Reviews for Leonardo, New Jersey (Images of America Series)

The average rating for Leonardo, New Jersey (Images of America Series) based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-14 00:00:00 Alane Lim Last week I heard a billionaire African businessman on the radio. He was mocking the Western media for its distorted reporting of Africa - always famine, war, pestilence, death, death. He said look at me, Africans do normal stuff too, they live in cities, they buy stuff. That may be true, but also true is the endless torrent of aid which goes down the drain into somebody's Swiss bank account; the myth of the virgin-sex cure for Aids in South Africa; the scourge of female circumcision all over the horn and the north of Africa; and the limitless rapacity of the African ruling class. It was headline news when the president of Ghana lost the election in 2009 and there was no bloodshed. You could count the examples of that happening in Africa in the last 50 years on one hand. The bad news on the tv is backed up by a stream of reportage books with titles like "Squandering Eden" and "Africa : A Continent Self-Destructs". The reporters are then backed up by the historians, such as Martin Meredith's brilliant jeremiad "The State of Africa". BUT THEN But then, on the other hand, we have a number of giant photo books about Africa, of which this present eyegoggling spectacular is but the latest. It's hard to made a bad photo book when your subject is Africa, but Olivier Follmi has created not just a not-bad book but a gorgeous brilliant one. Now, the irony of giant luxury photo books whose subject is the poorest countries on earth will not be lost on any of us readers. This book features Namibia, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Ethiopia. This book like the other big ones I have by Steve Bloom and Stefan Schutz is all about rural Africa. The images are so beautiful and arresting that I can see why it might be next to impossible to wrench one's gaze from there to the cities and the shanty towns, but it does seem that there is a whole area remaining to be explored here - the littoral where the country (of traditional ways of life, traditional beliefs) meets the city (that signpost to the unknown future, that destroyer of what was once certain), where the country mouse meets the town mouse, where African Oliver meets the African Artful Dodger and takes on a whole new way of thinking. GREAT PICTURES, BAD WRITING I've noticed in thise photo books that the loveliness of the images is offset by the wretchedness of the prose which is added in the form of introductions and essays tacked on at the end. These are written either by the photographer or more often by his mates, who are universally sycophantic about the photographer and write about him like he was the second coming of Picasso. And at the drop of a zebra they start up with the New Age vapourising, like this : Talent intuits that one can absorb the "other" without losing a sense of oneself; to dedicate oneself to work with constant care in order to better understand assures us of salvation. Or The word is a force. But if it is, it is because it created a bond between coming and going, a generator of life and action; however, so that the word can produce its full effect , it must be rhythmically scanned because movement has need of rhythm which, itself, is based on the secret of numbers. That's from this book, but it could be from any of the others too. STUFF YOU HAVE TO OVERLOOK One thing about big photo books is the unfortunate effect of printing a photo on two pages - you can't avoid the distortions of the central crease, you have to overlook it; in the same way you overlook the unmusical squawk of the fingers on the acoustic guitar fretboard during a violent chord change; and the unrealistically wooden floor-pounding made by the actors on a stage; and the universal crackle to be heard in all old music; all to be kindly ignored; you can't have everything. A DIFFICULT RELATIONSHIP Although I love these African photo books, the big question, for me, is can we here in the West avoid patronising and stereotyping the Africans in these pages? Are we glad to find that poverty and extreme lack of resources can yet produce not only beautiful images and an aesthetic language we may wish to appropriate for our interior design but smiles on the African faces, demonstrating that these people don't need our own destructive infrastructures and and gadgetry to live good lives, and indeed, by their very resilience and cheerfulness in the face of limited life expectancy, are they not teaching us valuable lessons about what is essential and true, about bedrock humanity, mothers, babies, fathers, families, villages, animals, the land you are gifted, the work you do, which exposes again and again the tinsel we westerners engarb ourselves with, the glittery stuff, the leaning towers of currency, the boiling rivers of drugs to help us with our anxieties, the carnival of delight on the freeway to oblivion. Oh well. Now I sound like the introduction to this great book.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-15 00:00:00 David A Grimes Some cool photos and tidbits, but not much of a narrative or anything. I wish the "now" photos were in color.