Booknotes

I've uploaded scans of the covers of some books that may be of interest to you. I'll have all of them readily available at our November 4th meeting if you care to take a look at them.

Designs on the Land is much more that just a collection of aerial photographs. Rather it documents how significantly the face of the land is being altered by human activity. Anyone concerned about runaway development may enjoy this book.

Zoe Strauss' America is a wonderful document of impressions of America in the early 21st century. It reminded me in some ways of Robert Frank's seminal work The Americans. This book is highly recommended.

Finally, John Szarkowski's book Looking at Photographs. I purchased this book from Amazon with high expectations. Szarkowski is the very esteemed former curator of the photography collection at the MOMA and the person who put together the exhibit and book The Family of Man. To say that this book is a disappointment is an understatement. It fails as a collection and for me there was hardly a worthwhile image in the entire book. The collection lacks any kind of coherence. But the worst aspect is the text-- the author indulges in a kind of art criticism which is vastly over-intellectualized and so obtuse that I'm not sure that I understood what he was talking about with most of his commentary. This kind of thing is commonplace in the the Art world and I think that it is fortunate that it is less so in Photography.