Jack Delano joined the Farm Security Administration in 1940 during its middle years (1937-1942) and worked for the agency and its successor, the OWI, for three years. His biggest assignment was in Puerto Rico for four months in 1941 and 1942. The introductory essay by Esmeralda Santiago (who was born in Puerto Rico) describes Delano's time on the islands and how he fell in love with the country and the people, he took just over a thousand photos, and twelve are included in these pages. In 1945 Delano and his wife Irene returned to live on the islands and he died there in 1997.

Santiago doesn't mention in her essay an assignment the he carried out in March to April 1943. Travelling from Chicago to Los Angeles on freight trains to photograph the railroad industry during wartime. (272 of these photos were published in 'The iron horse at war' by James Valle) also not mentioned is Delano's use of color. Kodak introduced 35mm film in 1936 though because colour was not used for editorial in newspapers or magazines the FSA/OWI used the new format sparingly. The book does have eleven photos in color, including four from the railroad assignment. (Much more of Delano's color, fifty-two photos, can be found in 'Bound for glory' ISBN 0810943484).

Look through the fifty photos in the book and it's clear to see why Delano was considered one of the leading photographers on Roy Stryker's staff along with Evans, Lee, Rothstein, Shahn and Wolcott. Like them his photos tell a sympathetic and humane story.

Gordon Parks was the only black photographer to work for Roy Stryker at the FSA/OWI. Stryker was at first reluctant to hire a black photographer and Parks quickly discovered that Washington was a 'hate-drenched city' but he did some of his best work in the city. The fifty photos in the book were taken in 1942 and '43 mainly in Florida, New York and Washington DC. Several of the New York ones are from a May-June 1943 assignment to cover the Fulton fish market, part of a series of studies the Government wanted on food production. Some of the Washington photos are from an assignment to record the life of Ella Watson, who cleaned the FSA offices. Included here is the famous one of Ella posed in front of the Stars and Stripes, holding a broom and mop, inspired by Grant Wood's `American Gothic'. I thought it was slightly unfortunate that the Fulton and Watson photos weren't placed as a sequence in the book.

The photos are full of interesting detail and mostly well framed, probably thanks to Roy Stryker's exact shooting scripts for photographers out on assignments. A stylistic point about Parks photos is that many of them are low down shots, as if he had the camera just above knee level, either straight on to the subject or slightly looking up.

The book is well printed with a 175 screen and the layout follows the same style as the other eight Fields of Vision books. This is an excellent collection, so far, of the sixteen FSA/OWI photographers.

Rebecca Lepkoff must have been an interesting person because how many other people would have taken photos like these? Cameras were for creating permanent records of family snaps, weddings and other uplifting occasions not the grit and grime of a working class neighbourhood.

The map near the front of the book outlines the Lower East Side in 1939 and despite it not looking all that big an area the photos suggest plenty of commercial activity mingling with tenements. The photos capture life on the streets beautifully and give real sense of place. The book's photo section is based around streets and although individually most are not captioned several do have details about areas in the images.

The first forty-three pages have an essay by Peter Dans about living in the Lower East Side followed by Suzanne Wasserman's short biography of Ms Lepkoff. The book is nicely produced with the photos printed with a 200 screen on a reasonable matt art paper. I thought it slightly unfortunate that several photos are a bit too black and hide the some detail that is obviously there. Overall these content rich photos capture the people and seasons in one little corner of New York.

Esther Bubley isn't as well-known as some of the other FSA/OWI photographers who covered life in America from 1936 to 1945 but I think her stature is growing as the years go by. She started to work for Roy Stryker, head of the photo-agency, in 1942 when she was only twenty-one. He promoted her to a field photographer in 1943 and she contributed over 2000 images during the year.

The fifty photos in the book are all from that '43. A fascinating fifteen are from a two week assignment to photograph wartime transportation with Bubley covering Greyhound buses. She travelled from Washington to several cities in the east of the country and back again. 445 photos from that assignment were probably her greatest contribution to the OWI files (she repeated the assignment, again for Stryker, in 1947 when he was the head of the Standard Oil photo library). The other photos in the book are a selection from Washington and the surrounding States in the documentary style that makes the OWI collection so important as a record of American during the war years.

The book is an excellent introduction to Esther Bubley. The format is the same as the other Library of Congress Fields of Vision books: a simple, elegant design with one captioned photo a page, printed as a 200 screen duotone. Each book has an informative essay about the photographer.

