Customer Reviews

Driving to Stony Lonesome: Jack Welpott's Indiana Photographs, 1936-1959 (Quarry Books)

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This book should be in every public library in the country, although on no photographer's personal bookshelf.
There is not a single image in this book which I would want to hang on my wall, yet the overall quality of the photographs is superb. It is the sort of work by dedicated photographic enthusiasts whose prints fill countless albums, envelopes, drawers, and old print paper boxes throughout the world.
The importance of the book lies more in its instructive value than in its aesthetic appeal. There are no illustrations of Ansel Adam's "Moonrise," or Karsh's "Churchill," to inspire young (or older) photographers to greatness. Nowhere else that I am aware is available to show the reality of how the plain, often simple images of ordinary events touching the photographer's life are where and how the study of the photographic art should proceed. Not as an end, but as a significant intermediate stage of learning.
For a photographer to achieve this level of vision would be more than most of us could ask for, to exceed it would be a blessing of great personal satisfaction.
There is even a chapter of really (unintentionally) bad landscape photographs at the end, to confirm that the path of improvement does not always lead upward. Even the title is a hoax. There are only two images taken in those important depression and war years between 1936 and 1950.
It is somewhat like a song with great, uplifting words, and an unsingable melody.