cover image Anglers Album

Anglers Album

Rizzoli, Charles H. Traub. Rizzoli International Publications, $50 (215pp) ISBN 978-0-8478-1256-1

In order ``to create an unexpected view of angling and its aspects,'' Traub ( Italy Observed in Photography and Literature ) matches quotes by writers as diverse as Plutarch and Norman Maclean, John Donne and James Dickey to fishing-related photos. Many of the silver gelatin prints, daguerreotypes and reproductions of color transparencies show people fishing. Taken by local professional photographers, they incidentally reveal that fishing has been a popular, acceptable activity for women since the days of the earliest cameras. Of special note is a luminous 1920 silver print of speckled trout caught in Lake Superior, a painterly turn-of-the-century autochrome of salmon and Elgin Ciampi's 1960 underwater transparencies. The effect of selected texts and photos, including pictures by Cartier-Bresson, Harold Edgerton and Lee Friedlander, is pleasing but without surprise; TV news broadcaster Kuralt's contribution is a brief personal odyssey through a family fishing album. (Dec.)