A capital investment

 

Published in 1992 to celebrate fifty years of business Capitol issued this 220 page, very lavish and free promotion book in paperback and hardback, my copy is numbered 1860 (and also an eight CD box of their top selling artists over the decades). Because the book is basically a PR exercise the copy is obviously none too critical about the artists or the companies operations. The reason I love this book is the completely over-the-top design, every page is a sort of visual explosion of star photos with various treatments, coloured panels, graphics and lots of different typefaces for the headlines. It's beautifully produced with good printing and paper but one major flaw, it was side stapled so it's impossible to open flat or even vaguely flat. In fact, this is the only thick, large sized book I have ever seen bound like this.

Copies of both versions of this book are available on the net though quite expensive but nowhere near as expensive as Capitol's seventy-fifth anniversary book published by Taschen in 2017. It's a truly huge book but unfortunately blandly designed and just full of large PR shots of the companies recording artists and it doesn't have too much to say about the history of Capitol in the forties and fifties.

Because of the cost I only think it's worth buying Capitol's fiftieth if you are interested in design and want to see a beautifully designed book.

　

 
 

 

Colorful aspirations



The 2004 Aperture Colorama book (ISBN 1931788448)

The thousands who used Grand Central Terminal daily must have been in awe of these huge colored photos that changed every few weeks from 1950 to 1990. The book has eighty-three of the 565 that were displayed over the years. A previous book (Aperture ISBN 1931788448 which I reviewed in 2004) about Colorama only had forty-three presented in a thin landscape title and rather annoyingly some of the images were trimmed.

The intro refers to Kodak's snapshot aesthetic to create the impression that any consumer could buy the company's camera and film and then take snaps just like the sixty-foot wide version they saw every day at Grand Central. If only...the Colorama photos were carefully staged, especially the interior ones featuring aspiring, white, middle-class nuclear families taking photos in their suburban homes. Colorama 314 from 1968 called 'Children breaking wishbone' has a son and daughter leaning over a table with the turkey, pulling the wishbone, ma is behind the smiling dad who has the camera and is about to click away, watching on either side of the room are the smiling grandparents. No doubt hours of work were involved in setting up this domestic tableau and also time taken to select the six models who had to represent exactly the ideal family in Saturday Evening Postland.

On the back pages, there is an index with eight largish thumbnails on each spread of all the photos in the book and it's possible to see that Kodak did their best to vary the shots, several featured tourist spots around the world, New York World's Fair in 1964, the 1971 moon landing, animals get a look in with pandas, a cheetah, koalas, deer in the snow.

The book is nicely produced and includes four fold-out pages. I don't suppose now that any publisher will have a go at doing a book with all 565 Colorama photos that millions of commuters saw in the now-distant past.

US

Amazon.com: Colorama: 9783961710522: George Eastman Museum: Books

UK

Colorama: George Eastman Museum : George Eastman Museum: Amazon.co.uk: Books
　



　

The snapper of NYC

Damiani are to be congratulated on this superb facsimile of Naked City. Over the years there have been several editions of the book but unfortunately they have been poor copies scanned from the original hardback or the 25 cent paperback, both published in 1945. This new copy uses the original prints in the International Center of Photography which holds the Weegee Archive of over twenty thousand photos. The printing helps too, with a two hundred screen on a matt art paper so the photos have the same punchy look as they appeared in the New York dailies from 1939 to 1945.

Weegee took these 229 photos on the streets of the city, mostly at night with his Speed Graphic flash camera which easily lit up the action whether it was a crowd of people looking at a corpse on the pavement or a building's fourth floor fire. An interesting point about the book is that individually these are just news or general interest photos that the dailies needed day after day and after publication just became history but collect them into a book and they gain extra credence and become Weegee's remarkable take on daily life in the city.

As well as the facsimile of Naked City there are two interesting essays about Weegee and thirty-two pages of captions taken taken from the newspapers that printed the photos. Almost all of these are from PM, a left-leaning afternoon tabloid that actually paid Weegee a retainer though he wasn't on the staff (the paper was unusual in that it took no advertising which probably explains its short life: 1940-1948).

A note to book buyers Second-hand and online sellers have plenty of copies of Naked City but the Damiani edition is really the only one that is worth getting because of its quality production. If you see a copy on the net it's worth checking the publisher or the correct ISBN 9788862086950.