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Subcribe to comment rss feedA Book Review
Tim Parkin
Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.
There’s another book out by our favourite publisher, Triplekite and it's a rather a beautiful one too. Triplekite are friends on On Landscape and we've helped them on occasion with colour management and hopefully marketing. This most recent book is by one of our favourite photographers, one we've featured a couple of times before in the magazine.
Imagine walking in your local park and discovering a small pond - only a couple of metres across - which takes your fancy. I think some photographers would take a couple of shots and then move onto something else. This particular photographer saw more than just a photograph or two - they saw an opportunity to experiment, to explore and to create.
This photographer is Iain Sarjeant and the project is called The Pool. A book was always meant to be the culmination of the project and Triplekite have enabled it to be something quite special containing 30 duotone images, each just smaller than 8” square. The book starts with an introduction by Wayne Ford (who runs a blog that’s well worth a read) and runs as a simple sequence of images with the occasional blank page as punctuation.
The result is rather magical. The power of the book comes from the mood the images create - these are rather like entering the dream world of a child, the fascination with the pool and it’s inhabitants, the focus bringing out the occasional detail and the blur suggesting.
There are stand out pictures in the book, the delicate hanging grasses, the blurred rings of a splash of water, the silhouettes of hard ferns, the delicate strands of grass and the occasional spider sitting and waiting. It’s not the individual pictures that have the big effect though - it’s the state of mind they put you in when you sit and absorb the whole book. The work reminds me of Josef Sudek, and not just in the beautiful warm tones but in the creation of an inner world - an escape from reality, a jump back in time.
I can only hope that when people see the book they share my own feeling for the work. If you want to know a little more about the project you can see our earlier interview here.
The book is available for purchase direct from Triplekite (get a copy of Land|Sea while you’re there!). Read Iain's Featured Photographer article & Tim's interview with Iain.
