Documentary-Collection

The photos, however, are lovely.

Bottom Line: It's a lovely treat to spend an afternoon with this book if you're not interested in anything new or innovative. Enjoy it for what it is, an attractive book about an attractive woman.

Even as a Sloane Ranger, Diana had outstanding tast in the style of clothes she wore and in the accessaries she chose to wear with each outfit. This book contains many beautiful pictures of Diana which have never been seen before.

It's difficult to believe this beautiful, young princess is no longer alive because each picture of her radiates such warmth. Diana often recycled many of her dresses by having different little touches added or by having something deleted. Diana possessed the ability to combine the most expensive jewelry with costume jewelry. She, also, liked color and chose to wear colors which no royal before her had done. Diana like to shop and what modern lady doesn't? Again, something royals didn't do.

Truly, Diana is "Queen of Style." This book is well written and shows that Diana could wear many varieties of color, dresses, jewelry, etc. with which no one before her dared to experiement. All pictures are in color except for a couple. This book is a must for anyone who collects books on Diana, Princess of Wales.

"Such great pictures," he would say, "now why the hell do they think they can improve them with a lot of pretentious writing."

I felt the same way about this book. Except that the pictures weren't as good as Playboy, either.

But despite superficial similarities, these are two very different books. WDT is clearly written by someone trying to make a name for himself in the academic world. Based on photos from the late nineteenth century, the subject matter was far removed from any of the author's own memories or experiences. In contrast, I can imagine many of the photographs in LTC, however, evoking powerful childhood memories. Yet, this book is anything but nostalgic. The maturity and depth of life experience of its editor shows on every page-- a sort of creepy, subversive confidence (detractors might even call it arrogance) lurks in virtually every sentence. The almost sinister commentary greatly accentuates the oddness of the photographs themselves.

In my mind, LTC firmly establishes Lesy as the eminence grise of the coffee table book. A fitting cap to a long career, it won't be off my coffee table or my toilet tank for a long, long time. Buy it!

Many of the images in this book -- a little girl sprinting up an alley in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, beneath rows of washing and before the disinterested stares of the older girls and women; the backs of five bony men as they carry a homemade coffin up a rocky path in Jackson, Kentucky; an angry black Muslim in Chicago leading his two stricken-looking sons on an errand or into fanaticism -- are as haunting and disturbing as anything Lesy has presented in his earlier work. They are also weirdly filled with hope. Neither inspiring, exactly, nor sentimentally-portrayed, the men, women, and children in these photographs might, looked at by themselves, fade away quickly. Gathered together in all their painful glory, they seem possessed of a Faulknerian quality: They endure.

Long Time Coming is best looked at it not just once and slowly, but several times over. At least once go through quickly, flipping the pages as if to set the coal miners, preachers, nuns, farmers, carny barkers, and bankers contained therein into continuous motion. Follow the running girl from Ambride, PA to the family wrestling and splashing and staring at the camera (beneath a giant billboard for Iron City Pilsner, "Just a sip at twilight") in a "homemade swimming pool for steelworker's children" on the following right-hand page; and on to a thick column of a mother -- the girl grown up? -- marching, baby in hand, past "Factory workers' homes, Camden, New Jersey," and then back to an alley, where now a young black boy stands staring at the camera defiantly even as he keeps his distance from it.

Sequences such as these abound throughout Long Time Coming, stories of escape and capture, of growing old and being born again. But beyond those literal progressions, there are stories told by shapes: A woman in a long black coat dominates the middle of a frame of a pleasant residential street in Woodbine, Iowa, as does a bent-over drifter crossing a dry, empty road in Dubuque, and a traffic cop standing like a statue in the middle of street glistening with rain in Norwich, Connecticut. The black hole at the center of a mountain man's guitar leads to the white sphere of a black musician's maracas, which in turn foreshadow the white straw hats seen from above at a cockfight in Puerto Rico.

That these stories slowly reveal themselves as morality plays is no accident; both Lesy, and the man who originally commissioned the photographs, intended them as such. There are eight chapters of text interspersed throughout Long Time Coming, in which the mastermind of the F.S.A. documentary project, a man named Roy Stryker, is introduced, mocked, and redeemed. A bureaucrat with tyrannical tendencies, Stryker drew up lists of books for his photographers to read in order to "understand" America -- cut-and-dried sociology, experts on regional hygiene -- and "shooting scripts" the photographers were supposed to adhere to. "Husking bees. Barn dance; hay rides -- Halloween -- football games; making pies -- mince meat and pumpkin; turkey dinners; picking feathers from the ducks." In his attempt to control reality's representation, Stryker ended up composing prose poems of Americana, which in turn became the major chords of a symphony much expanded by the keen eyes of the photographers.

The whole is a requiem mass. The fact that its subject -- the United States -- continues to exist doesn't so much refute its minor chords as make them all the more relevant to the Coplandesque sweeps of optimism: elements of a portrait of what the country was, is, and -- isn't this the point of all propaganda? -- may yet be. Roy Stryker saw these photographs as facts; the ordinary citizens who viewed them understood them as testimonies. "Every new form of communication," writes Lesy, "every new kind of media, has been and will always be a blind, blunt, crippled effort to make the past into the present, the far into the near, the outside into the inside, to turn us all, for a moment, into supernal beings.... The File" -- the collection of 145,000 photographs -- "had the potential to create, over time, an experience of totality that felt boundless... It's as grand a thing, in its own way, as Yosemite or Yellowstone. It's the common property of every citizen of the United States. It belongs to us. It is us."

