Bruce Rutledge

This is a miniature coffee table book, less than 7 inches square, beautifully made as are all Chin Music Press Books I have seen. Each pair of pages contains one line of text and one hazy photograph conceived and composed by the author using a variety of toy houses, cars, trucks and people, to convey the essence of her family's retreat from and return to New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina. (One blurber called it "a children's book for grown-ups", and that is quite apt.) It's effective, but the lack of focus in the camera technique gets a little stale by the end. One or two of the pictures remain incomprehensible to me after several attempts at interpretations. Others are quite evocative. I admire what the author did here, I applaud the publisher for putting it out, and as an object this book is gorgeous. But I wouldn't urge you all to go spend $18.00 on it, unless you're a photography buff, a collector of all things New Orleans-related, or just feel like contributing to the survival of groovy small presses like Chin Music.… (more)

Hurricane Story by Jennifer Shaw was not what I expected at all. I probably should have paid a bit more attention to the description I guess! What I was expecting was a large coffee table book with lots of black and white photographs that told the story of New Orleans during and after the hurricane; lots of pictures of the flooding, the destruction of property and the people of New Orleans dealing with the devastation.

When the book arrived it was small and when I flicked through I didn’t quite get it , my first impressions were that it was making light of a serious situation by a load of weird pictures of toys.

My attitude changed quite dramatically once I actually sat down and read through it. Although the story is simply told it is very powerful and some of the pictures were extremely atmospheric and moving and produced strong emotional reactions that I totally wasn’t expecting, even from a more traditional photo journal.

Photos like “The next morning we turned on the TV.”, “The news got worse and worse.”, “Ten thousand body bags seemed plausible.” and “Send in the guard.” seemed to me to convey the horror, helplessness and fear of the faceless military more than a straight photo could ever have done, while “We drove further north to the farm.” and “I’ll confess that fall was beautiful.” Posses an atmospheric beauty I never thought possible photographing toys.… (more)