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Light fantastic
If you know of Dan Burkholder already it will be in his role of photographic guru. For over 150 years the technology of photography had remained pretty much as was, and then with a sudden spurt of accelerating change its new technologies spawned ‘gurus’ by the sackful. Burkholder’s particular patch is in the production of digitally printed contact negatives. He has built a business out of gurudom and with this book reaches out his fingers for another pie - high dynamic range imaging, or HDR - although this is a book of photographs, rather than how-to-do-it tips. And the pictures are very interesting. They were made after a flooded New Orleans began to dry out and record, in colour, the remarkable mess left behind by Katrina. Not only are the images interesting, they are eerily beautiful: they look more like crayon illustrations than photographs. Burkholder concedes in his introduction that some who have seen the images consider them over-processed; he demurs, but I agree. He has used HDR to dig into the shadows of the wrecked interiors he has photographed, while retaining detail in the view out of the window. A good example of the use of HDR. But then he has got carried away with the possibilities of Photoshop and we are no longer looking at photographs. But Burkholder knows all this and makes clear that he does in his text; they are his pictures, so fair enough. More important is the design of the book. The ugly broad borders detract from the images and the florid typography is at odds with the subject. I would much rather have reproduced the images here without the borders, but as a respecter of copyright I have no choice.
The Color of Loss: An Intimate Portrait of New Orleans after Katrina, by Dan Burkholder, is published by University of Texas Press at £27, ISBN 978-0-292-71713-8.
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