Lauris Morgan-Griffiths

A sumptuous presentation of more than a hundred of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings, selected throughout her career, with a preliminary short article focusing on her life and career. The paintings are coffee-table size, which helps immensely to better show an artist like O'Keeffe, and nicely reproduced. O'Keeffe fiercely resisted the interpretation by the public and many critics of many of her paintings as having sexual themes, but really, there are some that I can't see any other way. Each full-page painting has a short piece with the author's and some critics' interpretations and a perspective on O'Keeffe's life and work at this time. A lovely and illuminating book with paintings mostly omitted from my other O'Keeffe collections. I find her fascinating, both professionally and personally.… (mehr)

A stunning coffee-table book (attach four legs to it and you'd have a coffee table). But seriously, this is a large-format book that does Adams' photography true justice. It also includes a number of pictures that do not reflect his preoccupation with landscape, but reflect the lives of indigenous people and also document one of the Japanese internment camps of World War II - an unusual subject but one which Adams does full justice to. Rather than concentrate on human suffering as such, he instead photographs the camp in a documentary style that nonetheless conveys a true sense of what it felt like to be in such a camp. (The internment of Americans of Japanese descent in World War II should be an object lesson in injustice and ignorance for our times, too.)

The bulk of these pictures are from the collections Adams made for the US Department of the Interior depicting American National Parks, and pictures now lodged with the Library of Congress of the Japanese internment camps, so these are not pictures that fall under the control of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. This does not mean in any way that these are 'second-rate' pictures. Any budding landscape photographer should read, study and inwardly absorb this book.… (mehr)