West Point

Rating:
Summary: Nice photos, but little context save the commercial one
Review: Photographer Marcia Lippman was artist-in-residence at the US Military Academy in 1986, and spent a year photographing images and life at West Point. More than 15 years later, her photographs have been published as yet another of the many, many books commemorating the Academy's bicentennial.

Ms Lippman is a good photographer, and the photos in this book (all black and white) include some interesting explorations with light and shadow, the mass nature of life in uniform, and the like. The cover image, as well as several others, is almost Hitchcockian. The minimal text strives for a kind of High Art ethos that often seemed out of place with what was actually being shown (kind of like those NFL Films efforts to turn football games into modern Iliads).

Maybe I didn't take enough art appreciation courses in school, because as I looked at many of the images, my first response was to ask, 'What's going on?' There are a few pages of captions in the back of the book, but they're not always helpful (example: 31. Formation, Central Area). West Point graduates will probably be best able to understand what they're seeing, and maybe the images will be particularly evocative for them. But personally, I didn't feel compelled either to set this out on my coffee table, or to return to it again and again to absorb the masterful artwork. And apart from cashing in on the bicentennial, was there any particular reason to publish these images now, as opposed to fifteen years ago, or fifteen years in the future?