Open Range and Parking Lots: Photographs of the Southwest

Rating:
Summary: Sun and shadows.
Review: The Southwest US is clearly a great place to take photos, dramatic open spaces and weather plus all those wonderful examples of the hand of man in the environment, mostly for negative reasons it must be said. It is a pity though that Virgil Hancock just doesn't manage to do the area justice. Of the fifty-two photos in the book so many of them seem to lack a focal point (or maybe they are just poorly cropped?) so that the book, I feel, is no more than a collection of ordinary photos.

As the area is so kind to photographers there are some images here that are just super with good compositions, cropping and color, for example, two store fronts in Las Vegas, NM (plate four) a chained tree stump on a trailer (plate thirty-five) or the Jungle bar in Phoenix, AZ (plate forty-one) there are at least another five or so but I feel they were let down by their cropping.

I can recommend these three photo books of the Southwest, Wim Wenders 'Written in the West' (ISBN 3823854690) Troy Paiva's 'Lost America' (ISBN 076031490X) with plenty of stunning night-time photos, presented unfortunately in a rather mediocre designed book and Gerd Kittel's 'Southwest USA' (ISBN 0500541213) eighty beautiful photos shown in a lovely classic photo-book format.

One final point about 'Open Range and Parking Lots' concerns the production, none of the photos have their captions with the image, you have to constantly turn to the back caption page to read them and the page numbering is just plain silly. The first printed number that appears is four, sixteen pages from the start of the book, the five photos that are on these pages are referred on the back caption page as 'N.b. Plates 1-5 appear on pages iii-xvi', predictably there are no Roman numerals on any of these sixteen pages. As I said the numbering is just plain silly!


Rating:
Summary: Southwest Funky
Review: This is a great book, highly recommended. Hancock and McNamee capture the essence of the strange, mirage-like Southwest, full of ghosts and forgotten dreams.