Book Review: Presence: The Transco Tower

Not quite towering

You would think that photographs in a book sixteen inches tall (and just under twelve wide) would deliver some exciting images but I thought the selection very mediocre. The book's title is very accurate as the fifty, full-bleed, photos show the Transco Tower (since 1999 it's now called Williams Tower) from various vantage points around Houston. In a way the photos are a sort `A day in the life of Houston' with the Tower included somehow in every photo.

Photographer Brady says he took eleven thousand shots and most of the photos in the book seem to have been taken on non-sunny days and as they have been enlarged to fit the page size they all have a slightly soft look, perhaps not the best way to present a hard-edge building. Ann Holmes writes an interesting essay about the design and building of the Tower but doesn't include and photos or plans of the construction, this seemed an editorial mistake to me.

The book was published in 1985 and if you live in the city and want a visual reminder of this striking building copies can be picked up quite cheaply.

Presence: The Transco Tower is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP)

A rather handsome cover to the book that folds out to forty-seven inches wide.

First photo in the book.

Title spread.

The back pages have large mono thumbnails of the photos and captions.

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