Portraits: Travel is said by its unnamed makers to be inspired by books of classic photographic prints.
Instead of presenting individual prints, this DVD collection brings us 52 brief (minute-long) film clips of cities of the world, filmed for the most part during the first half of the 20th century, and with a handful shot in the closing years of the 19th century.
There are, for instance, seven separate film-clips of Paris, showing aspects of life in the very early 20th century, then in the 1930s, then under Nazi occupation and when newly liberated. One of the more modern clips shows the very first flight of Concorde; there's also footage filmed at the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973.
Here's New Guinea and New York; the American Dustbowl of the 1930s and a Bedouin encampment in Iraq, 1940. There's even footage dating from 1900 of St Marks Square in Rome - well, that's what the DVD states. I've often been in St Marks Square and it wasn't in Rome!
Some of the clips are quite interesting, though all are too short to be truly riveting. And there's none of the original sound - only very bland and quite annoying music. Given the ability of a DVD to carry several soundtracks, it would have been good to have given viewers the option to have these images presented with original sound, or with this anodyne soundtrack.
In the end though, the clips just don't present the riveting images that the master-photographers such as Cartier-Bresson, Steiglitz, Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange were able to produce. These masters and their peers were able to produce images which compelled contemplation for far longer than a minute. The only clip in this entire compilation which seems to suggest the power of photography is a glimpse of Cairo in 1944, of the mysterious pyramids looming large under the moon.
The clips do of course vary tremendously in quality, with them spanning at least 80 years in time and technique. The very few colour clips seem to have suffered more than the black and white extracts - though although they're faded, they are still reasonably viewable. Overall, the quality is quite commensurate with age; it appears to have been compiled with an eye to producing the best result possible from such disparate material.
The Dolby Digital stereo music accompanying the tracks is reasonably produced and will delight all lovers of muzak.