Customer Reviews

Portraits

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have met Steve McCurry and viewed his slide presentation and am enchanted by his work. He captures his subject's mood and environment with a beautiful quality of light and color. Although I found it hard to maintain my enthusiam as there are so many images and no accompanying story with any of the images. I also wish that the book had been printed in a larger size. All the images are roughly 5x7 and larger images would have really made me feel as if the subjects were looking back at me. But please do not misinterpret this review, the book is a bargain. It is filled with pages and pages of wonderful images of people from areas many of us will never have the opportunity to visit, much less photograph with such intimacy. A great gift and a nice addition to anyone's table. I just wished it was bigger and had some text.

There are a lot to be said about this little handbook. For reason being there is nothing written on the pages except photographs. I don't want to use that line but, truly, a picture is worth a thousand words. One's own imagination is more intimate with one's self while looking at those miraculous photographs, than would when restricted with the words and passion of another. I also enjoyed the size of this little marvel; each picture is the size of a snap shot photo and delivers equal proportional faces that seems like, with the turning of each page, a remembrance of adventures thru out the world and me with my little photo hanger book.

While surfing the web, I was fortunate to find a supplementary companion for Steve McCurry’s book of Portraits; it is a well-made web site that provides a sample of 48 imagines taken from the book. Along with a short bio of the author, video clip of varies shooting locations and year and location of which each photo presented was taken.

This is a collection of some of the most beautiful and masterfully composed portraits I've seen. McCurry is a National Geographic photographer and almost every page in the book could be a cover photo. Many photos of interesting faces from India, Chad, Nepal, Afghanistan, Philippines, China, Mali, Tibet, and (a few of the most interesting) Los Angeles. Small format photos (about 5x7). Photos are printed full page (to each edge of the page) on the right-hand side, and opposite each photo is printed the city, country and year the photo was taken. Photos lack commentary or descriptions and are not categorized, but I found this rather nice. Page turns are often new locations, and the lack of commentary leaves interpretation to the imagination. Just look into the eyes of the subjects and you'll start to feel their story. Great book -- too bad it's so small. It's got a spot on the coffee table nonetheless.

Beauty is a huge thing, far too large to fit on any one face. It takes hundreds to capture even part of it - maybe as many as six billion.

This is a sample of our faces. There are no words in this book, just a face on the right-hand page and a place and year on the left. There doesn't seem to be any special order by place, time, or theme. Any order present is probably in the reader's mind only - not a bad thing, I think.

Young, old, man, woman, and some I'm just not sure about. The most varied in dress and adornment may be the many photos from India. The most varied in the people themselves may be Mali. As a group, the most beautiful may be the faces of Niger. The most startling, by far, are the Afghanis - so familiar in their features, but so very far from from my own world. If you don't like my answers, ask again. I'll probably have a different impression each time I look through this wondeful book.

And of course, there is "Pakistan 1985," the cover model. That may be the most famous, certainly the most arresting portrait of the modern era. The face is warm and somber, but the eyes look back out of the page, and into the viewer. I wonder whether they see more than my eyes can.

//wiredweird

Steve McCurry truly has a gift to capture the very heart and soul of the people he shows us with his photographs. I came away feeling like I somehow 'knew' each one, and after looking at them, just wanted to weep with the emotions that stirred within me. Essence lifts from his pictures, and I am impressed to display all of them, as they have certainly made indelible footprints on my very own heart and soul.

I first saw the picture of the mysterious (but now located) "Afgan girl" on a calender 20 years ago. I stopped, stared, walked past, returned and stared some more. I did not see the holes in her shawl or the dirt on her face until the second look. Only then did I realize that this was not the photograph of a model. The eyes are hypnotic.

Portraits is filled with other remarkable photos of people. Ordinary people from ordinary places. The color schemes and balance in the photographs are mesmerizing. As one pages through the book, the clear oneness of humankind shows through. Many of the photos of children defy description. McCurry says in the prologue that faces stare back at him from places he will never forget. The book's message to me is that there are people all over the world whom we should never forget.

This is a wonderful book. The photographs are incredible. It would be a great gift for anyone. My only complaint is that the way it is bound makes it a little hard to look at.

Cheap paperback (sorry, merely two cardboard pieces glued to the covers do not make it a proper hardback!) featuring: loads of photographs piled up without any pattern or concern for quality or integrity, with finest shots confused with many banal, mediocre, or even technically defective ones, and horizontal originals (see National Geographic) shamelessly amputated to fit an only vertical framing throughout the book!; pretty small size, and printing quality which does not compare at all with NG; and no background given for any of these more 'fine-art' documentary pictures than real standalone portraits, which detracts from their interest. In all honesty, I just wonder how even wholehearted Steve McCurry worshippers could rate five stars such a botched display, as it hardly does any justice to his best achievements. Moderate price tag, yes, but a cheap buy does not necessarily translate into a good buy, and I would be happy to pay more for half the photographs, at least twice as big, properly printed and bound.

I found this in my local library, and I was captivated and fascinated with the pictures inside. It's as if some of the pictures of the children are looking right back at me. My only crticism is that many of these pictures could have been larger. Some of them were so small that it left me frustrated. Nevertheless, this is a book that you may not be able to put down. The beautiful photos make this one of the tops in the fields of photography. The cover is somewhat chilling on what happens to many of the children throughout our world.

A thick book of the pictures taken by the prolific Steve McCurry. The title is "portraits" so the theme will be more often than not of people's faces. Their expressions, their feelings at the moment of the shot, their life, where they are, and where they've been.

Many of these photographs are striking, and if you like to travel you can do the same as McCurry does here. I would have liked a small caption about some of the people that were in this collection. Who are they? What is their story? Obviously it isn't always possible or necessary to collect the facts and tid-bits about subjects, but at times it would have added something to the colorful photos of these folks.

Those who've followed McCurry and love photography likely have high expectations, and may feel that they should get more from "portraits." With "Portraits" and its' beautiful photos of these residents of the world (primarily Asia), you can enjoy and respect McCurry's work. One postscipt, is that one of his most renown pictures, of the girl on the cover, (she) was found and interviewed over twenty years later.