A little extra color for the review. I've taken a few workshops from Jay, and had the same experience as most of the other photographers I know - his workshop changed my images for the better more than any other workshop I've taken, and he barely talks about "photography" as most people think of it. He focuses on seeing - not unusual after a day's shoot to hear a workshop participant say to him "I was standing right there with you and I didn't see that! What an incredible photograph!" He focuses on how light and color work, technically, and then either to your photograph's advantage, or against it. And on teaching how to find the gesture that takes a pretty picture into a meaningful photograph.
The book is essentially the one lecture he'd give during a workshop (which my notes from the workshop said he titled "Light, Color, Gesture") for decades. If you haven't had the good fortune to do a workshop with him, this is the keystone of the workshop in book form. (Much less salty language...) The three times I did workshops, the lecture ran just over an hour, and when the lights came up, the room was silent for a very, very long time.
I can recommend an approach to get good value from this book, something that I stumbled on to myself, and a few friends who I've shared this with have taken the same approach. The musings on the pages opposite the photographs can seem random, but they're not. Inside each is an insight about one aspect of light, or color, or gesture, and about how to be a better photographer by thinking about those things in different ways, with his musings as an example. Pick one or two photo/text combos, think about them as a direction on how to think differently next time you're out shooting, and practice it consciously for a week. (This isn't that different than what happens in a workshop with Jay, other than there's no brutally honest and profane review of your portfolio...) It hit me about a third of the way through the book that it felt like the daily shoot review sessions in his workshops. When I treated a couple pages that way... it WAS in fact like a refresher workshop.
Almost everything I've heard him talk about - in workshops, in presentations at conferences, in online videos - is in this book. (Some of it's in the other recent book he put out.) Almost every other photographer I've taken a workshop with has a "when I did a workshop with Jay" story, and most of them end with identifying him as a huge kick in the pants forward in the richness of their work, from making the most of color to learning to seek out gesture.
It's a book of beautiful images by a photographer who's much honored. But it's also a set of urgings and exhortations to be more conscious of light, color, and gesture, and less conscious of aperture, lens, and shutter speed.
