13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mastefterful work by one of the world's best photographers, March 20, 2002
This review is from: Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley (Hardcover)
There is a knock at my door and here is the UPS man delivering my order from Amazon.com. Among the books: Desert, The Mojave and Death Valley Photographs by Jack Dykinga, text by Janice Emily Bowers. I barely had time to read more than a page or two of the text before it made me want to go straight to the photos to see the place she was clearly, and intelligently writing about. And I was not disappointed: It was overwhelmed with joy of at being able to share the keeness of Mr. Dykinga's fine and perceptive photographic vision of that place. This is a more subtle body of work than the previous books based around his photographs.
The Sonoran Desert had a similar effect on me years ago and expanded my sense of what ilandscape photography could be. Stone Canyons did not have as great of affect on me as the first book
More than anything else, the images in this book remind me why the large format camera is such a tremendous aid to seeing something more clearly and perceptively than you can with the naked eye. even more so than a 35mm or medium format or easily portable digital gear can. Some of the photos even have a sense of humor to them and when did you last see that in a photograph of a natural landscape? The reproduction of the images appears to be first rate and the design and typography of the book match its contents in quality.
In short there are wonderful things to be found in this book.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Spectacular photography of a beautiful desert, December 27, 1999
This review is from: Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley (Hardcover)
The photographs are stunning of Death Valley, Red Rock Conservaiton Area, and the East Mojave National Scenic Area. This area west of my home in Las Vegas is very large and very beautiful. The photogrpahs are a delight, especially the wildflower photogrpahs taken after the El Nino rains.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dry, but not Arid, December 13, 2004
This review is from: Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley (Hardcover)
As I went through this book, I kept asking myself, am I looking at the dessert or am I looking at the landscape photographs of Jack Dykinga? I've been to the Mojave and to Death Valley and I don't remember them looking so beautiful.
Dykinga's style reminded me of the work of Eliot Porter, with modern film stock. Most of his pictures have the same subtle quality, created by the use of analogous colors, that is, colors near each other on the color wheel, and varying only by tint or small changes in hue. A Dykinga picture almost always has one dominant hue like brown or tan or blue, and the hue rarely feels intense, even if it's a field of California Poppies.
It's obvious that Dykinga's work utilizes a large format camera. Everything is in sharp focus from foreground to distant mountains, thanks to small apertures and the ability to twist the light through his camera. This means that the picture is not going to immediately draw your attention to one aspect of the scene by controlled focus. More likely, the viewer will have to work his way through the picture, discovering things along the way.
The layout of the book seems to be well considered. Quite often two plates with similar subject matter will face each other and there is a synergistic effect from the comparison. For example, I delighted in examining two facing pictures of desert sunflowers. In both cases the yellow orange flowers have a hilly background, but one group of flowers is pushing up through dried-out, cracked clay, while in the other picture the flowers are growing from a small body of water collected for a brief time from rainfall. The mud and the water are both magenta in color but the textures are completely different. The thoughts that arose from the juxtaposition were not only about the variety of the desert but also about the nature of color and vision.
I suppose one reason that I never saw the dessert the photographer portrays is because most of the pictures were taken at the golden hours of sunrise and sunset. To have been that many places in the desert at just those times would have taken me months and months. At the very least, I can be a philistine and thank Dykinga for saving me a lot of time.
As to the text in the book, my feeling is that it probably has to be included for marketing purposes. Janice Bowers' essays seemed poetic and show that she loves the desert, but like most such commentaries, they do little to illuminate the photographer's work. I suppose the essays are worth reading once. The pictures on the other hand can bear many, many viewings and add something to the sense of the place each time.
I finally concluded that I was looking at the desert through Jack Dykinga's eyes when I viewed this book. I resolved to return to the actual desert again and see if I could continue to see it through his eyes.
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