Book reviews: Photography (ed by Juliet Hacking) | Strong In The Rain

Published on 01/12/2012 02:03

The latest paperback releases reviewed by Michael Kerrigan

Photography

edited by Juliet Hacking

(Thames & Hudson, £19.95)

Star rating: * * * * *

Throughout what will soon have been a 200-year history, photography has had two main roles: representing the truth and being beautiful. Both functions are found busily undercutting each other in Simon Norfolk’s “The North Gate of Baghdad (after Corot)”, 2004. This image invents its own artistic genre, the war-zone pastoral. But then photography has been reinventing itself from its very start in the 1820s, re-examining “reality” and taking aesthetics off in its own directions. Renewing existing fields like landscape and portraiture, its also created new ones like photojournalism and montage and brought fresh life to everything from fashion to political propaganda. Nadar’s Sarah Bernhardt; Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother; Edward Curtis’s Navaho; O’Sullivan’s Gettysburg; Alfred Stieglitz’s Steerage; Korda’s Che… It’s hard to think of a classic photo that isn’t included here, and opened up by skilled and thought-provoking analysis. A beautiful volume.

Strong in the Rain

by Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill

(Palgrave, £17.99)

Star rating: * * * * *

11 March 2011 brought Japan a triple whammy of disaster: earthquake, tsunami and then, finally, nuclear meltdown. Or, rather, not finally, because the fallout (both literal and metaphorical) from Fukushima is continuing. National pride and stoicism have since helped keep the full scale of the human tragedy from the world: the loss of 19,000 lives was just the start. By no means unused to earthquakes, Japan had in some ways been supremely well-prepared. In others it was caught napping: a culture of secrecy and an attitude of denial initially hampered rescue and clean-up efforts. Overall, though, the Japanese were to show extraordinary resourcefulness in their response to the crisis and in their decontamination and reconstruction programmes since. Concentrating on the experiences of six individuals who were caught up in the crisis, this book provides both a gripping narrative of unfolding events and a fascinating portrait of a people.