Jung and Locke weren't as well known as other FSA photographers so this book is a useful look at their work. Jung was one of the first to be hired, in 1935, by Roy Stryker to travel around the country and reveal the poor living conditions caused by the Depression. His assignments in Ohio, Indiana and Maryland are covered with some particularly strong photos of poverty in Ohio taken in April 1936. Pages forty-four to forty-seven show seven photos of two families living in shacks, the captions explain they were soon to be resettled in proper homes. The Maryland photos have some excellent work of land where trees have been cut down making the land nearly impossible to farm even though landowners rented it out to impoverished settlers. Jung apparantly took too few photos on his assignments which annoyed Stryker so his job was changed to a designer for the FSA.
Edwin Locke was an assistant to Stryker from 1935 to 1940 and only worked on assignments for less than a year from 1936. The book looks at his work in New England, the Appalachians and the huge 1937 floods caused by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Walker Evans, probably the most famous of the FSA photographers also covered the flooding and the book's introduction makes an interesting point that Locke left many of his photos of the disaster unnamed so they could be credited to Evans. Locke's assignment to New England has several interesting photos of street scenes and the people of Manchester, New Hampshire taken in 1937, the copy says these photos might have been taken on a single weekend.
I thought the book, with probably more than 160 photos, was an excellent overview of these two photographers, neither of which seem to have any other books about their work. The title's format is interesting too, because the author has presented the photos in the same way they were originally used in newspapers and magazines of the Depression years with copy and detailed captions fulfilling the FSA remit of revealing poverty in America.
A delightful book to kick off the Thames & Hudson new series devoted to famous illustrators. Author Paul Gravett writes a warm hearted overview of this well known illustrator and cartoonist. Posy Simmonds seemed destined for some sort of creative career judging by the pictures in the book from her teens, page twenty has a very credible spread for a women's magazine called 'Herself' which she did aged fourteen. A few pages on and there's an art school pen and ink drawing of a torso that clearly shows a professional approach.
Her first published work, when she was twenty-one, was a book jacket for publisher Anthony Blond, a very simple graphic black and white design, then advice from cartoonist Mel Calman helped to start her career, The Times, in 1968, commissioned illustrations for some feature pages. Simmonds first book came out in 1969 and Sun editor Larry Lamb saw a copy and asked her to do a regular feature called 'Bear by Posy', which ran to over1500 cartoons by 1975. Now an established illustrator/cartoonist with work appearing in Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, The Sunday Times, Woman's Own and especially The Guardian where she contributed work for several years.
I can remember enjoying her very funny satirical strip 'Literary life' about the publishing biz from 2004 to 2006 in The Guardian. This was very typical of Simmonds work, well thought out characters, frequently with improbable names, that get involved in the social faux pas of life. This theme runs through her adult books like Tamara Drewe, Gemma Bovery and Cassandra Darke.
The book, with 115 illustrations in mono and colour, is an excellent sampling of Simmonds creativity, lots of strips (with readable text) roughs showing how characters are developed visually and here and there some work that shows just how professional she is. Page fifty-four has a remarkably precise pencil rough of a bird's eye view of some houses and gardens, on the opposite page is the beautifully finished coloured painting as it appeared in her 'Fred' book from 1987.
A very enjoyable book for anyone who wants to study the creative work of one our leading illustrators.
The book was originally published in 2002 and is a worthwhile overview of D-Day in thirty-two pages so it won't take long to read. What separates it from other books about the invasion are the photos and pull-outs of historical artefacts from the event, neither of which really add to the feel of the occasion. Several pages have large photos used as background with the text overprinted and making it hard to read. Other photos run across the top of each page, all the same size and some of these really should have been larger to show the detail.
The pull-out items are sort of hit and miss. A map of the French coast has reduced so much from the real map making it impossible to read anything and there are additions to show where the troops landed, the New York Times front page for June 6 has been printed on grey paper instead of white, a four page facsimile of the Omaha Beach landing with hand drawn maps and text is unreadable because of huge reduction from the original and the text has been printed as a picture rather than black type. The only interesting item from the pull-outs is twenty-four page booklet called 'A pocket guide to France', produced by the Pentagon and given to the troops.
The rather poor, bland nature of the book was bought home me when I compared it with 'The D-Day experience' (ISBN 1844428052) by Richard Holmes and published in 2004. The format is similar, sixty-six pages but beautifully designed with lots of very readable pull-out material and a CD-ROM (with twenty-six tracks lasting seventy-four minutes) so you listen to the voices of veterans who were there and experienced the invasion. It's a large book and comes in a slipcase.
