Customer Reviews

William Garnett: Aerial Photographs

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This book contains 73 black and white aerial landscape photographs, with a brief introduction and a list of Garnett's exhibitions and publications/photo essays. The photographs are amazing. Pure form, pattern, and texture. The scale of many images is completely deceptive - fractals 30 years before the word was invented! The introduction by Martha Sandweiss is concise and insightful. I would have liked to know more about how the pictures were made, but this information is probably available from the bibliographic references. My only criticism is that the binding on my copy is failing slightly.

Garnett's work is for me the absolute essence of what the art of photography is all about. He has an incredible eye for beauty and the technique to bring it to life. The printing is top notch, and the introduction enriches the book further.

These are black and white aerial photographs only in the most literal sense. They also exist as simply exquisite patterns, textures, abstracts, but always with a second hit of pleasure when you realize what the literal subject was.

Of 50 books of photography I own, this is the most precious to me.

I've just revisited this book for what must be at least the hundreth time. It is an old friend that never fails to bring new hope. Garnett goes beyond the stunning simplification of a harsh and chaotic world at the horizons into one of harmony and purpose from a loftier perspective: It allows me a better perspective on my own place in the world, and - more importantly - the world's place in my own sphere. It reminds me that it can be a place where beauty and inspiration intersect.

This book features a broad range of Garnett's highly graphical aerial photographs. While almost all are striking in pattern, form and texture, I particularly enjoyed the agricultural shots, the sanddunes, and the fractal/branching patterns. Garnett's work is so very different than almost everything else I've seen, that I felt I needed this book to round out my collection.