Vacant Eden: Roadside Treasures of the Sonoran Desert

Rating:
Summary: Powerful observations of disappearing roadside motels
Review: "Gumbiner and Hayden's photographs capture on film rapidly disappearing architectural treasures and capture in wonderful detail artistic elements from the past. The photographers skillfully blend documentation with powerful observations of the current social milieu of these roadside remnants. Recommended reading and viewing for anyone who ever slowed down at the sight of a neon sign!"---Teri Cleeland, HistorianArizona Historic Sites Review Committee

Rating:
Summary: Sign snaps.
Review: Abigail Gumbiner and Carol Hayden had the wonderful idea of photographing examples of motels and their signs before they vanished. The buildings are mostly around the Tuscon and the Sonora desert area but unfortunately with no captions (or dates) it is difficult to know exactly where these fading treasures were located. This was not the only disappointment I had with this book. So many of the signs are photographed against a dark blue sky which, I thought, really subdued their impact, others were badly cropped (plate thirty-three). The non-sign photos, for example the pool images (plates forty-four to fifty-three) are not really worth a second look and others of chairs, close-ups of doors and motel walls are rather ordinary. The book design does not help either, I felt all the photos could have been larger and so reduce the excess of white paper surrounding each image.

I was expecting to see in this book photos of the same color and composition quality as David Graham's in his two books, 'Declaring Independence' (ISBN 0966677684) and 'Taking Liberties' (ISBN 0966677668) both cover, so well, the fading sights of the American highway and small towns.

The first (and most likely last) serious analysis of the sign genre is Lisa Mahar's 'American Signs' (ISBN 1580931197) where she discovers "Form and Meaning on Route 66" motels and their signs and goes into the subject with perhaps more detail than I would have thought possible, loads of photos, too.