ILLUMINATIONS

A commercial photographer explains his craft in this memoir.

Klein revisits highlights from a long career that started in the 1950s and was spent mainly photographing products for print ads—everything from consumer electronics to Kleenex—while also doing artier portraits, landscapes, wildlife tableaux, and abstracts, some of which won awards. The colorful book mainly consists of making-of narratives about a series of pictures, each one discussing the artistic concept, set construction, lighting scheme, exposure schedules, and miscellaneous mishaps. (One photo session for an ad for Sears bathroom rugs featuring a cat nestled cozily in the plush floor coverings got derailed when the star kept stalking off the set.) The author includes full-color reproductions of the images he discusses, which are notable for their glowing hues and complex, arresting visual effects achieved with sophisticated lighting, filters, and long, multiple exposures. A dancer seems to swirl up and leap over his own crouching form; a jazz trumpeter highlighted in lurid reds and purples appears to be playing three horns at once; profusions of abstract discs and pentagons in honeyed gold erupt like shooting stars; the three-dimensional labyrinth of an iris blossom tunnels inward in delicate shades of blue; a full moon rises at dusk over Oregon’s Mount Hood above a river full of eerie, shimmering light. Klein opens a window on to the considerable aesthetic effort that goes into workaday advertising and re-creates the ingenious tricks film photographers used before digital effects came along. His writing is full of technical details and is pitched at readers who already have a substantial understanding of photography. (“The diffused red glow in the upper right area of the scene is coming from” a spotlight, “with a red filter, pointed at a black seamless background, seen through a glass,” he writes of an answering-machine ad that shows red lines suggestive of sound waves emanating from the device.) The book sorely needed a copy edit to prune irregularities like the overuse of quotation marks. Still, professional photographers and hobbyists will find much intriguing lore here, and casual readers can enjoy the captivating images.

A spottily written but visually sumptuous look back at old-school photography.