Material Stone: Constructions and Technologies for Contemporary Architecture Book

I really like this book. There are no people in any of the photos, despite the fact that they are all taken in a city, some even inside houses. This is of course Mike Melman's choice. He is the photographer, and as such decides what appears in his shots, and he chooses to exclude people from this world. This creates an eerie atmosphere. Some of the houses are fully lit, but with no people, it almost looks as if mankind has just been spirited away. One could almost talk about it as being post apocalyptic. That may be a little melodramatic way of looking at the photographs, but that is the mood I'm getting from viewing the book. And the fact is it may not be the end of the world Melman is documenting, but he is definitely documenting a world that is disappearing.

The late Bill Holm writes a very good introduction to this book, where he connects Melman's work to poetry, arcitechture, and photography. One of the photographers he mentions is Walker Evans, and Holm is quite right to pair these two together. Evans is best remembered for photos of people, but the mood is not that different. I went through the photographs before reading this introduction, or Melman's preface, and then went back to the written words once I had gone through the photos once. Then after reading both I looked at the photos another time, and it gave me a bit clearer picture of what Melman was doing with this collection.

The photographs in this collection stand well on their own, without the writing though. The photos are well composed, and for most parts strong. Occasionally I came across a photo that I thought was too grey, and didn't have enough contrast, but those photos are very few indeed. An excellent work, well worth exploring for a few hours, and probably a few times as well.