San Diego

by Bill Ross

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556520433
• ISBN13: 9781556520433
• Release Date: December 1988
• Publisher: A Cappella Books (IL)
• Length: 93 Pages

Customer Reviews

See it from the sidewalk

I bought this years ago and I can remember first flicking through it and thinking it was somehow different to other photo books of seventies and eighties. The subject matter was common enough: big city street scenes. Bill Klein's brilliant 'Life is Good and Good For You in New York' sort of laid the groundwork, in 1956, to inspire others (even down to off-shoots of the genre like Lee Boltin's 'Jail Keys Made Here') and each photographer saw the city in their own way. Walker's street scene photos had a kind of quirkiness that appealed to me. They are very graphic with strong shapes and blocks of color which frequently merge into blackness. The best of them pull you into the composition though when you first turn the page the image seems so ordinary. As with any book of photos, the eighty-eight don't all work (or rather I don't like some of them) but there are enough that do to convince me this book would be worth buying. This was in 1984 when the book was published and it was only recently that I realized that I had another book by Walker: Color Is Power published in 2002. Still the same very graphic compositions but this time the saturated color of the everyday street scene is the dominant theme. Both books capture what we all see in the street but as usual it takes the creative folk to pull out the beauty. ***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.