Magnum Landscape

Ordered to be shipped to Australia, arrived fairly fast considering the distance. No complaints.

This is a book with no pretense: Fantastic images, from some of the world's greatest photographers, collected under the shaky title of "landscape," and put together in a well-designed, under-sized, cheaply produced pamphlet-book that can be purchased for under twenty dollars.

It's cheap, small and light weighted. But filled with wonderful photos. You can read it everywhere, in subway, in park, in rest room.

You wouldn't think Magnum, a photo agency best known for its outstanding photojournalism, could produce a compelling collection of landscape photographs. But going through the book, it made perfect sense. These photographs aren't the sublime visions of the natural world one associates with the art of landscape, whether in photography (e.g., A. Adams, the Westons) or painting (e.g., all of the Hudson River School artists), but are reports of the state of the world expressed through our landscape. It works much in the same way as Magnum Degrees (the more conventional Magnum collection, which sets forth a gripping vision of the state of the world at the end of the millenium), but instead of events and people, the environment is the primary mode of expression in Magnum Landscape. (There are some overlapping photos between the two books, in fact.) This isn't to say the photos aren't beautiful and artfully composed, because most of them are, in their own way. My admiration for Magnum photographers grows each time I discover one of their books. My admiration for the reproduction quality of Magnum Landscape, however, is nonexistent. The printing, frankly, blows (judging from a comparison of photos that are reproduced in both Landscape and Degrees). The book is probably still worth getting, because it's the only way you can get this fine selection of photographs.

Look at a famous Ansel Adams print and you see (generalising grossly) a technically immaculate, beautiful image of something that is itself obviously impressive and beautiful. Which is not to belittle the level of visual imagination and craftsmanship that went into making those photographs. Look at some of the images in this book and you see something utterly different -- the ability to see a picture, to pull a compelling and fascinating image, out of nothing, out of scenes most people wouldn't even glance twice at. Street corners, car parks, shadows on sand.Again a gross generalisation, and there is work from a lot of different photographers in the book, but there is a coherent editorial eye at work here and a definite Magnum "house style". I bought this book at the same time as a book of Ansel Adams classic prints. I looked through this one first and thought "oh no, now the Ansel Adams stuff will be boring". It isn't, it's completely different, but for me the Magnum pictures are more inspiring.