Synopsis
Gathers two hundred photographs from over thirty-two thousand entries in an international photography contest to portray the current state of the environment
Reviews
This visually arresting but unsystematic collection of more than 200 mostly color photographs was culled from an international photographic competition held to coincide with the Earth Summit and the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Environment Program (to which all the book's royalties will be given). There are images of stunning beauty, like a polar bear silhouetted in evening light, a perfect wave at full froth and a field of flowers worthy of Monet. And there are images of warning: an inexorably deforested hillside, a starving African, a couple nuzzling on a beach strewn with cans. However, the book suffers from a lack of order in the flood of images. Captions with titles and the name and origin of the photographer appear at the end of the book; because we don't learn the locations of the photographs, this compendium from all corners of the earth loses the power of specificity. Chernushenko, a physicist responsible for the clean-up around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, offers a sobering afterword about the need for environmental safety. $25,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This collection was culled from 32,000 entries from 144 countries in the 1992 "Focus on Your World" contest cosponsored by the United Nations Environmental Project (UNEP) and Canon. First exhibited at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the winning images are well reproduced here. Their subjects range broadly over the environment, with disturbing images of pollution outnumbered by exquisite nature, landscape, and cultural photography. Textual matter consists of a foreword by the executive director of UNEP, an afterword by a Russian nuclear physicist on the continuing effects of Chernobyl, and an "Earth Audit"--a prose summary of facts and figures relating to the environment. The majority of the book is rightly given to the images, but, with captions only to be found in the end matter next to extreme reductions of the images and, worse, no organizational scheme to the layout, the viewer's experience is disjointed and the book relegated to the coffee-table genre.
- Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, Brooklyn
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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