Silent color

The 179 photos in this book explore its physical appearance.  Eric Maillet is conscious that a publication is made up of two side by side pages and he takes advantage of this by having the photos run off the edges of each page and butt up to another photo in the middle.  This is contrary to the normal art photo book style where each image is centred on the page surrounded by generous margins and in the classic format only the right-hand pages carry a photo.

Silent conversations works because the two photos burst out of each spread and this makes the reader consider both images at the same time.  The spread photos are linked, either by texture, pattern or shape.  For example, a close-up of a horse's head faces a model's head and both have similar texture on their skin or some smoke photographed against a black background facing the similar effect with some fabric in a liquid against a white background.  Many of the photos are close-ups of objects without revealing exactly what they are though the many uses of liquids, in any form, can't be disguised. 

What I liked about this book was printing Maillet's photos in four colors though the majority of them appear to be black (or blue) and white but look carefully and you'll see subtle suggestions of color where you least expect to see it.  There are several obvious color photos throughout the pages.

It's worth commenting on the book's excellent production.  Printed by Damiani with a very fine screen (250 or 300) on a lovely silky matt art paper.  The pages are unnumbered with six at the back with thumbnails of each spread and the briefest captions, just the year (and some are 2015) and somtimes the name of a model.

Maillet is rightly well known for superb fashion and studio still-life photos but away from the commissioned work you can see his other creative side through the photos in this book.

Poor look, weak taste

This really should have been a visual winner with seventy-five of the Nation's faves displayed in all their glory, instead it misses it completely by having an incredibly bland layout throughout the one hundred and sixty unnumbered pages.

Each spread is the same. The left-hand page has some text about the product: size; package; origin; ingredients; maker; slogan; general comments, some of this is actually quite interesting, especially the ingredients which have probably changed a lot since 1980 when the book came out. This text takes up mostly less than a quarter of the page, the rest is empty. The right-hand page has the visual interest with a package and the contents shot, sometimes a whole page or a cutout but all very unimaginative as photos.

Predictably so much of the contents could be called fun food -- 7Up, Good Humor ice cream sandwich, Bazooka bubble gum, Twinkies, Hershey's kisses, Reddi wip. McDonald's gets three spreads with hamburgers, french fries and milkshakes. Other foods are non-branded generic products like macaroni and cheese, chocolate chip cookies, cream cheese or onion dip.

If you want a bit of thirty-five year old food nostalgia maybe it's worth picking up a copy but don't pay more than a few dollars.

Chinese photobooks...who knew?

Easily the most ambitious of the Aperture photobook series: Japan, 2009; Latin America, 2011; Dutch, 2012, large in size (and weight) with 448 pages and a 1000 colored images from over two hundred and fifty photobooks. Though China might seem a long way from Western influences the country has absorbed these through colonial invasions in the early decades of the last century. Hong Kong, a British colony since 1843 gets a separate chapter (it includes Taiwan as well) which considers photobooks in both places from 1949 onwards.

The foreign influence is notable in the books from 1900 to the late twenties with so many of them published in Shanghai in Chinese and English. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria and formation of the state of Manchukuo gets its own chapter because the Japanese published so many propaganda books praising life in their puppet State. Two key chapters look at photobooks published from 1945 and especially books covering the Cultural Revolution from 1966. There are some intriguing titles here: Medical workers serving the people, 1971; Chinese clouds, 1972; Railway bridges, 1973; Catalogue of tongue coating diagnoses in Chinese medicine, 1984; China traffic police, 1989; Road interchanges in Beijing, 1996 and of course plenty featuring the Great Leader Mao Zedong (was he the most photographed man on earth?). The last chapter provides a fitting conclusion by featuring twenty-eight photobooks about China but taken by foreign photographers and published outside the country.

Each of the featured books has a technical caption (title, date, size, publisher et cetera and then an essay about the book's editorial, these are always quite fascinating to read because of the amount of detail. I thought the book's design by Kummer & Herrman is worth praising because it's so elegant and Verona printers Graphicom do their usual quality print run, using a three hundred screen, too.

One of the pleasures of the book for me are seeing several spreads from each of the featured books and frequently quite large. I always thought Parr and Badger's photobook series for Phaidon were rather over-designed with too much white space which should have been filled with reproductions of photobook pages.

A suberb book to be added to anyone's slowly expanding photobook collection.

City of Angels back then...

It's a pity Bruce Davidson doesn't give any indication why Esquire Magazine rejected his LA photo assignment that is the basis of the book. They are very typical of his work, full of detail and intriguing compositions and though only thirty-one at the time he was already a member of Magnum.

This is one of those delightful Steidl books that works on all levels: shape; design; printing with a 175 screen; paper and of course the photos and though there are only twenty-five of them (but with exception of maybe two) I think they deliver LA to the reader. By the nature of the place cars feature in many of the images mixed in with the beach, suggestions of the very pleasant climate and flamboyant commercialism. The photos kick-off with a shot of LAX through a jet's window (also tipped onto the front cover) and the last photo shows a group of senior citizens waiting in a bus station and behind them a list of all the places served, an indication of just how huge the place is, even in 1964.

The Esquire rejects of 1964 come alive fifty-one years later.