lettering cut at the top which pulled the eye out of the frame.

Right: one of the more interesting photos in the book, nicely framed and plenty of visual interest.

Right: more cut lettering which the eye goes to instantly and then to the two uprights
framing the bridge in the distance.

Bismarck, North Dakota like any State capitol will have plenty of visual opportunities to capture American commonplace street scenes. German photographer Dirk Reinartz was drawn particularly to Bismark because of its namesake Otto von Bismarck the Prussian statesman. There are no captions (or page numbers) to date the sixty-eight photos but as the book was published in 2000 I assume they were taken during the 1990's.

Overall I was disappointed with the selection, in particular the framing of so many of the images. Frequently there is something cropped off the top -- for example: it could be a road sign; a telephone kiosk; a sign on the side of a building, they all pull the eye out of the photo and to my mind it seems a serious flaw. Other photos are really quite mundane with nothing much to look at but even a dull photo can be redeemed by capturing the effect of light as it falls across the external texture of a building. Stephen Shore seemed to be a master in capturing sunlight as it created shadows in a street. Reinartz does deliver some excellent photos but they are too few to give the book a lift. Also, just quickly flicking through the pages show that the photos lack any color sparkle. Streets in the commercial and retail areas of any American cities reveal a kaleidoscope of color from signs, trucks, shop fronts, billboards, street furniture et cetera, the photos here miss so much of this color.

Bismarck in America is a bland photo record of this interesting city.