ASPIRATIONS

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.