Africa

Rating:
Summary: I have to agree with the others
Review: AFRICA does not represent the best work of the late Herb Ritts. He was a master of the celebrity photograph and a good director of music videos. But the image of Africa that he portrays in AFRICA is, well, the Herb Ritts version. It certainly does look like a collection of stills from a music video, and it would not have been surprising to see Naomi Campbell pop up now and then.

Herb Ritts seems to have made the beautiful African landscape (and his human subjects) a backdrop to his own stylistic preferences, as opposed to revealing anything new or previously unknown about the continent. A better title for this book may have been "Herb Ritts," because his signature is on every page.

Look elsewhere for his best work, such as NOTORIOUS.

Rating:
Summary: it's creative and beautiful. . . .give Herb a break!
Review: its a sensual and magical collection of photos. they are beautifully shot, creatively composed, and wonderfully printed. no, it does not tell the whole story of a vast continent--but don't require it to! this isn't photojournalism, and isn't trying to be.
it is a powerful view of a particular landscape (kenya) and certain individuals of the maasai. you've never seen nakedness look so natural on someone--a wonderful reflection on being human, rather than any comment on race or tribe. lighten up, and let yourself enjoy it!

Rating:
Summary: it's creative and beautiful. . . .give Herb a break!
Review: its a sensual and magical collection of photos. they are beautifully shot, creatively composed, and wonderfully printed. no, it does not tell the whole story of a vast continent--but don't require it to! this isn't photojournalism, and isn't trying to be.
it is a powerful view of a particular landscape (kenya) and certain individuals of the maasai. you've never seen nakedness look so natural on someone--a wonderful reflection on being human, rather than any comment on race or tribe. lighten up, and let yourself enjoy it!

Rating:
Summary: Yuck yuck yuck
Review: Oh, what a stinker of a book! Luckily, I got it as a present and didn't squander my valuable cash. This is a classic example of the worst stereotypes of Africa. Africa is a desert. Africa is full of Animals. Africa is deadly. Africans run around naked. Heck, Ritts' presentation of Africans is EXACTLY THE SAME as his presentation of animals. Whether accidental or intentional, it is insulting all the same. SHAME SHAME SHAME.

Strangly, I have found this to be a USEFUL book. I use it as an example during my lecture on "Stereotypical Images of Africa" in my African History Class. Without this redeeming feature, I would probably use it as a backstop on the rifle range.

Rating:
Summary: Stunningly Uninteresting
Review: Putting the politics of this book aside (it is something of a Maplethorpe meets Tarzan movies) the title alone is deceptive. Although the pictures were clearly taken in Africa, or on a black-and-white Tarzan movie set made up to look like it, the book has little to do with Africa.

Instead, it is an art project. A series of would-be beautiful black and white shots of a few "natives" running around naked. Maplethorpe and others did the photography better. This book actually feels a lot more like Janet Jackson's black and white music video in the desert than anything else. The fashion photography feel was self-evident. I kept flipping the pages looking for the inevitable shot of Naomi Campbell. Alas, to no avail.

I, being a 30+ year fan of photography urge you to do what I did. Go to your local bookstore, look at the pretty (mediocre) pictures, and spend your hard-earned money on a doggie calendar or something of the sort.

This book sucks.

Rating:
Summary: Judge it for what it is, not what you thought it should be!
Review: The reviews trashing this book seem to be based not on how well the book does what it sets out to do, but on the biases of what KIND of book the reviewers like or don't like. Paroti is even more scathing of this book elsewhere on Amazon (where, in a discussion of Africa photography books, he doesn't even MENTION the glorious Beckwith/Fisher book, "African Ark"), actually telling readers not to buy the Herb Ritts book! Why not describe the stylized fashion shots, and then let readers decide whether it's what they like? Prospective buyers would do well to rely more on the two industry reviews of this book, which are more professional and accurate than the reader reviews, although the second one is less so. (Why the remark about "old National Geographic stereotypes"? Millions of women in Africa dress bare-breasted and last April I photographed a tribe in which the men often wear the only wrap they own thrown over their shoulder, if they bother to carry it at all. And that wasn't even in one of the most remote areas of Africa.)

Frankly, as a photographer and a collector of coffee-table books on Africa, I value--not denigrate--the Herb Ritts book for the very fact that it is different. I'd have preferred the book to stick with either people or animals (people!), but that is just my preference--I am happy to inform readers of the mix and let them go with theirs. I'm shorting the book one star because I thought the composition and subject matter of the animal pictures didn't always match the high quality and wonderful composition of the people pictures (one of which now hangs on my wall after I purchased a second copy of the book for that purpose).

Seems to me our reviews are most helpful when we accurately describe the book and its intent, and then say how well it lives up to what it purports to be, including quality. I feel most of the reader reviewers here were more concerned with winning people over to their own tastes than with objectivity.