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Shark! by Jeffrey L Rotman
Shark! by Jeffrey L Rotman
Sharks are exquisitely proportioned predators best photographed in toto. Many of the photographs in Shark! - an eye (damaged by the point-blank firing of the strobe?)/mouth/fin spine - are isolated close-ups that present a very different viewpoint.
For me, this would be like photographing a supermodel and concentrating on her earlobes. In fact, many of the photographs in this book are so impossibly close up and from such unlikely angles that I did find myself wondering how they were obtained.
Where Jeffrey Rotman photographs the whole animal, he provides images of standard (for well-travelled shark photographers) shark subjects: Caribbean reef sharks swirling around in the Bahamas, great whites clunking into cages in South Australia.
There are, however, some unusual species captured - several deepwater species from the Gulf of Aqaba, for instance, as well as several species of ray.
To me, the best images in the book are the great primeval head of a manta ray and the classic image of a sand tiger shark's head. Given the crisis facing shark populations worldwide as a result of commercial over-fishing, it is helpful that Rotman has included images of this damaging activity.
There is very little text, and the brief captions to the photographs are only superficially informative. Photographically it all boils down to style, and I hope readers will be sufficiently interested to judge for themselves whether Rotman's work 'does it' for sharks. Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch |
| Shark! by Jeffrey L Rotman, Ipso Facto (020 7733 9268). Hardback, 224pp, £24.95 |
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