Phaidon are to be congratulated on their fine 55 photo series and now they seem to have corrected the major fault of all the original titles: at six by a little over five inches they were just too small. This particularly applies to the Meyerowitz title because so many of his photos are full of detail and when they appear one to a page at five inches wide the essence of the image is almost lost. This title is now available in the bigger 55 format.

The photos run from 1962 to 1999 (the book came out in 2001) and the first three are in color when Meyerowitz was first experimenting with this new medium (for him) out on the street. Several photos show his ability to be at the right place to capture some quirky happening: a man getting tangled up with some cabling or a swimmer jumping of a bridge in Central Park while another photographer does a fashion shoot on the bridge. Some of the shots reveal his fascination with light and how it can change the mood of a color photo (he explored this more in the Cape Light book).

Overall I thought this was a fine selection of his work. Colin Westerbeck contributes a thirteen page essay and Meyerowitz provides a commentary on the photos as you turn the pages. This is certainly a plus because in most photo books the images are interpreted by anyone except the photographer. The printing uses a 175 screen on a reasonable matt art and this being a Phaidon book there is the usual odd bit of design: the page numbers are in a light face type and positioned at the bottom of each left-hand page near the gutter.

For a rather small but chunky book this packs a large number of questions about creativity in the broadest sense. Such as: Is graphic design necessary in a non-capitalist country?; Is there a system of values in design?; Do we take design too seriously? You, of course, have to provide the answers.

The idea originated with Ruedi Baur who created a typographic wall of questions at the Elisava School of Design in Barcelona. The book could be quite useful within an academic setting to get students to think outside the box of purely practical exercises that is the main function of commercialle creative colleges.

I do think though that the publishers could have been a bit more creative with the book's editorial. There is one question a page and all set in the same typeface; it would have made more sense if a different typeface was used each time with its name. Also each question is in colour on a coloured page, how much more useful if these colours all had Pantone numbers. Two simple ideas that would have given the book a positive practical use as well as the stated philosophical one.

Yet another 'Best of...' book about the world's greatest photo magazine. After the weekly folded in 1972 and the monthly folded in 2000 then another go at a weekly which folded in 2005 Time is left with magazine specials and anniversary editions like this one to generate income. All the top photos in these pages, that appeared in the magazine over the years, have been reprinted many times, especially in the last anniversary book `Life: the first fifty years 1936-1986'.

This book though does have some interesting things going for it. A large format, at sixteen inches deep, making stunning photos and even more impressive and printed on a good matt art paper with a 175 screen. The layout and typography is probably the best I've seen in any Life book. The back pages reproduce thumbnails of all the weekly covers from issue one and nicely all the special editions and books right up to the magazine edition of this book.

The cherry on the cake for me was the facsimile of the first edition inside the back cover. (If you're buying a pre-used copy I suggest you check with the seller that this included, I've already seen a copy where the seller stated it wasn't) The production is probably better than the original, the paper certainly is and I doubt it had a thicker cover paper like this one. It's a pity the heading and captions are missing on page fifty-four, a heading and caption from the previous page is used and on sixty-nine the caption is missing above a photo. Hard to imagine why these mistakes happened.

If you are too young to remember Life this book is a good introduction to a magazine that presented some of the world's best photojournalism to several million readers each week. If you want the same photos a more conventional format check the remarkable The Great LIFE Photographers.

I noticed in Benson's superb analysis about the history of printed images (ISBN 9780870707216) that he used several of his own photos to illustrate contemporary printing techniques. This book, with 105 of his photos, confirms that as well as an authority on printing he can also take wonderful pictures.

The images are a selection of the natural environment and man-made commonplace. The latter are easily comparable to the work of Brouws, Eggleston, Plowden, Shore and Tice in my view. So many of the shots are rich in detail, color and perfect framing and like those I've mentioned Benson has the eye to capture something so everyday and visually ordinary but presented as a compelling image that is worth returning to over and over.

There is something extra in many of these photos though. They are the kind that the graphic arts industry uses to sell their product. It has to be a great shot with: texture; color; depth; clarity. You'll see them sparkle on beautiful papers using the finest four color screens and printed by craftsmen on quality presses. The book, of course, is a good example of this.

