Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past

I enjoyed this "photo album" so immensely I immediately sent a digital gift of it to my mother. It's so incredibly human, proving that our emotions, struggles, joys, sorrows, and laughs are timeless, bonds that reach across decades, even centuries, to tie us together in the experience of life. Ransom Riggs is a rare historian capturing this fragile record of our collective memories, and I applaud his dedication to keeping this rapidly vanishing resource alive.TALKING PICTURES goes from hilarious to heartbreaking and back again, plus everthything in between. It's as fun to flip through as a family album - only more poignant and irreverent. These resurrected bits of rubbish depict *real* people, are real photos, snapped with purpose, only to become a swirling pile leaves fallen from the family tree, caught on the winds of change and swept up, rescued, and collected by Riggs and his fellow enthusiasts.I know my own grandparents were guilty of the very crime of tossing out photographs when they moved across the country in '69. I wish I wish they hadn't done that.I'm going to start turning my digital photographs into real physical prints, and writing on them, too. Riggs is right: this is too important to our history to leave to computers, files, memory cards, flash drives, and Facebook!I'll be giving a copy of this book to many people on my list this Holiday season. It's so entertaining and enchanting I want to share it with everyone I know.

From cover to cover, this book is filled with fascinating images that are thought provoking and capture the reader's imagination. The author wisely lets the images and their messages do the "talking" and the reader is left to do the interpretation which is the point of the book. As a collector of such images and similar books in this field, I was not disappointed with the "interestingess" of photos included, the arrangement by theme, and the large number of images included. This is the kind of book that you can pick up again and again and discover something new. Destined to become a classic within the field of found/vernacular photography, this book is a keeper and a must have. In short, this book works and works well.The quality of the reproductions and the printing is very good and for the price it's a real bargain. I purchased additional copies to give as gifts.A sequel to "Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children" this book is not (another fascinating book by the way), it was not intended to be. Nor is it an overly wordy or scholarly work on found/vernacular photography, which is a good thing in my opinion. As previously mentioned, the author expertly presents the material and the reader is left to explore the context of each image paired with its message. The images within the book stand on their own and do so superbly. I highly recommend this book, it's a real gem.

Ok, I am a lover of old photos. I go to sales as Riggs does and look at them, I have a few of my own that I have purchased. I was really excited for this book. So when I remebered it was out, I bought the ebook version. And I enjoyed it. However, I was hoping for more story telling. I love the way he did that in the prior book he wrote, I enjoyed that book so much; I have been hoping for the story to continue and get a book two. Instead we got this one, which, as I have said was cool, but flat. I am not like the reveiwer who wanted money back, no no, that is not how the world of publishing and the art of writting works, this book is an art, and so is the collecting of the photos. It just needed more meat. If you love photos or history this book is for you.p.s. I love the pictire of the guy in, what looks like the Majave dessert, pretty cool!

This book is certainly entertaining. Interesting. Funny, sad, strange, and occasionally downright weird. All of these things and more are accomplished using very few words.That, for me, has always been one of the most amazing things about photos. They have the ability to allow me to step back in time and let my imagination fly. Of course that very ability can be frustrating. I have only a small handful of my family's pictures. No grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins, but my husband's family has tons- and the majority have no inscriptions. His aunt, the only one who could have identified some of them, is now too old to remember.I can't think of a better- or more novel- way of making that point than Mr. Riggs did with this book. Photos, whether ours or someone else's, give us a visual link to the past that mere words cannot. Even if they are of complete strangers, we know that OUR relatives lived back then- saw those cars, wore similar clothing, went through that war.It is scary to think that by putting our family pictures on hard drives or discs instead of paper we might lose scores of family gatherings, Christmas mornings, graduations, and more. And it does happen as anyone who has ever had a hard drive fry can attest to. Something most of us probably wouldn't think about until it was too late.

Let's face it, Riggs is an odd duck, and a thoroughly charming and entertaining one. I plowed through his two books (Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and Hollow City) and now I'm impatient to see the third. Taking pictures is a collection of snap shots from years gone by. With their captions, they bring you to an isolated moment of intimacy with the subject. But, they leave you suspended. As one reviewer wrote, they whet the appetite, but there is no meal.

Het boek staat van voor tot achter vol met een veelheid aan foto's. Dat is ook gelijk het mindere punt van dit boek: er ontbreekt tekst over de keuze en doel van al die foto's. In totaal worden er slechts 6 zes pagina's aan de achtergrond van het maken en verzamelen van de foto's besteed.Dat hadden er van mij beduidend meer mogen zijn.

I am one for old photos and seeing if anything weird was photographed in the 20th century and earlier, but this is so fascinating, some parts gave me an erie vibe and other parts made me observe the photo for a very long time to work something out.If you are like me then get this, I know it is a bit pricey but it is awesome, it is one of those you would keep going back to and would yet keep finding different photos even after looking through the entire thing.

Interessante Leküre

Bellissima la raccolta di Ransom Riggs per gli appassionati di foto d'epoca. Naturalmente il taglio dellaselezione è tutto suo... se vi piace lo riconoscerete.

This book is an interesting way of displaying photographs and more importantly their owners captions from years before. I saw an interview with the author on Canada AM one morning and by the afternoon I had ordered it for a friend for Christmas. When it arrived, I had to do my utmost to restrain breaking the spine as each page had a new treasure...some happy, some sad, some made me laugh, and others making up a story to fit the situation.Ultimately an interesting book that I hope my friend will like!