[Leica] "magnum" book

[Mitch Alland <malland@mac.com>]

A couple of weeks ago someone on the LUG asked about a new book entitled "magnum," a book with photographs by members of the Magnum agency. Not having much time before going to the movies on Sunday, I bought it without looking closely at it...and was so annoyed with it that I returned it the next day.

Here are some things that annoyed me:

1. The captions are printed in silver colored ink that is unreadably with a light behind you ( as in bed), so that you have to move the book around to get the light at a certain angle to make them legible.

2. The introductory text is written without using any capital letters. It is amazing how distracting it becomes to read such a text at normal reading speed. One tends to get lost as to where sentences begin and end.

3. The picture layout is often varied so that every few pages photos bleed into the inside edge and become confusing in terms of whether one is looking at one or two pictures on the two facing pages.

This seems to be a case of a designer having been given excessive freedom, without critical input from photographer. I supposed the designer wanted a funky design without considering readability.

Other problems: the book is a 550-odd page door-stopper and just to heavy to read comfortably. Although there are some good, and famous photograohs, there is a lot of stuff that just isn't very interesting. Moreover, the content seems to be based on arbitrary selection of section or subject matter, at least the logic of the various chapters was not clear to me. If one opens this book randomly, and looks at a few pictures here and there, there is nothing that piques one's interest to look; one tends to want to put the book down. What a waste!

- --Mitch