It must be galling for an art book publisher, spending a lot of time and money on a title, only to find that a very similar book is published at the same time. This happened in 2010 with two excellent photo books covering in detail the ruins of Detroit.

I bought Andrew Moore's: (ISBN 9788862081184) first and thought it rather impressive with seventy photos in a landscape format but Marchand and Meffre's book is a much more ambitious and comprehensive look at this fallen city with 186 large photos. As one would expect with photographers looking at the same subject there is some duplication. Intriguingly, right down to a wall clock in the Cass Technical High school, which both books show because it looks like a real life Dali melting clock face.

The photos in The Ruins of Detroit follow a sort of format starting with interiors and exteriors of factories then: interiors of commercial buildings; theaters and cinemas; schools; apartments; churches; police stations; hotels and more schools. The decay is just so overwhelming because this isn't just a few abandoned factories, which could happen anywhere but whole communities occupying hundreds of acres. The thing that intrigued me with Moore's book and this one is that so many of the photos show interiors: classrooms; dentists; libraries or a police office with everything still intact, though admittedly now strewn everywhere. It's as if the everyone just left in a hurry leaving everything behind.

One really strong point about these photos is that they haven't concentrated on lots of close-ups of abandoned detail. I reviewed The Blue Room with photos by Eugene Richards of empty houses on the Great Plains. Far too many close-ups of clothes and personal belongings completely diluted the sense of ruin that these tumble down houses possessed. Marchand and Meffre have stood back from this detail and allowed the overall ruin and decay to capture your eyes. Their photos do it so well too, with beautiful compositions, framing and color.

This has to be considered the perfect photo book. Large format (check out the Product Details) with a photo a page and mostly all the same size though there are six pages of houses that have four on each. Nicely for a quality art photo book there are detailed captions under each photo instead of the nonsense of putting them all on some back page. Another thoughtful touch are the occasional pages with some text to explain the subsequent pictures. The printing uses a 175 screen for the photos on semi-gloss matt art paper.

Photo books of ruins, whether in cities or in the landscape, seems to be an expanding genre but the two books about Detroit, especially this one, have probably exhausted the visual potential. I doubt anyone can improve on Marchand and Meffre's remarkable efforts in these pages.

An interesting monograph about one of Britain's best realist painters. The book does, though seem to be about two art styles: Photorealism and photo-rendering realists. Clive Head, through the essays of Michael Paraskos, says he is not a Photorealist but for my money, I think it's a term he's going to have to live with. For me the style is essentially American, evolving originally around the late sixties. Head, like the first and second-generation Photorealist artists use photos to create their own interpretation of reality (mostly of the commonplace environment). They use them to get a correct fix on the huge amount of detail required for this painting style.

Throughout the three chapters, there is a reference to Photo- rendering realists and explained in a footnote quoting from a 2005 Damian Hirst New York exhibition: "Take a photograph, and copy it meticulously, until your painting and the photograph are indistinguishable". This is not Photorealism at all but copying a photo, hardly even an art form and certainly nothing like Head's complex paintings though his work would be impossible without photos for reference.

The essays by Michael Paraskos fill ninety-eight pages and I thought they could have done with some editing because they take ten more pages than Head's paintings. The first (rather exotically called Metastoicheiosis) takes a lot of text to reveal that the paintings are not precisely like real life but a creative montage of reality. Pages ninety-one and two show thirteen transparencies that were used to create the `Coffee at the Cottage Delight'. Looking at the painting (Plate ninety-five) it's easy to see how Head picks and mixes the visual information in these photos to make his wonderful picture. Just like any Photorealist would do. The other two essays reveal a lot of art theory and how it relates to the paintings. Missing, I thought, was any detailed description of how Head actually works: what sort paints, brushes; canvas; how is the initial drawing created using the photos et cetera. There is a fascinating photo on page six showing Head drawing up a canvas for `Leaving the Underground' and it clearly shows what a superb draughtsman he is. The essays could certainly have done with some editing to reduce paragraphs to a more readable format. I read one at ninety-nine lines and another at 142.

