Love and Desire: Photoworks, by William A. Ewing
Give it to someone you love (four stars)
(Review posted 27 Jan 2000 12:12:12)

(Copied from an old review originally posted elsewhere.)

This is a book to savor, to page through slowly, to share with someone you love. As long as that someone is relatively enlightened about the occasional explicit or disturbing image!

The photographs are well chosen and span a very wide range, from interesting early pornography (yes, there was hard-core even in 1855!), to romantic and abstract pictures that wouldn't shock even the dullest U.S. Senator, to Ann Mandelbaum's bizarrely erotic whatsits. Many of them are true gems, images that catch and hold the viewer in that wordless somewhere evoked by the best photographic art.

The arrangement into eight large sections gives a certain amount of structure to the book, and allows the text to cover a subset of the images at a time, but don't look for any very scholarly or systematic division. The format is too small for a coffee-table book, and the text is too general and chatty to constitute a serious critical study; but these are nits. The book is well worth buying, or giving, to anyone that takes in joy through the eyes.