Watchmen: Portraits

by Clay Enos

I only had a relatively fast look through this beautifully huge volume, but it was enough to garner the following thoughts:

The format, blurb and price give away the truth: this isn't really a Watchmen tie-in book, it's a book of photography -- portraiture, to be precise -- that happens to be about Watchmen. It's the visual-arts equivalent of poetry, where each unexplained image is designed to be perused slowly for its own beauty and its placement in relation to the other images, not rushed over in pursuit of an overall narrative. It is, if you will, an Art of the Film book taken to its furthest extreme.

However many times you've seen the film -- and, for some people, that's already a bizarrely large number -- there will still be far more faces here you don't recognise than those you do. For example, in amongst the previously faceless punks, prostitutes, protestors, prisoners, politicians and pedestrians there is only one shot of Nite Owl II and not even that many of Dan Dreiberg or a CGI Dr Manhattan.

This isn't about the film, it's about the people, and the art.