PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS OF THE YEAR
December 12th, 2009 adminWe English features in a roundup of the year’s best photography books in today’s Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.
New York art critic Richard B. Woodward writes in the Wall Street Journal: “Most of us experience nature along pathways and shorelines trodden for decades, if not centuries. This rueful truth is known in the bones of the English, who have pieced and parceled their half of an island since the Bronze Age. Simon Roberts gently mocks his compatriots as they search for weekend inspiration in these well-groomed landscapes, even as he reminds us why such lovely places were, and still could be, wellsprings for poetry.”
While Prudence Hone writes in The Guardian: “[Massimo] Vitali might recognise something of his style in We English by Simon Roberts (Chris Boot, £35); from the Camel estuary to Kirkby Lonsdale, the dreamy panoramas, with their sweeping skies and miniature figures, are a lyrical reminder of the beauty of the countryside. There is a tranquility and charm in these documentary shots which is in stark contrast to the up-the-nostril, harshly lit studies in Luxury by Roberts’s stablemate Martin Parr (Chris Boot, £25).”
