Out of Focus
A Review of Sacred and Secular: The Aerial Photography of Marilyn
by John Butterfield
When did Voyager, that most relentlessly highbrow of CD-ROM suppliers, turn into a purveyor of coffee table books?
When it started producing volumes like Sacred and Secular: The Aerial Photography of Marilyn Bridges.
Now there's nothing wrong with a coffee table book -- provided it ends up on the coffee table. But Sacred and Secular remakes a format that works perfectly well in its original form, thank you very much, and recasts it with a few multimedia bells and whistles.
The end result is a really inconvenient way to read a coffee-table book.
Bridges, an experienced aerial photographer, specializes in overhead black-and-white landscapes that trace the patterns that lace the Earth -- from winding rivers in Alaska to spidery designs scratched into the Nazca Plain of Peru.
She obviously owes a heavy debt to Ansel Adams (you'll find a photo of Adams and her in the author's bio section of the disc). Just as obviously, she has refined a look of her own: Heavy shadows punctuate and lend dimension to the silvery and gray landscapes she shoots from as close as 300 feet overhead.
Her photographs are worth studying, both for their fine detail, and for the subtle points she makes about how humanity is shaping -- and marring -- the Earth.
However, Sacred and Secular won't let the photos speak for themselves. Chief among the wrongheaded decisions Sacred and Secular's producers made was to have Bridges do the narrating, while synthesized, vaguely ethnic tunes by composer Daniel Palkowsk ramble aimlessly on the soundtrack.
As a narrator, Bridges is a great photographer. Saddled with a nasal tone and flat, sing-song delivery, her voiceover melds the worst aspects of Aunt Edna parading her slides from the week at the Jersey Shore with 7th-grade social studies' filmstrips on "Our Friend the Atom." If even Bridges is bored (or sounds bored) with her work, how is the viewer/listener supposed to react?
Of course, you can always turn off the narration and the music, and just soak up the photographs in silence. They resonate with music of the ages all by themselves.
O course if you do that, you eliminate two of the reasons that make a multimedia disc "multi." Multimedia becomes monomedia. And if that's the case, why not dispense with the CD-ROM altogether?
At least the producers offer a few different ways to shuffle the deck of 100 photos. You can choose to wander around the world following a timeline, a geographical index, visual index (a sort of Pyramid Builder's Greatest Hits, for instance), guided tours (not with Bridges as a guide, thank you very much), or a "meander mode" that mixes the images. And it is fun to use the zoom to move in for a closer view, and a grabber hand to nudge the viewer this way and that around the landscape.
In fact, the meander mode, with music enabled and narration quashed, produces a pretty nifty screensaver effect. I doubt that's quite what Bridges and Voyager had in mind when they published Sacred and Secular. But then, as any experienced photographer will tell you, sometimes the best planned shoot goes awry.
Multimedia Cafe Scorecard
| Product: |
Sacred and Secular: The Aerial Photography of Marilyn |
| Company: |
The Voyager Company
|
| Cost: |
$39.95 |
System Requirements:
Windows: 486DX-66 MHz, 640x480, 256-=color display, 8
Mbytes RAM, double-speed DC-ROM drive; 16-bit sound card with external
speakers or headphones; Windows 3.1 or Windows 95; DOS 6.0 or later.
Macintosh: Any color-capable macintosh (minimum 25 MHz 68030 processor);
640x480, 256-color display, at least 8 Mbytes or RAM installed (5,200K
free); double-speed CD-ROM drive; external speakers or headphones
recommended;System 7.1.
Breakdown:
Entertainment Value 2
Educational Value 3
Concept 2
Depth 3
Interface 3
Overall Score:
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