Hotel Seventeen

Rating:
Summary: Lust for star dust
Review: ... has been the inspiration for this book, assembling mainly portraits of people who tip toe in the footsteps of now legendary stars who once upon a time where not famous yet and were renting the cheapest possible room in this New York hotel on 17th Street Manhattan. The technical quality of the full page color photograph is good, and it seems that all pictures have been made by a flash light (including the red eye effect which make some people look like wolves). For my taste it is this hard framed and harsh flashed way of photographing that fails to get the spectator any closer to the people and the hotel that is portrayed.
The pictures in between the portraits that try to put the hotel and its guests in a spatial context are either distant or close-up. What is missing is a more natural and personal distance between object and observer, some feeling for the intermediate levels of observance, the particularities of the actual light, or the lack of it in the rooms. The essence of things is often to be found in what is invisble or hardly visible, the suggestion of what can be hidden in a shadow. The flashlight does not allow for such subtelties.