The ninety-seven paintings in the book are arranged in date order, from 1988 to 2010. Nearly all are exterior cityscapes, street scenes or interiors of coffee shops. One characteristic of so many of the works are lines that start at the bottom of a painting and zoom into the detail. It could be a balustrade, wall, railings, road markings, a windowsill or frame but they all take the eye on a journey of discovery through shapes and color in the rest of painting. Head's style has certainly changed over the years. Page twenty-eight has a painting from 1991: The Riviera that is very reminiscent of Robert Cottingham's rather flat graphic style. The last works in the book are a mixture of close-up street scenes cleverly using interiors and exteriors at the same time, allowing for reflections in windows to add to the dazzle of detail.

I thought the book's production worthy but bland with some editorial sloppiness: the three essays ending with short columns on the page, for example. What I found most annoying was that several plates were not as big as the pages would allow. `Brooklyn Heights' (pages 136/137) has far too much empty page space and it could easily have been much bigger. Head paints a large canvas with plenty of detail and it seems nonsense not to have them as big as possible within the book's grid. Because of this, I've given the title four stars.

The book's back pages have a listing of exhibitions and a short bibliography but it seems that there is nothing that has as many examples of Head's work as this title. Incidentally, he had fourteen paintings in Louis Meisel's 2002 book `Photorealism at the Millennium' where Meisel stated that Head `...deserved to be recognized as an artist with a sincere dedication to the Photorealist style'. In 2011 I still think that's true.

Page could be considered the photographer who slipped through the public gaze but look at the bibliography at the back of this book and there are plenty of examples of Page's work from the forties to mid-sixties in a variety of magazines and books. As well as helping Steichen organize the Family of Man show he had nine photos included, the same as Dorothea Lange. Only Wayne Miller, with twelve and Henri Cartier-Bresson, with ten, had more.

Perhaps the reason for Page's low profile, as Keith Davis explains in his excellent essay, is that Page had two photographic careers. The first, revealed in the seventy-two plates in the book, was his personal, creative look at New York thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship and after 1950, he concentrated on commercial assignments.

Davis also mentions that Page is a link between two eras of American photography: the FSA and Photo League of the thirties and forties and from the fifties the expressionistic young street photographers centered in New York. Certainly some of the book's photos give me that impression. There are several that would blend right into a selection from Don Donaghy, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt or Lisette Model.

Though the book's sub-title is New York 1949-1950, only four are from 1950. Not that it matters because none of them is really date related but they all capture in a wonderful, vibrant way street life back then. Flick through the pages and be amazed at the ebb and flow of pedestrians that Page managed to capture. So many of his shots just grab you and pull you into the frame.

Great photos deserve a great book and this one cannot be faulted. Three hundred screen tritones beautifully printed by Meridian of Rhode Island from separations that only Thomas Palmer knows how to do properly. Meridian and Palmer's name keep popping up on the best American photo books year after year.

The photography of Homer Page, with this lovely book, has finally arrived.

How unfortunate that these world-class photos are presented in totally the wrong editorial format and more so because the solution would have been simple: a landscape shaped book.

The 448 pages are printed on a reasonable matt art paper and this makes it a quite chunky book so that it cannot be opened without the pages curving into the gutter. The problems start with so many photos a spread wide with any centrally framed detail merging into the spine and basically destroying the photo. Another problem is that most of the photos bleed off the page, which eliminates page numbers. To get round this, every so often, a photo has generous margins allowing for some numbers. The back of the book has nine pages of thumbnails and page numbers for every page even though throughout the bleed pages there are no numbers.

As to the photos, there are many classics here that are frequently shown whenever Erwitt is mentioned in print. The wonderful one of a mother looking lovingly at her baby on a bed (1953) that was in the Family of Man exhibition, the landscape shot of the a car racing a steam train in Wyoming 1954, two New York dogs, one huge and the other tiny and their owner's legs from 1974. There are several fun shots like the art class with the painters in the nude and the model fully clothed. There is another editorial problem here because as far as I can see the 343 photos are shown in no order. Surely, a book like this would do them in date order or themes: dogs (one of Erwitt's favorites) countries and cities; humor; children; New York; portraits etcetera.

The publishers have several Erwitt books in print and it looks like they all have the same editorial problems I've mentioned. This is so unfortunate because his work is part of the history of photography over several decades and their creativity would really have come across if more thought had been given to their presentation.