The landscape format works well with the one photo to a page though eight pages each have two uprights and printed in an impressively fine screen (three hundred+ I think). There is a little extra feature in the book, ten pages at the back where Benson writes about his many years exploring the art of photography and the printing press. I thought this was a lovely addition to come across after looking through the pages of his work.

A remarkably thorough, comprehensive look at the graphics output of this Swiss chemical company. The clean, elegant designs of the Geigy `look' really took off in the early fifties though the head of the publicity department Rene Rudin, as early as 1944, said: We must take care that a certain artistic level is maintained, marked by impeccable typographic design, high quality illustrations and technically flawless reproduction'. An excellent example of this design approach is shown with two pack shots on page sixteen. A 1942 insecticide spay shows a dull, unimaginative can the total opposite of the 1959 version, now with clean type (Helvetica, of course) and a simple graphic.

Page forty-three reveals an interesting observation: Geigy had no style manual, except for the packaging. The company relied on choosing designers who all had a similar attitude to design and were mostly trained at the Allgemaine Gewerbeschule in Basel. Clearly this paid off judging by the high quality of the printed material shown throughout the pages.

As the leading Swiss chemical company with an impeccable corporate face (I would place Hoffman La Roche a close second during the fifties and sixties) the company exported this to other countries. There is a chapter on Geigy in America and another dealing with United Kingdom. An interesting chapter, by graphic historian Roger Remington, though not relating directly to the company deals with the influence of Swiss graphic design in America.

The first part of the book takes an overall look at the how Geigy organized and ran their Publicity department (a footnote says that before 1966 this was known as the Propaganda Department) in Basel. The rest of the pages cover ads and a wide range of promotional material for named products produced by the pharmaceutical, dyes and agricultural divisions. The last chapter looks at how the company presented itself as a responsible company to the public through books and other media.

The book itself is a sort of reflection of the design Geigy used until the seventies. Clean, orderly presentation of text and the 385 illustrations and well printed on a matt art paper. I think thanks should go to Steven Lindberg who did an excellent translation job from the original German text.

The title will certainly interest designers and anyone dealing with the way a company presents itself in print.

The book is a celebration of Dan Graham's first magazine article. It appeared in the December 1966/January 1967 issue of the small circulation 'Arts Magazine' and the editors drastically cut the copy and discarded all the original illustrations except one: a Florida developer's ranch house with floor plan. Since this first publication the article has taken on a life of its own. Odd in a way because it is quite short and I didn't think it offered any particular insight regarding American tract housing. A spread in the book features ten versions in various publications up to 1976. These repeat the original text but use different photos from Graham's New Jersey field trips.

The book is in three sections: thirty-six New Jersey photos from 2006; three essays; thirty-eight New Jersey photos from the sixties and seventies. In the first essay, by Mark Wigley, Graham admits his photography is never more than a hobby, the work of a resolute amateur. The sixties photos were taken with an Instamatic and the 2006 ones with a cheap point-and-shoot one. As I looked through the pages I became aware of tilting uprights, soft focus, washed out color and several confusing shots with reflections looking through windows. But these are working photos (to be used in slide shows for example) tightly cropped to emphasize the area of interest and in the same amateurish style as the student shots used in Venturi and Scott Brown's 'Learning from Las Vegas'. It's rather unfortunate that all the photos are presented one to a page in the classic photo book style which I think gives them much more credence than they deserve.

Apart from the three essays Graham writes, in the first photo portfolio, short intros to the seven cites and towns he photographed and contributes captions to many of the photos, commenting on the architectural style, the environment and the New Jersey and Staten Island working-class communities where he grew up. Of the three essays (over forty-two pages) I thought Mark Wigley's the most interesting. He reveals the background to the Homes for America article and Dan Graham's working methods. The two other essays are by Mark Wasiuta, one a Q and A with Graham and the other a full blown academic analysis with sentences like:
Yet Mallarme's "book" is described in terms that might be understood as a nonsolipsistic prescription for a form of confusion or interpretation between linguistic systems and objects, and as a procedure for operating on conventions of linearity, narration, and temporality - all terms that informed Graham's serial, permutational projects.

The book seemed to me a rather indulgent look at some bland, amateur photos of New Jersey tract housing. George Tice with his two books: 'Urban landscapes' and Patterson II' did a much better job of photographing the gritty cites of New Jersey and Barbara Kelly's 'Expanding the American dream: building and rebuilding Levittown' summed up tract housing concisely.