Book review: An American Odyssey, by Marc Walter and Sabine Arque

by Marc Walter and Sabine Arque
Taschen
4 stars

Taschen's new photo-book, , is massive, both in scope and literal size: it is almost unmanageably large.

Yet its girth, however unwieldy, is appropriate to its subject: America. In the tome's generous definition, "America" stretches from New York City in the east, to the Wild West and Pacific coast in the west, and from Montreal in the north to Cuba and the Bahamas in the south.

The images are likely to be the earliest colour representations the reader has ever seen of America; often they are the earliest ever made.

At the end of the 19th century, the Detroit Photographic Company made a name for itself providing colour photographs of America's places of interest to hordes of eager and awestruck tourists. From a collection of more than 100,000 images, it used a Swiss process called Photochrom to produce several thousand full-colour prints. For many Americans, these were the first colour representations of the continent they had ever seen; for a New Yorker, the colours and characters of the fabled western frontier must have seemed like an alien world.

Later photographers and art historians would criticise Photochrom prints for their garish colours and lack of realism, but I found many of the images truly beautiful, often awe-inspiring. Four-page foldouts of turn-of-the-century Manhattan or the Grand Canyon felt rich and alive on the page.