In Time, All is Revealed

The Life of a Photograph by Sam Abell
National Geographic Focal Point (October 21, 2008)
208 pages/hardcover/200 photographs/$40.00

Reviewed by Jain Lemos

Sam Abell’s purpose permeates all the way through the weighty pages of his latest book, The Life of a Photograph. Abell provides an important insight to his success: He instinctively and deliberately makes photographs, he does not take them. Abell’s definition of the life of a photograph is all about the progression of a scene. He has trained himself so deeply in this practice that at the end of the day, individual images matter less than staying true to his formula for making them.

The Life of a Photograph is a career technique book. The theme is to continually illustrate Abell’s stance that once he finds the setting of his desire, the picture will come. The book does not follow a structured outline in terms of place, storyline or chronology; instead, there are many parings made at the same setting. This device contributes to the sensation of actually being Abell as he waits. Sometimes the waiting feels anxious and other times, divine. Abell explains his modus operandi with observant, and sometimes modest, words. Strapped to find inspiration in the Amazon, he decides to approach the area as a garden leading to stirring results. He writes the shots were, “done with an appreciation of how, one day, they might be seen.”

There are terrific comparison exercises presented in The Life of a Photograph. For example, when faced with two views of a cab in a Santorni street scene, do you choose the image on the left that includes a towering bust of a historical figure or the frame on the right where the roof of the taxi appears like a fresh sheet of ice? Out of four shots taken from a Japanese bullet train window, are the photographs where Mt. Fuji is captured intact superior to one with the mountain obscured by a steel structure? The book provides a semester of such discussions.

Not all of the images in The Life of a Photograph are remarkable. Many are knock-your-socks-off shots of a lifetime. With this assemblage, Abell reveals his signature approach to photography where the photographer is eventually discerned and connected to every image forever. Abell admits this is not easy, even after forty years in the field. In all, the book is a testament to the fact that photography is extremely hard work. The Life of a Photograph is a treasure map that Abell graciously hands over to those ready for the hunt.

Curtains of Change

Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World
by Alexandra Avakian
National Geographic Focal Point (September 30, 2008)
208 pages/hardcover/150 photographs/$40.00

Reviewed by Jain Lemos

Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World is the first title released in National Geographic Books’ new imprint, Focal Point. In accord with Focal Point’s mission to, “draw on the most outstanding photography of today’s journalistic elite,” Alexandra Avakian’s memoir is exceptionally influential. Avakian’s enviable assignments from leading journals spanning twenty years resulted in a massive body of work. Her 150 selections for this book reflect an exclusively personal and brave assemblage of Muslim life.

Windows of the Soul is divided into sections on The Palestinians, Iran, Central Asia and the Caucasus, Somalia and the Sudan, America and Hezbollah. The chapters are a mix of news stories, discoveries, atrocities and realities of a way of life. The images were often taken at much risk to Avakian’s safety and health. In Gaza, she spent two years in Islamic clothing—blending in to gain trust and access—but the cost included being beaten by Hamas and shot at by Israeli troops. Her infiltration into Hezbollah was unprecedented and her depiction of their daily life is oddly still. As she photographs Muslims in America, the images become more saturated, lively and divergent as she documents Arab festivals in Michigan, a baptism in Texas and a Persian New Year celebration on the beach in California.

Like her photographs, Avakian’s narrative in Windows of the Soul is clear-cut and poetically composed. The text is a private accounting yet she provides readers with more than just an insider’s view of life in regions that mystify many outside of their world. In Iran, an image of masked women sipping sodas at a market is shot intrusively but their masks and head coverings create a separateness of subject and shooter. Avakian explains that she couldn’t resist trying on a mask herself: “The most disconcerting thing…was having my vision strictly divided between left and right….” Following gunfire in Gaza, Avakian stumbles upon, “a Palestinian teenager dying in the dregs of the alley’s sewage.” Her photo is largely flanked on the left foreground by a soldier with his weapon ready, creating a type of crude barrier over the stricken teen.

