Customer Reviews

Wicked

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

 

 

What a disappointment! Anybody with a Kodak instamatic camera can take pictures like this. Stick to photobooks by Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, LaChapelle, and Mark Selliger, and you'll get your money's worth. I wish I never bought this book and will refund it!

I like the book... But I found it somewhat dull. Although the model is very beautiful and the content is playful, I was left wanting more. Ellen Von Unwerth is my favorite photographer nonetheless, but her versatility with themes was nowhere to be found in this book... I recommmedn you buy it only if you are a fan of Ellens' and if you like the model. It is very well done. I kept my copy.

This book is not a grand overview of Ellen von Unwerth's career. It is apparently a single session or series of sessions. All monochrome, focused just one gorgeous model (Brazilian, as I recall), and great, sensuous fun. These masterful pictures have rhythm, warmth, and life -- everything sexy photography usually lacks.

The viewer is invited to play along with the model and the photographer. Technically terrific; only "fashion" photography in the loosest sense.

First I must confess that my review may be slightly bias, as Ellen Von Unwerth has become my most admired and respected photgrapher. She has an incredible talent that is well presented in "Wicked". Although her colour photos (as have been seen in "Couples") may better exemplify her ability to use lighting to its greatest advantage, the black and white photos in "Wicked" show her ability to capture the models natural looks. It is rare for any photographer to be able to relax the models as well as Ellen Von Unwerth has done so well here. Although when I purchased the book, I paid almost double the amount that Amazon is retailing it for, I have absolutely no regrets, and I strongly urge any portrait enthusists to at least give "wicked" a look. It is without a doubt the best photography book I own. Its a great book to sit back with at night, and have a few glasses of good red wine.

Von Unwerth is the current darling of photography magazines in Europe and America. "Wicked" and her other book "Couples" are playful but fail to distinguish her as an artist. At this juncture, from what I have seen, she is better at securing PR for herself than she is a quality artist. The problem with the media is that when one of them features something, anything or anybody, then all the others feel they have missed something and run their own features of the same thing. The reader deserves better but rarely gets it. I'm sure Von Unwerth will continue to grow as an artist but right now she is a lightweight. The ground she covers has been covered many times before.

I enjoyed this book, being a design student and a photographic hobbist. Beautiful quality images of gazelle like model with a sexy, playful, witch- like theme

As a photographer I can think of few artists who truly inspire an emotional response and posses an eye for the asthetic and dynamic which inspires my own interpretations. Of those few, Ellen von Unwerth and Howard Schatz are two that come quickly to mind. von Unwerth seems to continually find novel expressions of a similar theme, most always limiting herself to black and white images. In my mind, the "masters", such as Newton are, to my eye, uninspiring, producing images easily replicated that constitute in no way a creative vision of a subject. While she is not the be all and end all of photography she is the place to start in regards to modern editorial photography.

If you want modern photography look up Jeff Wall, he is a true modern artist in this medium. He does not work for fashion magazines and does not spend all his time in New York hopped up on cocain running around taking fuzzy pictures of half naked women. This book was not the best, but I have a few friends who really like it. I don't. Her photographs are exactly like you picture them to be. They are a fanciful look into the glam world without any breath of reality. They are not art and she is not an artist.