Customer Reviews

Nonfiction

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

 

 

With this book, Christopher Anderson -- a widely celebrated combat photographer (his pictures from places like Afghanistan, Gaza, and Iraq have won almost every major photojournalism award) -- turns his wry and insightful eye on life's more intimate moments. The fact that he's using a toy camera here gives each of his photos a surreal, fun-house-mirror sort of feel, and enhances the head-nodding sense of familiar-yet-unfamiliar shock that seach of his pictures seem to provoke. Also, his sense of humor shines through: The picture of two nuns on an airplane is like the punchline to some perfect joke. Highly recommended.

The book is beautiful in design and content. The pictures are sort of fleeting moment, but have a quirky intrigue that make each page a surprise. The photographer seems to move from humor to David Lynch surrealism and back again. Not heady material, but perhaps the finest collection of Holga material around. And despite what another reviewer says, all of the pictures are in color.

This is a great little book. The photography is all in color beautifully wrapped in a bound (coverless) book that is housed in a sturdy box. The design is very clean and perfectly compliments the images. I love the first and last page: simple embossed dots on a white page, soft at the touch. The book is the perfect size and displays one photo per page. What I like about it is that the photos are very varied in subject matter (soldier in iraq, the tour the france, paris landscape, ground zero etc ...) so they are not necessarily related to one another but they are held together visually. The visual flow of this books is very strong and colrs, feeling, moods, more than subject matter, hold the book together. As the author states in the beginning of the book: ... the picures in this book are not about anything in particular ... they are conversations overheard and half remembered ...

I bought this book because all of the photos were taken by a Holga plastic "toy" camera. This is one of the very few books of photographs dedicated solely to images taken with a Holga camera. Unfortunately this collection of images is too disjointed. Content-wise the pictures cover a wide range from landscapes, to urban scenes, to people snapshots. Most are color, a few black and white. And although this collection is by a professional photographer, I have seen more interesting and cohesive image galleries of Holga photographs on the internet. Another downside is the physical production of the book. The book is a very flimsy softcover (with an unusual, weak binding) that doesn't seem like it will last very long. I would recommend this only to Holga collector's who must own *everything* Holga.