A scattershot career guide, but the stunning visuals and photographic lore will beguile readers.
A photographer looks back on his most successful images and draws lessons for neophytes in this memoir and primer.
Klein reflects on his career as a commercial photographer producing advertising images for everything from Kleenex to radar detectors, along with his forays into fine-arts photography. His reminiscences offer a detailed view of a commercial photographer’s work, which goes way beyond snapping pictures. His time was spent constructing elaborate sets, setting up complex lighting rigs, procuring props—crushed Styrofoam stood in for snow in a Christmas album cover photo—and working with models. (“When the first flash was fired the cat thought the job was done and wanted to exit the set,” he recalls of a bathroom rug ad shoot that included a finicky feline model to suggest the fabric’s plushness.) The author’s career advice for would-be photographers is sparse and haphazard. He provides some useful, if rudimentary, tips on showing portfolios to local ad agencies, networking with art directors, and Googling photo contests to enter. Klein displays inspiring photos of checks he received for prints and issues stirring, if vague, exhortations. (“BE DARING, BE DRAMATIC, BE DYNAMIC! EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT!”) At the book’s heart are the handsome color reproductions of the author’s best works, which feature rich, saturated hues; intricate multiple exposures; and arresting geometric abstractions. His commercial images include avant-gardejazz album covers, elegant displays of floor tiles and power tools, restaurant photos glowing with mellow ambiance, an iconic picture of a cluster of four giraffes, a captivating multiple-exposure portrait of a whirling dancer, and a telephone answering machine that emits lurid red rays to convey sound vibrations. Among his fine-arts photos are piquant finches, a sumptuous riverscape glimmering in the light of a full moon over Mount Hood, and a backlit blue iris blossom that’s a mystical cavern of violet chiaroscuro. In workmanlike prose, Klein delivers detailed accounts of how he made his images—“The boats shifted slightly, and so did I, trying to keep the sun positioned between the boat masts,” he writes of a shoot at Chicago’s Belmont Harbor. Although some of the film techniques he describes are obsolete in the digital age, serious photographers will still find them engrossing.
A scattershot career guide, but the stunning visuals and photographic lore will beguile readers.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1638714668
Page Count: 148
Publisher: PageTurner Press and Media LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.
Celebrating a beloved artist.
Published to coincide with a major exhibition of works by British-born artist David Hockney (b. 1937) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, this lushly illustrated volume offers a detailed overview of the artist’s life and work, along with chapters focused on his various styles and subject matter, a chronology, and a glossary of the many techniques he employed in his art, including camera lucida, computer, and video. Contributors of essays include noted art historians and curators, such as Norman Rosenthal, who edited the volume; Simon Schama; Anne Lyles; James Cahill; and François Michaud. Growing up in the north of England, Hockney was drawn to the light and sparkle that he found in Hollywood movies. When he finally arrived in Los Angeles, the sunlit landscapes inspired him, and his new sense of artistic freedom concurred with sexual freedom: As a gay man, he felt liberated from the constraints that had weighed on him in Britain, even in the “relative Bohemia” of the Royal College of Art. Essayists reflect on his artistic interests, such as landscapes, portraiture, flowers, and the opera—for which he created boldly exuberant sets—as well as on his influences and experimentation. Michaud examines the impact on Hockney of a visit to Paris in the 1970s, where he became familiar with Henri Matisse and his contemporaries from museum exhibitions. In the 1990s, visiting his mother and friends in Yorkshire, Hockney painted both outdoors and in the studio, experimenting with various media—including the photocopier and fax machine—as he worked to render the woodsy landscape. As a companion to the exhibition, the volume offers stunning reproductions of Hockney’s prolific works. Enormously popular with museumgoers, Hockney, Rosenthal exults, “transforms the ordinary and the everyday into the remarkable.”
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780500029527
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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