The book was published in conjunction with an exhibition of Susan Meiselas photography in Barcelona, 2017 and this year in Paris and San Francisco (MoMA July to October). It's not the usual book with an extensive selection of photos but a heavily illustrated collection of essays analysing Meiselas work since the early seventies. Oddly, there isn't any reference to who the eight essay writers are.
Meiselas remarkable photos of conflict in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Columbia and Iraq get the most coverage and I found some of the writing here rather elitist. Much more interesting for me were Pia Viewing's essay on the Prince Street girls with photos taken in New York during 1975 and 1978 and Marianne Hirsch writing about Meiselas photography in a several refuges for women during 2015-1017 and published as A room of their own.
The back pages have a very comprehensive biography, bibliography and exhibitions listing. The book is well produced (with a 200 screen) and printed on a matt art paper, as well as photos there are plenty graphic images of books, newspapers, magazines, exhibitions and the photographer's archive material. They all reveal the dedication that Meiselas puts into her work.
An excellent introduction to science, especially for any teens and of course, curious adults. The five sections: Matter; Energy and force; Life; Space; Earth, explain the basics in a visual format. Each spread covers a particular aspect with colorful flat graphic diagrams and text. Fortunately the graphics have been designed to put across the information in a straightforward way unlike a lot of contemporary info-graphics that end up being far too visually complex.
The pages are quite busy but in a very controlled way blending the illustrations, colored panels and typography together seamlessly over each spread. A clever feature on lots of pages are circles that contain questions and answers, just the sort of thing any curious person would ask.
Considering the amount of information in these pages and the clever way it's presented this book has to be a bargain for the price.
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?