I thought this was a fascinating little book (it's only ninety-six pages) about seven European émigré photographers: Alexander Alland; Robert Frank; John Gutmann; Otto Hagel and Hansel Mieth; Lisette Model; Marion Palfi. No doubt others could have been included, Andreas Feininger is one that comes to mind but I think the seven were probably chosen because they represented a European tradition of liberal creativity which is shown in the sixty-five photos.

All the images are, what loosely might be called, reportage of events in American life from the thirties to the late fifties. Hagel and Mieth (who I hadn't heard of before) have sixteen varied photos ranging from a wonderful New York 1938 street scene crammed full of detail, the German-American bund taken in 1938 to four charming farm ones that appeared in a 1950 Life photo essay called the Simple Life. Marion Palfi (another unknown to me) has nine that cross the boundary between straight news and art photography. Not easily, done it would seem but her work captures the visual imagination. Robert Frank, the most well known of the seven only gets five photos and the reproduction of one of his contact sheets, which I thought was rather an odd choice. One of the five is that brilliant Hollywood premiere shot from 1956 where the glamourous starlet is out of focus and the anonymous background crowd is in precise detail.

The paperback is nicely produced with a photo a page printed with a 175 screen, all captioned though these are printed in either black or a light brown (which is a bit unreadable). The front pages have two short essays by Andrei Codrescu and Terence Pitts. I thought the book was useful as an introduction, apart from Frank and Gutmann, to some interesting lesser-known photographers.

I find it odd that since the publication of this perfect photo book in 2002 there has not been another on Faurer's photography. Maybe this will be his publishing legacy. By all accounts his work seems to remain on the visual fringe of American photographers during that very creative period from the mid-thirties to the early sixties.

The bulk of the photos are Faurer's remarkable night shots of the streets of New York, especially Broadway and the Times Square area and as another reviewer has commented virtually everyone in these photos is looking elsewhere and apart despite being surrounded by of plenty people. Page eighty shows a woman having a flower pinned to her coat lapel but she is not looking at this but away from the person doing it, on the opposite page a women is adjusting her husband's hair while he looks away from her. Faurer seems to seek out individuals in a sea of crowds. The forty-nine page illustrated essay by Anne Tucker explores this theme.

After these photos in the book there are twenty-six taken between 1948 and 1983. They include three fashion shots in color, experimental work in black and white and color, four in NYC in the seventies (but I thought without the vigor of Faurer's earlier city work) and three taken in Paris. Missing are examples of his fashion work, perhaps two or three pages with large thumbnails of magazine spreads would have done. Interestingly there are three pages at the back of the book with a listing of all of Faurer's magazine work. Oddly there is a color photo (page 163) of a family in Times Square, from 1950, that is printed the wrong way round.

The book's production is perfect. The one to a page photos are printed as 200 screen duotones on a good matt art, and thankfully the captions are printed on the same page as the photos. Overall I thought this was a beautiful looking monograph of Louis Faurer's photography.

Published in 1992 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Pacific Jazz. This was the label (plus Lester Koenig's Contemporary Records) that established the West Coast Sound around the world. The book is full of LP covers using the photography of Bill Claxton; he designed about half the covers, too. There are 182 Pacific Jazz covers and 43 from other jazz labels that used Claxton's photos.

During the early fifties the covers mostly used black and white photos of the musicians as was the style for jazz labels like Blue Note, Riverside and Prestige. As Pacific became more successful during the fifties the covers became full color and possibly more adventurous: pages fifty and fifty-one shows nine covers using abstract paintings; pages sixty-six and seven has eleven that feature typography rather than a large musicians photo.

Though the book's contents now have a delightful period flavor (and I had many of these LPs) I don't think the covers overall were particularly well designed. The easy option was mostly taken by using a Claxton photo or graphic and just putting some type with the title and artist on top. None of these designs had the graphic punch of Blue Note's distinctive style or the brilliant drawings of David Stone Martin that brightened up labels run by Norman Grantz. Even Koenig's Contemporary Records had better designs by Robert Guidi and his Tri-Arts studio. Still, for me, the book has a nice nostalgic feel.

Apart from the covers there is a twenty-six page portfolio of Claxton photos, four pages just showing the backs of Pacific covers (and these look really dreadful and unimaginative) and nicely a spread with a numerical listing of all the Pacific releases.