The degree to which Windows of the Soul works to turn around the ignorance of the many political and social issues facing Muslims is significantly high. All too often the media diverts attention away from matters of real importance; Avakian’s efforts to the contrary with this subject matter deserve recognition and reward. Even if the Muslim world remains chiefly impenetrable to outsiders despite attempts to change that through dialogue and photojournalism, Avakian is to be admired for sharing without hesitation the amazing insider details of the mindset and methodology rooted in her work.

Wavelengths to the Past

The Eternal Light of Egypt
by Sarite Sanders
Thames & Hudson (September 30, 2008)
220 pages/hardcover/126 duotone photographs/$50.00

Reviewed by Jain Lemos

Sarite Sanders issues the results of a thirty-year reconnaissance mission in her book, The Eternal Light of Egypt: A Photographic Journey. Conquering the sensitivity of infrared, Sanders’ impressions of Nile treasures are most welcoming. As the full gray spectrum is no longer hidden, gods and goddesses, mummies, rulers, colossi, temples and portals reveal a new likeness with prideful charm. Along with her timeless subjects, Sanders can rejoice with this mammoth personal and professional achievement.

Eternal Light is deeply rich in substance like the dark fertile soil of the region. There is an immediate admiration for Sanders’ understanding of the difficulties with the entire process surrounding infrared technique. In her excellent introduction, Dr. Dorothea Arnold, Curator for Egyptian Antiquities at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, compares and contrasts Sanders’ images with those of photographers Francis Frith, Werner Forman, Henri Stierlin and other artists obsessed with capturing the light of this ancient corridor. Arnold imparts her acute knowledge with tremendous care; her treatise provides a solution to the puzzles Sanders faced when selecting angles and points of focus.

There is much in the book to celebrate and discover. Discussing the images will be the first delight for readers. The photographs chosen for Eternal Light are not repetitive even when the same place is examined more than once. Quotations accompanying the images are inspiring rather than pretentious and create a perfect separate track. Instead of being filler they fittingly become the missing color channel. The back matter includes a lifetime study list of Egyptology within the sources of quotations, a picture index with edifying captions and Sanders’ adoring thanks as she reveals details of her own transformation.

Sanders waited—apparently without anxiety—to deliver Eternal Light. Her rewards deserve to be as massive as this undertaking. Likely, as she placed each piece together, she foresaw her work’s everlasting impact. Any trip to Egypt would be hollow without this special book as a primer. While there, don’t miss an exhibition of selections from The Eternal Light of Egypt hosted by the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the American University in Cairo Press.

Magnificent Magnatismia

Animalia
by Henry Horenstein
Pond Press (June 30, 2008)
80 pages/hardcover/64 duotone photographs/$40.00

Reviewed by Jain Lemos

Professor Henry Horenstein remixes his acclaimed photographs of land and sea creatures, adding 35 unpublished images, into his latest book, Animalia. His parade of subjects in sepia marches with pride and precision though the lens and into the mind’s eye. As an artist, Horenstein connects humans to animals through emotional macro studies. As a scientist, he patiently waits to press the shutter on an unsuspecting world.

Photographed primarily from 1995 through 2001, Horenstein used captivity as his studio and laboratory, visiting zoos and aquariums rather than making solitary excursions into the wild. This environment provided him with a special auditory dimension as he worked. Comments from visitors such as, “Poor thing, she’s bored,” or “Doesn’t that monkey look like Uncle Ike?” spurred him on, proving that animals can be photographed to convey their own personalities.

The pacing of Animalia’s 64 duotones is steady yet relaxed. The animals appear in sharp focus, select focus, soft focus, then softer and back to crispy. Some of the pairings on spreads with left and right plates are clever. A dead mouse’s tail is within the grasp of a newt’s outstretched arm on the opposite page; a pig’s snout sniffs the smooth nose of a whale; the curled fingers of a monkey mimic the hooked claws of a bat. Assembled, the book has depth in every category of photography and design study.

Animalia is accompanying a traveling exhibition through the Harvard Museum of Natural History assuring large audiences and accolades for this master photographer and teacher. Don’t miss Horenstein’s extraordinary work in any accessible format.