Customer Reviews

The Quiet Hours: City Photographs

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I had never heard of Mike Melman until I saw I reference to this book in Kelly Povo's excellent 'Roadsides: Images of the American Landscape' and so I bought a copy and I'm pleased I did.

The title is correct, these are probably the quietest photos you'll ever see. Melman had the neat idea of capturing the pre-dawn hours of the Minnesota, Twin Cities. No people, no vehicles, and no activity that you expect to see and hear during daylight. Many of the photos are given an extra twist because they were taken in wintertime and the visual presence of snow creates an additional awareness of silence in the viewer.

Of the seventy photos twenty-nine are interiors and as such I don't think they quite have the impact of the exteriors but they still carry the theme of the book. Many of the outside ones work so well using the brightness of security lights (and don't forget the snow) of industry or sometimes just streetlights creating shapes of buildings yet still revealing plenty of detail.

The book is fortunately in the formal photobook style: landscape, one photo per page (in 175dpi on quality paper) generous margins with a location and date caption. Simple and elegant, it lets these quiet images capture your thoughts.


***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

These are some of the most wonderful black and white night photographs that I have ever seen. Melman captures the waste of industrial mid-western landscapes, at a magic time of day (the dawn and pre-dawn hours), and turns it into beautiful art.

He also depicts shops, storefronts, industrial interiors, all devoid of human presence, in a way that is both nostalgia-invoking and repelling at the same time.

Quiet Hours is a great book by a very nice guy. The images are calm, relaxing, and quiet - just as its title implies. The images show us a side of the city not often seen: a city without people or motion. The images make you feel like you are alone, walking though the night in a wintery place. You can almost hear your footsteps as your feet creak on the frozen snow, feel the cold air enter your nose as you breathe, and the snowflakes landing on your face. The Quiet Hours: City Photographs