The View from Down Here: Photography by Sylvia Longmire

Traveling and photographing from a wheelchair, as author Sylvia Longmire did, is a daunting task. Yet Longmire visited fourteen foreign shores in her wheelchair with her camera in tow and documented her trips in photographs in her book The View from Down Here. In her book she presents about half a dozen photos from each of the places she visited: Iceland, Sydney, Barbados, Vienna, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, Copenhagen, Russia, Poland, Slovenia, Greece, and Israel. She prefaced each place with a short introductory text. These paragraphs are good, but don’t expect exceptional writing. Similarly, the photos are nice, pleasing but nothing outstanding; they are good snapshots but few, if any, are photos your eyes linger over for more than a few seconds. Longmire is a photographer but not an artist. You will find many similar photos of inside of churches, pretty buildings, and nice landscapes, yet they all look like duplicates. Captions are given at the end of the book; a mistake. The reader would prefer to see them under each photo to get a perspective while viewing.