Chinese Turkestan: Photographs by Ryan Pyle
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Unfortunately, whatever interest his photographs might provide has been severely diminished by the layout of his book. The book is in a vertical format, 7 inches wide by 9 inches high. In this size many of the full sized photographs must be printed across two pages. Unfortunately this leaves the gutter running right down the middle of the largest images, splitting faces and places in two. Where he prints an image on one page it is a mere 2 and one-half inches by 4 inches, which is much too small for the level of detail in the images.
He often presents a series of 9 frames in a grid across two facing pages. This results in both guttered shots and images that are too small, without the format adding anything to the images.
The descriptions of the images are frequently several pages away from the images and in small type.
The images seem to have a limited range of tonality, and the skies are always steel grey. If this is accurate Xinjiang must be a depressing place to live, although I suspect that the tonality could have been more realistically presented by the judicious use of modern photo-processing techniques without compromising the reality.
The images look like those one might take in almost any third-world country with nothing to distinguish them. I often felt that some of them could have been improved if the photographer had made use of the techniques that the first-class documentary photographers of the world use to make images more artful and to explicate the content of their images.
The book has a curious dustcover with blank whitespace that adds nothing. Curiously enough if you remove the cover there is another image on the backside that might be more interested.
A representative of Pyle aggressively pursued me for a review, as I suspect he did other reviewers. As I warned him, I was experienced in reviewing photography books and was unforgiving of a poor product.
There is a lesson to be learned here for photographers. If you are going to self-publish a book, either learn about layout or get help. Moreover, learn to take good photographs.