Night light

I recently reviewed Lynn Saville's Dark city (ISBN 9788862084116) published this year, I liked her night photos enough to get this book published in 2009.  Both books are full of intriguing shots taken after the sun has nearly disappeared so that the only light source is artificial.  The work in both books is taken in New York though Dark city had a few taken elsewhere in the US.

Saville cleverly uses what light she can find and combined with shadows creates great photos that wouldn't have the same magic if taken during the day.  I particularly liked the subject matter, commercial areas, construction sites, bridges and parks in the city rather residential streets which tend to be more uniform in scale.

Of the two books I prefer Dark city because it has a slightly larger page size, finer printing screen than the 175 used in this book and cleaner presentation but both books show off some first class images after dark. 

Edgeland

Open the cover to reveal two books tucked into pockets.

The silly caption idea with a thin line of the photo's contours rather than a colored thumbnail.

There are only fifty-two photos in this two-books-in-one publication, some are really fascinating and pull you into the frame but with so few photos the also rans seem to overwhelm the excellent ones.  Both books look at contemporary housing developments in the south eastern Las Vegas area.  Because the landscape, in parts, is hilly developers had to flatten out the land by creating a series of turning terraces with the obligatory curving roads linking them together.  A few of these terrace photos make the land look quite extraordinary, the precision of the lots contrasting with the natural look of the non-vegetation hills.

With only two types of photos: terracing and homes, I thought the bird's eye view of housing provided the most interesting images.  Because the heat really doesn't encourage outdoor living the properties more or less fill the whole lot with a minimum of space for a garden.  McMansions with multiple roof-lines sit right next door to each other.  A photo of Roma Hills gated community  (which I saw recently used on a real estate website selling a still empty lot) shows the development neatly cut into the hillside.  The houses all have trees surrounding them, none of which existed before the building.  No solar panels or satellite dishes either, the community housing associations probably bans them.  The building style here is faux northern Mediterranean and the road names like Valenzano Way,  Tozzetti Lane or Latina Court reflecting the European aspiration in the Black Mountain developments.

The twenty-six photos of the Lake Las Vegas (it's actually a reservoir) area continues the Mediterranean feel with Strada di Villaggio, Via Tiberius Way, Mezza Luna Court, Camino Barcelona Place street names and perhaps even more flamboyant properties (palace might be a more accurate word for one or two of these) inside the many private communities.  The speculative nature of these developments is indicated by the many unbuilt lots clearly seen in the photos.

I've given the publication three stars because of the uneven flow of the photos, with only fifty-two there are thirty that basically show terracing and the empty landscape, some of these, as I've said, are remarkable but surely no more than ten or so would have covered this leaving the rest to reveal the visually much more interesting ongoing property developments.  Three stars also (or should that be two?) for the hopelessly unprofessional way the captions in the back pages have been presented to the reader.  Instead of an obvious color thumbnail of each spread, so it can be found easily, there is an outline box containing a thin drawn line of the significant contour shape from each photo -- this is pure designer whimsey and next to useless in finding a caption efficiently, also the twenty-six captions are needlessly spread over six pages in both books, one spread in each would have been enough.

*You can spend an interesting bit of time looking at the houses in the Ascaya and Lake Las Vegas areas with Street View and though the Google camera-car wasn't allowed into the gated communities switch to Bing maps for bird's eye views of these and remaining unbuilt terraces.

* As of today's date you can get the book from Amazon for less than $15, publisher's price is $60.

Global quirkiness

I remember the first issue of Colors back in 1991, certainly a different looking magazine, big photos (and frequently over enlarged) exuberant page design and articles that had a unique perspective on life around the world.  It was funded though by the deep pockets of clothing manufacturer Benetton which allowed writer Oliviero Toscani and designer Tibor Kalman to do their own thing without the constraints that other publication live with.

This large size book is a celebration of ninety issues of the magazine but I found the contents as scattershot as some copies of the magazine I had seen.  The pages are a collection of reproductions of spreads from past issues which means that some of the text isn't readable or some of the copy has been reset and used with pictures from the original articles.  There are ten themed chapters (plus two interviews at the start of the book with Toscani and Luciano Benetton) but they are very loosely based on their subject.  The one called Elvis meanders around all sorts of items with very little to do with a dead rock 'n roll star.  The one that seems the most obvious is Bang, which looks at various types of guns and explosives from around the globe.

This could have been a worthwhile look back at ninety issues if only the Editors has presented the material in a more thoughtful way that would make sense to the reader.  I always thought the Colors covers were interesting but there isn't even a spread or two showing all of them since 1991, the nearest you'll get to that is photo on page seventeen showing all of them in one pile with the spines facing the camera.

Handsome posters

The twenty-six poster books in the series

The Hand is the latest poster publication from the Zurich based Mueum fur Gestaltung.  The 113 in the book (all in color) feature this vital part of the human body in all sorts of combinations.  Similar themed posters are featured together, for example, writing a message on a hand has five on a spread, an adult holding a babies hand features four on a spread, the hand as a fist has five but oddly Lord Kitchener's famous and much copied 1914 Britain wants you army recruitment poster isn't included on the spread with five pointing finger versions.

The graphic interpretation of the hand by designers is quite comphensive: hand prints; holding hands; x-ray hands; pensioner hands; claw like hands; hands holding pencils, knives, bottles, phones; cigarettes et cetera.  The posters throughout the book are mostly European and date from 1919 to 2010, each has a brief caption with a numerical listing in the back pages giving more technical details.

This is the twenty-seventh book in the poster series and nicely they are all the same size and format.  Practising designers and students will be stimulated by the creative work in these pages.