picture window # 20 ~ buy this book
Friday, January 2, 2009 at 12:17PM 
The Cinemascapist looking out of a picture window • click to embiggenPlaying Santa Claus to myself, I purchased a new book of photography while I was in south Jersey.
Whenever I am in a "big" city / suburban sprawl area, I generally like to find a bookstore (is there anything other than a Borders / Barnes & Noble out there?) and browse the photography section, both books and periodicals. Although I must say that, lately, all the periodical racks offer is almost exclusively made up of gear / how-to / pretty picture crap.
The book sections are marginally better and occasionally one can find an unexpected and unheard of surprise lurking amongst the shelves full of How To Master Landscape Photography dreck and drivel. One such delightful discovery is now in my collection - River of No Return ~ Photography by Laura McPhee. Check out the "Book Tease" HERE.
I had never heard of Laura McPhee prior to stumbling upon this book. When I saw the spine of the book on the shelf I was immediately drawn to the name McPhee (which stood alone without her first name) because one of my all-time favorite authors is John McPhee, who, as it turns out, is her father. Her mother is Pryde Brown - a wedding / portrait / event photographer in Princeton, NJ.
So much for introductions and on to the book. As I mentioned, I picked the book up because of the name McPhee and, even though upon viewing the cover I discovered it was not John McPhee, I flipped through the book and saw enough interesting-at-first-glance pictures to pique my interest. After spending a few more minutes with it, the book went into my basket simply because my quick look at the pictures imparted a sense that the photographer was giving me a real look at a place that went beyond the regular landscape genré.
Another purely visual sense led me to want the book - the feeling that the pictures were made using a large format camera and color negative film. Later reading confirmed this suspicion to be the case - indeed, an 8×10 view camera and color negative film are Laura McPhee's tools of choice. An aside - if you haven't had the pleasure of viewing prints made from LF color negatives you should go any distance / make any effort to do so because you'll never realize that, no matter how much the digital gearheads rave about their state-of-the-art equipment, it can not hold a candle to the color and tonal subtlety of 8×10 color negative film.
That said, I have not been disappointed in this book. As a matter of fact, I would rank it very high (if not at the top) of my list of must-haves for the serious picture maker. I would do so because this book is:
1) a magnificently "complete" look at a place - McPhee mixes photo genrés - traditional landscape, portraiture, and a form of documentary and of still life - to great story-telling effect. It most definitely reads as an all-of-a-piece, sum-is-greater-than-its-parts work in and of itself -
This book of seventy-two images is itself a work of art: It accumulates meanings through echo, repetition, statement and counter-statement, digression, and return ... on the second or third time through it began to dawn on me what Laira McPhee was up to, to see that River of No return is organized like a long poem or a piece of music, that it is, as well as a stunning look at an actual place, a meditation on rivers, nature, history, the history of landscape photography of the American West and of the idea of the American West. And - while I'm piling theme upon theme - the nature of fact and the nature of myth, and how we hold the world in our hands. ~ from the Foreword by Robert Hass
Most certainly the book has quite a number of stand-alone greatest-hits type pictures, but if you have ever wondered what a cohesive body of work looks like, a body of work which demonstrates the relative "weakness" of single stand-alone pictures, this book is for you. On that criteria alone, this book is well worth the modest price of admission.
2) beyond the aforementioned, the other reason to rank this book high on the must-have list is because of the writing that accompanies the pictures - not as captions or stories, but in the form of an introduction, an essay, and an interview with McPhee (each by different writers).
What all these words convey are ideas and notions, thoughts and conversations, about meaning and process. Not only of the work itself but also, by extrapolation, a kind of working thesis on picturing making as Art (of any kind). In a very real sense, for the thinking person, there is enough of real substance here to chew on that one could almost consider it a bargain basement, $37.42 tuition fee for a MFA degree in photography.
All the writing is the product of the much dreaded photography academia (as are the pictures themselves - McPhee is a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design). What is amazing to me is the almost total absence of any vestige of the web of verbal and theoretical delirium that is so often spun by the academic lunatic fringe. The writings and interview are eminently readable and understandable.
IMO, this book is very highly recommended.
Reader Comments (2)
Thanks for the recommendation! I have the previous book No Ordinary Land, which was co-authored/photographed by Laura McPhee, with an afterword by John McPhee. Usually available for $15 used.
Thanks for the recommendation. This looks to be just the thing for me.