A funny thing happened on the way to this review. Not funny ha ha; Funny peculiar. This is Jim Grey’s second book. I reviewed the first, Exceptional Ordinary, in April, 2017. I figured that this review would reference that one, make some comparisons, make some jokes. It would be fun; Maybe even funny ha ha. But that review has gone missing. I don’t know how or even when. I’ve plugged the hole left by the disappearance, but my memory’s way too far gone to try recreating the original review. The best I can do is try to compensate by being twice as impressed with Textures of Ireland as I would be otherwise.

That’s a joke, of course. It’s also impossible. I’m not saying that the book has pegged my impression meter, and that I couldn’t possibly be a little more impressed with it. I’m just saying that it has put the meter close enough to the max that there’s no room for doubling. I’m even impressed with the title. I think I would have picked up on the role that the various surfaces, from rough rock walls and bluffs to smooth water and glass, play in these photos, and I may have even happened upon the word “texture” at some point, but I can’t be certain. It’s the perfect word and I think having it in the title got me focused properly from the beginning. I don’t doubt that some would prefer not to be steered in anyway at all but for me I feel it was a good thing.

Grey’s considerable writing skills see very little action in Textures of Ireland. The first page is filled with text describing the trip he and his wife made to Ireland in 2016. Neither had been there before, and for her the trip included visiting homelands she had never seen and talking with relatives she had never met. The page also provides some common background for the book’s photos. All were taken with a Nikon N2000 and 35mm lens using Kodak T-Max 400 film. There is some discussion of the reasons for choosing that combination which include the camera’s ability to take quality photographs while being rugged enough to survive the casual handling and mishandling that seem to just naturally be part of vacations. The camera’s ready availability at reasonable prices was very much a factor since it meant that a camera disaster wouldn’t automatically be a financial disaster.

Without counting, I’m sure that first page contains more words than the rest of the book combined. The camera, lens, and film are the same for all thirty-five photos and the only additional information Grey shares on each one is their location. Clearly he expects the pictures to stand on their own. They do.

Although I’m sure I’d feel cheated if they weren’t there, even the few words that identify a photo’s location aren’t really necessary. Knowing where any of these pictures were taken does not make me appreciate them any more or any less. I’ll admit that a couple of the pictures made me curious enough to check out the location before I studied the image, but more often than not I’d spend some time soaking in an image then move on without knowing or caring where it was taken. The two exceptions were a picture of people walking over an unusual jumble of rocks and the picture of a hairpin turn on a steep road. The jumbled rocks were part of The Giant’s Causeway, and I think I liked knowing that because it was a name I’d heard before. The hairpin turn was in Glengesh Pass which meant nothing to me but became a place I might seek out if given the chance.

I’m not enough of a student of photography to understand why black and  white images convey texture better than colored ones. Maybe it’s because the absence of color forces the viewer to notice the shadows which are visual indicators of texture, or maybe it’s something else that I understand even less. About three months ago I was able to look over some original prints of some of the most well known photographs in the world. It was at an exhibit called “Ansel Adams: A Photographer’s Evolution” at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. No, I’m not about to compare Jim Grey to Ansel Adams, and I won’t even try comparing any of their photographs, but I will say that some of the same things that make Adams’ images worth looking at can also be found in some of Grey’s images.

I have other favorites besides the previously mentioned Giant’s Causeway and Glengesh Pass pictures. Two of them face each other. On the left a path bordered by tall (marram?) grass curves out of sight with water and a distant shore in the background. The photo on the right hand page starts with a layer of sand at the bottom, moves to a bit of shallow smooth water, then some deeper water covered in small waves. Above that is a dark shoreline and the whole thing is topped by a sky filled with fairly angry looking clouds. A few man-made objects dot the shoreline with the straight lines of what looks like a building pretty much dead center. Both pictures were taken at Rosses Point Beach, and both pack a variety of textures into the frame. I also quite like a photo of Kylemore Abbey reflecting on itself and one of small boats tied up at Portrush.

I said there were thirty-five photos but that’s not quite true. There are thirty-five interior pages with one photo each. One of these also appears on the front cover. It looks out through the doors of Kylemore Abbey. There is also a photo on the back cover. It does not appear inside and it has no identification at all. In it are columns that go from a coal black silhouette in the center to some reasonably well lighted ones on each side. The columns are at least similar to some inside the book in photos taken at Sligo Abbey. Maybe they’re the same; Maybe not. It’s a cool picture in any case and a little mystery is not a bad thing.

In that missing review of Jim’s first book, I commented on the quality of the printing and binding. It was the first time I had seen a Blurb product and I happily reported that it was not crappy. It was quite good, in fact, and so is this one. The pages are fairly heavy semi-gloss and the printing is quite sharp which helps bring out the, you know, texture of the decidedly non-crappy photos.

Textures of Ireland and Exceptional Ordinary are available digitally or in paperback here.