Horses of the Sun

Robert Vavra

Blurbed by James Michener and introduced by William Shatner (and this was before the Priceline days, mind you). Can you get any cooler?

Horses of the Sun reminds me of another book that's crossed my desk quite recently, Barbara Livingston's Old Friends: Visits with My Favorite Thoroughbreds. Maybe if I hadn't read that one so recently, this one would have appealed to me more (but I don't think so). About the only place where Vavra's book doesn't pale in comparison is that he covers more breeds of horses (but then, you expect from the title of Livingston's book she's only photographing one breed for it) and covers each horse with more photographs than Livingston. Other than that, however, Livingston's book towers over this.

As should be the case in two books of photographs, the main thing to compare is the photographs themselves. Barbara Livingston shoots clean, spare shots with an eye for a good background. Vavra's photographs are always very cluttered, and he has a thing for overly-dramatic double-exposure shots. (Oh, my, does he have a thing for overly-dramatic double-exposure shots.) Now, one overly-dramatic double-exposure shot, on its own, is fine (for example, the one that hangs over the entrance to the Kentucky Horse Park). But in a book of over two hundred pages, where you've got at least two for every horse he's photographing, the effect gets to be a bit much. To say the least.

Livingston also gets comparative points for the text in the two books, though it's a bit harder to put a finger on why. Both of them are writing about horses they've loved over the years, and both approach a tone of hero-worship quite often in the text (which, for a book of photographs, is extensive in both). I think, perhaps, it's the same thing as it is with the photographs; Livingston's prose is cleaner, less flowery. It's almost as if, in comparison, Vavra's book is a two-hundred-fifty-plus page Hallmark card.

Nice to look at, but if you're a Vavra fan, check out Barbara Livingston's work.