Here, Ewing collects mostly black and white photography from the last one hundred and fifty years into the volume. He seperates them according to different "genres": Bonds, Icons, Observations, Propositions, Tokens, Libidos, Reveries, and Obsession.

With these genres, all collected under the broad "love and desire," a case could be made as to why the editor put some pictures in "Tokens," but not "Libidos." The book tries to be an overview of love in photography, but barely scratches the surface.

The good news is the collection he does have is marvelous. I read the book in one sitting, the genre intros are short, but the photos here are wonderful. Ewing provides excellent credits, letting the reader try to find more work by photographers they have never heard of.

The opening introduction essay, capsulizing the history of photography is both too long and dismissive. Ewing laments the use of the camera by the common person to take family photos, not realizing that every snapshot cannot be art.

With all the photography here, the volume is one that can be picked up and perused again and again. Despite some spotty editorial choices, I highly recommend it.

The book does contain explicit images of sex and nudity.

The photographs are well chosen and span a very wide range, from interesting early pornography (yes, there was hard-core even in 1855!), to romantic and abstract pictures that wouldn't shock even the dullest U.S. Senator, to Ann Mandelbaum's bizarrely erotic whatsits. Many of them are true gems, images that catch and hold the viewer in that wordless somewhere evoked by the best photographic art.

The arrangement into eight large sections gives a certain amount of structure to the book, and allows the text to cover a subset of the images at a time, but don't look for any very scholarly or systematic division. The format is too small for a coffee-table book, and the text is too general and chatty to constitute a serious critical study; but these are nits. The book is well worth buying, or giving, to anyone that takes in joy through the eyes.

However, when I first became aware of his books about cats and dogs, I was thoroughly dismayed by his choice of subject matter and the way he has chosen to portray the lives of these creatures as idyllic and carefree.

Having been to these Greek islands, I have learned firsthand that the large majority of these poor animals are ignored, injured, or mistreated by people there-anything but "respected." The photographer has omitted portraits of the true conditions for most of the stray dogs and cats in Greece-crippled, starving, dying of thirst, hurt or maimed, with the humans around them barely taking notice.

The full horror of the story was later revealed to me by locals on the islands. Each year, the cats & dogs are allowed to breed uncontrolled, because tourists are fond of seeing the cute animals around town and on the beaches. At the end of each tourist season, as many of them as possible are rounded up and killed (I couldn't bear to learn exactly how), until the following year when the ones that survived begin the cycle all over again. I found this same story on all the islands I visited, including Mykonos, and I was so appalled that I shortened by stay and left Greece altogether.

The situation is a tragedy, and my feeling as a photographer and animal lover, is that Mr. Silvester should not be misrepresenting the condition of the cats and dogs on these Greek islands, especially when it is for monetary gain. I hope animal lovers around the world will agree, and send a message to anyone who profits in any way from the suffering of these dogs and cats in the sun.

Silvester's use of lighting, color, camera angles - and obvious patience - illuminates the personalities of this secret society. The photographs make one feel like an anthropologist eavesdropping unseen on their world.

This volume will satisfy those who admire cats, art, photography, the Mediterranean, architecture; or those who simply like to escape to a new world for a time.

The photography is divided into main sections:

1915-1929 Golden Age of Silents
1930s Studio System
1940s The Dream Turns Dark
1950s High Fever in the Atomic Age
1960s Censorship Hangs Loose
1970s The Silver Age
1980s The Space Opera Begins
1990s The Cinema Goes Electronic
2000s The Future, The Meaning

I can't say Hollywood has been the best influence on culture. In fact, one wonders if it has done more harm than good. Eventually you learn how to weed out the good and the bad. Normally, you can tell what you are getting in the first 15 minutes of a movie or by doing research here at Amazon which really is quite educational in itself.

If you are looking for ideas for movies you want to watch, I can't think of a better way to be introduced to classic movies. As you look through the pictures, many movies will strike you as interesting and soon you will be making a list of new fantasy adventures.

This contains photographs from sweet as pie Shirley Temple films to Tom Cruises Mission: Impossible and Lord of the Rings.

The photographs all come from the Kobal Collection, the largest and oldest privately owned movie photo archive in the world, with more than a million images on file.

Impressive!

Most importantly however, the pictures were nowhere near as good as I would have hoped. Many pictures were taken at dusk and sunset hours and they came out dark. The shadows, especially of pictures in lower Manhattan are long and dilute the quality of the pictures. Many shots of the World Trade Center and their neighboring Battery Park City and WFC are pretty poor. There is an overhead shot of the WTC that is taken at dusk and the smaller buildings are invisible. No pictures were taken at night, when the city has a new life. There were no pictures of Times Square, only one picture where Madison Squeare Garden is partly in the background, no pictures of South Street Seaport (which would come out well if taking a picture of Manhattan from Brooklyn), and many of the pictures were of obscure buildings that most people don't look at.

As a native New Yorker I can appreciate seeing some of the unique buildings and architecture, but as far as a book for sights and photographs there is much to be desired. It almost seems that the photographer just took some pictures and put them together, almost haphazardly. The book was definitely not worth what I paid for it. They could have done so much more with the concept of aerial photos, but I was left disappointed.