Love and Desire: Photoworks

Rating:
Summary: not quite as good as the body
Review: this collection of photos isn't quite as good as his selection for the body. but there are many good photographs in it. the text of the chapters is well written and informative. some of the placement of the photos is confusing. all in all, a good book to have.

Rating:
Summary: Love and Desire: Photoworks (Wr. by William A. Ewing)
Review: This four hundred page volume is a followup to the photography book entitled "The Body," which had pictures of just that.

Here, Ewing collects mostly black and white photography from the last one hundred and fifty years into the volume. He seperates them according to different "genres": Bonds, Icons, Observations, Propositions, Tokens, Libidos, Reveries, and Obsession.

With these genres, all collected under the broad "love and desire," a case could be made as to why the editor put some pictures in "Tokens," but not "Libidos." The book tries to be an overview of love in photography, but barely scratches the surface.

The good news is the collection he does have is marvelous. I read the book in one sitting, the genre intros are short, but the photos here are wonderful. Ewing provides excellent credits, letting the reader try to find more work by photographers they have never heard of.

The opening introduction essay, capsulizing the history of photography is both too long and dismissive. Ewing laments the use of the camera by the common person to take family photos, not realizing that every snapshot cannot be art.

With all the photography here, the volume is one that can be picked up and perused again and again. Despite some spotty editorial choices, I highly recommend it.

The book does contain explicit images of sex and nudity.

Rating:
Summary: Give it to someone you love
Review: This is a book to savor, to page through slowly, to share with someone you love. As long as that someone is relatively enlightened about the occasional explicit or disturbing image!

The photographs are well chosen and span a very wide range, from interesting early pornography (yes, there was hard-core even in 1855!), to romantic and abstract pictures that wouldn't shock even the dullest U.S. Senator, to Ann Mandelbaum's bizarrely erotic whatsits. Many of them are true gems, images that catch and hold the viewer in that wordless somewhere evoked by the best photographic art.

The arrangement into eight large sections gives a certain amount of structure to the book, and allows the text to cover a subset of the images at a time, but don't look for any very scholarly or systematic division. The format is too small for a coffee-table book, and the text is too general and chatty to constitute a serious critical study; but these are nits. The book is well worth buying, or giving, to anyone that takes in joy through the eyes.

Rating:
Summary: A really thoughtful and beautiful collection
Review: This is an elegant slipcased book with hundreds of art photographs which really make you think about the nature of love and desire. It's hard to put down, and the images haunt you....I loved it!