Customer Reviews

NUDES 2 (Graphis Nudes) (v. 2)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Nudes Volume I had some really good unseen pictures, with many incredible nudes. This second book should never have been made. The photos are terrible, and the pictures are nothing compared to the first book. If your looking for nudes to study, this book is not the book to get. If you just want every book out there with nudes, then buy it.

This book stinks compared with the original. Of course, the original is hard to top, but really, this is such a lame effort. They should have left Nudes to stand by itself on the merit of its own greatness. As well as use the money wasted on this flop to produce more hardcover copies of the original!

When paging trough NUDES 2 it gets obvious that these are the plates that did not fit in the first book. There are several great photographers depicted inside but as a compilation of fine art nudes it does not give a good overall picture due to some rather compromising work.

As a Finn I am happy to see several plates by Arno Rafael Minkkinen, one of the more internationally known originally Finnish fine art photographers.

This book has hard covers but the "mechanical" quality is poor. The pages are bound of course but the gluing gives and breaks after only a few readings. Nothing breaks loose however, so the book pages stay together.

My book is marked second edition so perhaps the printing and binding work is done more successfully by another company on the first edition.

In fact, the other books in the Graphis Nudes series gave me every reason to expect better. But every series has a low point and this, at least among series members to date, is the nadir for an otherwise fine series.

A few of the pictures make clear and worthwhile statements about the realities of being human (p.34, 37), or draw on figure's wonderful potential for abstraction (p.32, 171, 174). Too often, though, the samples presented here collapse into technical exercises in optical trickery. Other photos are older, disappointing any viewer who'd come expecting to see recent innovations. (Oddly, a 1920s photo by Weston seems much more modern than the samples from the 1940s and 1950s.) And a number of artists present quite a few samples of their work here. That disappoints both the viewers looking for the variety in other Graphis Nudes collections and viewers who just want to get past the work of an artist that they dislike.

Maybe, judged in isolation, this book deserves a better rating. I have to evaluate it in the context of its outstanding series siblings, though, and this one is decidedly the runt of the litter.

//wiredweird

PS: I have to agree with the reviewer who commented on the strength of the binding. I thought it was just that my used copy had led a hard life, but now I'm not so sure.