This one of those delightful books from the Abbeville Press `Recollectibles' series. As far as I'm aware they only published sixteen titles in the eighties, all with the same visual style editorial pages and neat square shape. Abbeville editor Walton Rawls was responsible for these interesting books.

Bowl-o-rama kicks off with a clever cover idea: three holes are punched through the thick cardboard in proportion to the photo of the bowling ball (the Recollectible covers tried to go for something unusual, the book on miniature golf used some AstroTurf on the cover). The ninety-six pages are full of photos and printed ephemera about the subject and each of the ten chapters starts with a few words of text, the only other words are captions to the images. The few hundred pictures are nicely laid out though if the book was published today I expect a drop shadow would be used for the images.

Bowling fans will obviously enjoy the look back over the last few decades and graphic artists would also find the Americana feel interesting.

The Product Description above will tell you a bit about this interesting photo journalist. This book is one of three monographs that have been published over the years and because it's the most recent it has a reasonably comprehensive coverage of Gutmann's career. Predictably all three titles have very similar photo content. `The Restless decade' (ISBN 0810916584) 1984, has 167 duotones and `The Photography of John Guttmann' (ISBN 1858940974) 1999, has 100.

Sally Stein's 2009 book is the one I prefer because the reproduction of the 175 photos (200 screen duotones on a good matt art) is better than the other two. With more photos it's possible to appreciate the quality of Gutmann's work, in particular his coverage of cars (one of his favorite subjects) and the man-made America, where he follows the style of FSA work by taking photos of commercial buildings and their signage. Plate thirty-six is a beautiful shot of a Hollywood drive-in restaurant; plate thirty-eight features a well framed image of the first Los Angeles drive-in theater. The weakest photos, I thought, are the five signs with white and neon type on a black background. They look simple enough to be student photographic college material.

The book's essay by Sally Stein, over thirty-nine pages is as comprehensive as you'll want and like the essay in `The photography of John Gutmann' title it's illustrated with spreads from magazines with photos that influenced him. One minor point I noticed with Stein's essay are the footnotes, there are ninety-two of them and amazingly the numbers in the text are the smallest I've ever seen: three point and at that size they are virtually unreadable. Actually that's not the only rather unreadable type in the book: the imprint, footnotes and list of plates are also a strain on the eyes and the photo captions seem to be printed grey ink (someone at the Center for Creative Photography was asleep at the wheel when the proofs were checked!).

John Gutmann was born in Germany (1905) and he arrived in the US during 1933. As he had the eye of a European I think it gives his work a fresh take on the everyday American urban scene especially during the Thirties. This handsomely produced book proves it.

The world's premier city looks pretty cool in daylight so its look after dark should be dazzling. Photographer Jason Hawkes has done his best to capture the dazzle in these 130 images. It should have worked but I didn't think the idea quite comes off, partially because of the concept and also because of the book's presentation.

The bright lights of the city really only look dramatic where the skyscrapers are: midtown and the Wall Street area. The rest of Manhattan, after dark and from the air, sort of looks like any other huge metropolis stretching to the horizon. There are many photos in the book with not much to look at and taken from above doesn't help. Apart from the skyscraper area distance reduces what lights there are to small dots and the shapes of buildings disappear. The same shots during daylight, of course, look much more fascinating. Some of the aerial shots of skyscrapers do look quite stunning but the rest could just have as easily been taken from the top of buildings in midtown. This is what two other photographers have done with their photo books: New York vertigo (ISBN 9780810995116) and Manhattan lightscape (ISBN 1558591214). Both include some night shots among the panoramas of the city and both books are a landscape shape rather than Hawkes square format.

I thought the book's presentation rather reduced it to a tourist offering rather than a creative photo book. Everything in the book is black, reasonable enough, it goes with the theme but unfortunately there a many spreads with two photos and a thin black strip which separates them, only it doesn't. Because darkness makes building shapes disappear two photos frequently look like they merge together and destroying the feel of both and all the photos bleed off the edge of the page. Another problem are the long captions. They are white text on black panels and annoyingly, quite often, these are placed on the photo.

If these photos had been presented in a more formal photo book style with more thought given to the text, still keeping the all black page design, I think it would made a more interesting book.