jlw
Rangefinder camera pedant
I'm temporarily marooned in Kansas City by snow up north, so after seeing the Kansas City Ballet performance yesterday I went down to poke aroud the Barnes & Noble store in Country Club Plaza.
They had on display a copy of the latest Elliot Erwitt book, Personal Best,, published last October. Erwitt is a big favorite of mine - encountering his book Photographs and Anti-Photographs while in college literally changed the course of my life as a photographer, and I feel that his straightforward, wry, keenly-observed pictures exemplify the "rangefinder aesthetic" (no matter what kind of camera he actually might use now.)
So, I really wanted to like this book. I suppose I even would have contemplated paying the $125 price, since you can think of this sort of thing as a lifetime investment (I hate to think now of some of the books I didn't buy when they were available and now can't get at all) and since Erwitt is 79 and you have to figure he may not have many more books left in him.
So I spent a long time flipping through it at B&N. And I liked a lot of the pictures (many never published before) a great deal.
But the book itself -- it's just too dratted big! You've heard the expression "coffee-table book" -- well, you could screw legs onto this one and it could BE a coffee table, or at least an end table. It's so heavy that my arms got tired holding it up standing there in the store. And the page size is so large that you can't just curl up on the sofa and enjoy looking at the photos: you really need to be several feet away to give your eye the proper angle of view. How are you supposed to use a book like that? Prop it up on a stand and gaze at it from a respectful distance? And the fact that many of the photos are shown huge over two-page spreads means the gutter runs right smack down the middle, disrupting Erwitt's often off-kilter but carefully balanced compositions.
I'd like to think that the same selection of photos might eventually come out in a standard-sized, lower-priced edition (although price isn't really what's holding me back here) but given the egotism of the specialized art-book publishers I can't really hold my breath.
Oh, well, thanks for letting me vent. But if any of you are in the book business or are in the fortunate position of contemplating having your own photography book published, please keep utility in mind when you're talking page size with your publisher!
They had on display a copy of the latest Elliot Erwitt book, Personal Best,, published last October. Erwitt is a big favorite of mine - encountering his book Photographs and Anti-Photographs while in college literally changed the course of my life as a photographer, and I feel that his straightforward, wry, keenly-observed pictures exemplify the "rangefinder aesthetic" (no matter what kind of camera he actually might use now.)
So, I really wanted to like this book. I suppose I even would have contemplated paying the $125 price, since you can think of this sort of thing as a lifetime investment (I hate to think now of some of the books I didn't buy when they were available and now can't get at all) and since Erwitt is 79 and you have to figure he may not have many more books left in him.
So I spent a long time flipping through it at B&N. And I liked a lot of the pictures (many never published before) a great deal.
But the book itself -- it's just too dratted big! You've heard the expression "coffee-table book" -- well, you could screw legs onto this one and it could BE a coffee table, or at least an end table. It's so heavy that my arms got tired holding it up standing there in the store. And the page size is so large that you can't just curl up on the sofa and enjoy looking at the photos: you really need to be several feet away to give your eye the proper angle of view. How are you supposed to use a book like that? Prop it up on a stand and gaze at it from a respectful distance? And the fact that many of the photos are shown huge over two-page spreads means the gutter runs right smack down the middle, disrupting Erwitt's often off-kilter but carefully balanced compositions.
I'd like to think that the same selection of photos might eventually come out in a standard-sized, lower-priced edition (although price isn't really what's holding me back here) but given the egotism of the specialized art-book publishers I can't really hold my breath.
Oh, well, thanks for letting me vent. But if any of you are in the book business or are in the fortunate position of contemplating having your own photography book published, please keep utility in mind when you're talking page size with your publisher!
Flyfisher Tom
Well-known
I agree, I would have preferred that some of the photos be on single pages, and perhaps even with a bit of a border. Having each photo on two pages, with seam, with no borders, just felt a tad like reading ALL CAPS.
Lots of interesting photos I had not seen before though.
Lots of interesting photos I had not seen before though.