Visual Symphony. - book reviews

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1988 by Stewart Brand

Visual Symphony For me this is the best photo book in over 20 years. I haven't been so excited by a collection of photographs since 1960's This Is the American Earth, which launched Sierra Club's exhibit-format series of books that became an engine of the ecology movement.

Bruce Barnbaum's photos imprint themselves instantly on your mind and become part of your memory, and yet they reward constant return and reinspection. The book is organized into four "movements" -- following a musical metaphor that works throughout the volume -- The Landscape; The Cathedrals of England; Urban Geometrics; The Slit Canyons. The slit canyons are little-known geological marvels of the American west, sometimes only arm's length wide; Barnbaum now owns them photographically. Likewise no one has ever photographed cathedrals better; he restores their original soaring impulse perfectly. And his mad-math views of urban highrise buildings and his intense psychoanalysis of rural landscapes can change how you see both.

Barnbaum has matched or surpassed Edward Weston's extraordinary novelty of composition and Ansel Adams's technical perfectionism (lucidly carried by the jewellike quality of reproduction in the book). And he has an eye for full-field complexity that is uniquely his own. I add him to my short list of photographers who can show me something new every time I let them: Eugene Atget, Edward Weston, and now Barnbaum.