Gail Mooney

A slim volume of roughly 120 pages, this book hovers in an odd limbo between "vacation keepsake" and "coffee table book . . . almost too substantial for the former, and definitely too slight for the latter. The photographs by Mooney and Kelly are attractive and evocative of the place. Keeping with the mission of the book, they have the professional polish and characteristic "look" of high-quality travel-magazine photography, without reflecting -- like the work of long-time island photographers Alison Shaw, Peter Simon, or Alfred Eisenstaedt -- a personal artistic vision. The text related to Martha's Vineyard (the island I'm more familiar with) is a farrago of misunderstandings, unsubstantiated claims, and gross factual errors that reads like it was cobbled-together snippets gleaned from tour-bus-drivers' spiels.… (més)