Down from up

Two things separate Milstein's excellent book of photos from other looking down titles. One, he shoots vertically rather than the more usual bird's eye view and two, the very fine printing screen to reveal the amazing detail. The eighty-four photos are divided into four chapters: neighborhoods; commerce; parks and recreation; transportation and industry.

The straight shot look has the advantage of reducing the perspective so that the top of something becomes clearer in relation to nearby buildings. Mid-town Manhattan, with its grid streets seems far more interesting than an angled shot. The Carnival Vista cruise liner, docked in New York, looks amazing with decks full of dazzling color, the photo is opposite the rather staid looking Queen Mary in Long Beach. The big, wealthy homes on the curving North Doheny Drive in LA are a mixture of styles with their pools, tennis courts and trees everywhere and on those with flat roofs the air-con can clearly be seen. A few pages before this photo the straight streets in the LA city of Carson show middle class homes packed tightly together, very few trees and no pools. Some of photos are taken at dusk like Century City and Times Square aglow with street lights and neon or the container port in Long Beach looking straight down on a ship surrounded by a black sea.

Transportation and industry has an interesting selection of scrap yards, refineries, container ports though oddly no rail yards. Airports always look fascinating, five photos here show the usual shape of jets contrasting with different shaped buildings and ground markings.

I thought the vertical photos certainly gave this book an advantage over the usual birds eye view aerial images. A volume two?
　

Breaking up is hard to do

Claudio Cambon took these photos in 1997/98 when he joined the last voyage of the US tanker SS Minole from Baton Rouge to a breaker's yard in Chittagong, Bangladesh. A slightly unusual book because as well as photos of the voyage and beak-up Cambon also wrote the text that fills fifty-three pages after the photos. The ship had four names since it was launched in 1961: Stanvac Meridian; 1962 Mobil Meridian; 1990 Seminole: 1991 Minole (minus the Se of Seminole). Page seven has a photo of a lady smashing the traditional bottle of bubbly against the bow.

I thought the photos of the voyage and crew rather ordinary, nothing of the engine room, bridge. cabins et cetera but Cambon's work comes alive with his shots of taking the ship apart, basically by hand back then. The gas cutters get to work cutting the steel into ever smaller pieces until they can be man-handled onto trucks and carted away for recycling. There's a two page fold-out with sixteen photos, taken over five months, showing the Minole getting smaller and smaller.

The breaker yards in Bangladesh are the poor cousins of those in India, principally centered in Alang and Gadani in Pakistan, there the workers mostly wear hard hats and gloves and crawler cranes help pull ships apart. Since 1998 the workers lot has probably improved in Bangladesh but as labor is cheap and plenty of it it's a slow process.

Snow snaps

Some of the photos in the book appeared in Vivienne Gucwa's 2014 title NY through the lens where they worked well enough by blending into images of the city through the seasons. Unfortunately this book isn't nearly so successful. Snow photography works best when it's captured as freshly fallen and has an untouched surface, near impossible in a city with people and traffic.

Central Park obviously would give some good images, tops of buildings and private areas visible from the street, statues and contemporary art (like Robert Indiana's Love sculpture on Sixth Avenue). Far too many photos in this book have been taken from the middle of a street, after dark, looking into a blurry distance, the snow has been disturbed by pedestrians and cars and so losing much of its magic.

There are some good shots but really this is not much more than a collection of snow snaps of Manhattan.

A fresh take on NYC

The Big Apple delivers yet again some rich pickings in the best Photo League style of busy street photography. Todd Webb (1905-2000) took most of the book's pictures during 1945/6, when he returned to the city after active service in the South Pacific. Many of the 167 photos capture the working class street environment, especially straight on shots of houses or store fronts with windows full of signs and products which sometimes spill out onto the pavement.

Pages four and five has an eight exposure shot of Sixth Avenue between 43 and 44 Streets (part of it is on the cover) the exposures were joined together to create a stunning wide photo. I particularly liked the many photos that included lettering and Webb seems to have sought locations with signs, rather reminiscent of the FSA photos from the Depression years, in fact there aren't too many photos that don't have some sort of lettering within the frame. The editors have included a few interesting architectural shots of New York including row houses with skyscrapers rising behind them, the Empire State at night and the Brooklyn Bridge.

The first pages have an illustrated essay by Sean Corcoran about Webb's life and during the late forties he was friends with several photographers of the period: Berenice Abbot; Harry Callahan; Ansel Adams; Alfred Stieglitz; Gordon Parks; Helen Levitt and Lisette Model. Daniel Okrent contributes an essay about changes in the city shown in the photos and today.

This is a good looking book with a lovely matt art paper for the two hundred screen printing which reveals, once again that the Big Apple is a mythic city for photographers.