Seeing is thinking

Stephen Frailey says the inspiration for his book was John Szarkowski's 'Looking at photographs' published in 1973. Both books have a hundred photos though only Lee Friedlander and Henry Wessel appear in each, Frailey's mostly considers well known photographers work from the Seventies onward.

What I enjoyed about the hundred photos in the book was the remarkable range of creative images. Obviously photography in its broadest sense (police mug shots, time lapse, celebrity PR et cetera) was not the book's purpose, instead the author reveals his interpretation of what is or isn't revealed in the pictures and he has some quite thought provoking ideas which you might or might not agree with but this is the point of the book: how to look at and enjoy photography.

Maybe fifty or so photos have people in them, the rest are landscapes, street commonplace, still life and close-ups, industrial plant ( the Bechers) texture and few of those interesting photos that break out of a rectangular format. Fifty-eight are in color. The book's format is very similar to Szarkowski's book with a photo on the right-hand page and block of text on the left. Nicely it's printed with a two hundred screen on a semi-matt art paper.

Well worth getting if you want to discover more about creative photography than meets the eye.

　

 

The future is junk

This new book by Giacomo Costa is his second published by Damiani and it follows the same format as 'The chronicles of time' published in 2009. 'A helpful guide to nowhere' has pictures of his work from the last decade. Costa's mastery of digital software shows up in every picture though I prefer his failed cities rather than the forty pages called Landscape and Timescape.

The deserted cities art displays huge apartment blocks which look incredibly real because of the detail, like air-con units, service pipes at roof level and especially round sat-dishes everywhere which help break up the straight lines of the buildings. The 'Postnatural' series has some amazing art showing nature taking over crumbling structures, some of these might have been inspired by photos of the real thing, nature is slowly taking over the small city of Chernobyl, deserted after the nuclear accident in 1986. 'Waterfail', with nine pictures has cities under water with gigantic submarine objects tethered to the ground.

The book is very up to date with art from 2019. The two hundred pictures in twelve sections (oddly there is no contents page) are printed with a two hundred screen on a thick matt art paper which is excellent for revealing the masses of detail in Costa's art.

Nothing novel about this book's art

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've always found Weegee's photos fascinating so I've collected a few books about him. A graphic novel could provide an alternative look at his creativity. Unfortunately it turns out to be a rather dull and bland look at the man, a sort of 'A day in the life of Weegee' treatment and it can easily be read in less than an hour. One of the great things about graphic novels is the opportunity to present a story in all sorts of exciting visual ways so that even though you've read the story the art is worth looking at again and again.

This book's cartoon treatment falls short in every way. It's not in colour (not always essential, Will Eisener did some brilliant work in black and white) the six square frames a page are just repeated on most pages with no graphics breaking out of the frame for a change of pace, even the speech bubbles typeface is a poor choice and capital letters would have worked better. Lastly Wauter Mannaert's drawing style is rather poor and scrappy, more suited to cartoons rather than an illustrator for a complete book.

This is really a few hundred cartoons strung together in a book. Weegee the Famous deserves better.