Modernism man (5/5)

 

This is a very comprehensive survey of Michael Boyd's career. He is probably best known for the restoration of mid-century designed homes in California and the first half of the book is about this. Editor Michael Webb in his essay 'Treasuring art and living' reveals the problems that Boyd faces in his restoration work, especially the famous Case Study Houses. They have flat roofs that leak, some are sited on hilly areas and are sinking, fifties materials wear out and Frank Lloyd Wright's textile block houses are as porous as a sponge! Contemporary building codes also have to be taken into account.

Boyd has restored houses designed by Quincy Jones, William Wurster, Craig Ellwood, Richard Neutra, Oscar Niemeyer and Thornton Ladd. Each house has a brief essay about what was involved and plenty of interior and exterior photos. A forty-page section has a detailed look at the Boyd-designed 'Shed House' in Malibu, inspired by the Case Study program (it's pictured on the book's cover).

There are several essays that explore other areas of Boyd's creativity. A section on chairs reveals his thoughts on seating. He designed an incredibly simple chair called Plank, using just four pieces of wood. Other seating designs are shown in photos of patios, house interiors and commercial premises. Christopher Farr writes about several abstract rugs Boyd has designed. 

The last two chapters in the book cover exhibition, museum design and gardens. 'Sitting on the edge', a 1998 show of furniture at SFMoMA, 'Birth of the Cool' in 2008 at the Orange County Museum and another furniture exhibition in 2016 at the private Tisch Museum. I was intrigued to read about Boyd's work for the Wende Museum, it has a collection of artifacts covering every aspect of life in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall (not the sort of museum one would expect to find in sunny Los Angeles). Boyd considers gardens an opportunity to use plants as sculptures that take advantage of the pleasant Californian climate. There are several photos of the contemporary garden work he did for Lautner's 1960 Chemosphere House, showing paths surrounded by cacti and palms.

Michael Boyd is one of those rare designers that can work creatively in various mediums and the book's essays and more than three hundred photos clearly reveal this. 

A life through the lens (5/5)

 

Before I got this book I wondered if it would be a sort of celebrity biography full of anecdotes about Meyerowitz's life, travels and the people he met. Fortunately, I was wrong, virtually every page is one hundred percent about photography the Meyerowitz way.

The book's nine chapters are in a question-and-answer format which really works well. Lorenzo Braca's questions are in bold type followed by the answer and there is line space between each Q and A, so the reader can easily dip into a subject that captures their curiosity, whether it's cameras, film speed, types of film, differences between color and mono, the creative and composition aspects of a shot et cetera.

People, of course, are mentioned but they are connected to the medium, especially John Szarkowski, Tony Ray-Jones and Gary Winogrand. There are chapters that relate to specific assignments where Meyerowitz has a lot to say about Cape Light (published in 1991) and Aftermath (published in 2006) about the attack on the World Trade Center.

I think it's worth saying that the book is probably three-quarters text. There are 112 photos throughout the book, with a few of them filling a spread but they are included because some of the questions relate specifically to these images. Appendix A in the back pages has eleven one-to-a-page photos of Meyerowitz's best-known work.

Meyerowitz, now in his early eighties and one of the world's great color photographers, reveals in these pages a lifetime's knowledge about his chosen creative medium.

The mother of all Depression era photos

Right A more detailed book about the photo and how it was used in past years, it also has better reproductions of the seven images Lange took. ISBN 9781633450660

A book for younger readers revealing some background to the Depression years in America and in particular Dorothea Lange's most famous photo that is frequently used as an icon for those times. The author writes about the March 1936 photos that Lange took in a Californian field with several hundred destitute vegetable pickers. She took seven photos, gradually moving closer to a woman and her three daughters who were living in a makeshift tent. The last shot turned out to be the classic. The book says Lange took six photos but I'm looking at seven that are shown in the 'Migrant Mother' book by Sarah Meister (published in 2018 by The Museum of Modern Art ISBN 9781633450660).

Though the book is for younger readers I found the production rather amateurish. Including the cover, the migrant mother photo is shown six times throughout the book's sixty-six pages. Other worthwhile photos from the Library of Congress depression era collection haven't had any treatment to make them sparkle they are bland grey reproductions (and they could all be bigger). The Meister book I mentioned has Lange's photos reproduced with full tonal qualities and printed on lovely matt art paper. Her book also gives lots of background about Lange's photo and how it was used by print media over the past decades.