Stopping By: Portraits from Small Towns (Visions of Illinois) [Hardcover]

Raymond Bial (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 23 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press; First Edition edition (December 1, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252015878
• ISBN-13: 978-0252015878
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 8.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,596,559 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Raymond Bial (pronounced Beal) is the author and photo-illustrator of more than one hundred critically-acclaimed books for children and adults, including Amish Home, Frontier Home, The Underground Railroad, Where Lincoln Walked, One-Room School, Ghost Towns of the American West, Tenement: Immigrant Life on the Lower East Side, Nauvoo: Mormon City on the Mississippi River, The Super Soybean, and many others. A skilled photographer, he works with ease in both color and in black and white. Working with both film cameras and digital equipment, he is best known for his versatility in portraiture, landscapes, and still lifes, and his sensitivity toward the people, places, and objects portrayed in his images.
The subjects of Raymond's books range from farm life to American social and cultural history. Appealing to young and old alike, his books are ideal choices for parents, grandparents, teachers, and librarians to share with children. His most recent photo-essays are Ellis Island: Coming to the Land of Liberty, and Nauvoo: Mormon City on the Mississippi River, published by Houghton-Mifflin, and The Super Soybean, published by Albert Whitman. He has also written three popular collections of mystery fiction for children: The Fresh Grave and Other Ghostly Stories, The Ghost of Honeymoon Creek, and most recently Shadow Island: A Tale of Lake Superior, published by Bluehorse Books. His books have received numerous awards from the American Library Association, National Council of Teachers of English, Children's Book Council, and many other organizations. He lives with his wife, Linda, and children, Sarah and Luke, in Urbana, Illinois. His daughter Anna, who illustrated two of Raymond's books, is a fashion designer in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Getting to the heartland, January 16, 2011

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stopping By: Portraits from Small Towns (Visions of Illinois) (Hardcover)

Photographer and writer Raymond Bial wanted to photograph the people of small town America and in particular the quiet places of central Illinois. I think he succeeded admirably though I have reservations about his style of photography and also the production of the book.

Bial traveled to all the towns in central Illinois with populations from under a hundred to a few thousand and selected those that still retained the small town ambiance he was looking for. The rural America he captured is fast disappearing. He undertook this assignment in the late eighties so many of the places in these photos have probably got smaller though even after a couple of decades I doubt that they have disappeared completely.

In his Preface Bial says that he preferred to photograph people looking at the camera, he felt it was a more natural and honest way to capture individuals and looking through the eighty-five mono photos everybody seems at ease with the situation and also I felt this reflected their contentment with small town life. However in many of the photos, especially those inside stores, this format seems a bit contrived. Had store owners and others done what they normally do I feel it would have made a much more animated photograph. Surely, where there are two people featured it would have been more natural to have them relating to each other and the camera capturing the moment. Page after page of everyone looking at the camera has a slightly off-putting feel to the work.

All the photos feature individuals posing inside or outside buildings. Missing are any photos of Main Streets to give a sense of location. Four or five photos of town exteriors would have nicely broken up the flow of portraits.

What would really have given this fascinating book a lift would have been better reproduction. The photos are only printed with a 150 screen when they deserve 200 or 250 dpi to bring out the detail and depth that is in so many of them. Better still they should be printed as duotones on a matt art so they can really sparkle. Small Town America (PC): The Missouri Photo Workshops 1949-1991 though printed with a 175 screen has better paper and it shows in the photos. Both books cover the same theme but photographically go about it in a different ways.

'Stopping by' captures beautifully a passing America thanks to the vision of Raymond Bial. It's slightly unfortunate that the book doesn't quite deliver the vision one hundred per cent.

***LOOK AT SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.