Reefs and Rain Forests: The Natural Heritage of Malaysian Borneo
Murray S. Kaufman
A great photographer can take a familiar subject and make it look so fresh it’s almost shocking. In Reefs and Rain Forests: The Natural Heritage of Malaysian Borneo (Reefs and Rain Forests Publications, $50), Murray S. Kaufman gets close, really close, to his subjects, and he has a special way with tiny and little-known creatures. Pictures of, say, a half-inch-long technicolored lobster, or luminescent mushrooms creeping into darkness, feel like intimate portraits. Here, like a child caught raiding the cookie jar, a rain-forest tarsier with grasshopper wings jutting from its mouth saucer-eyes the camera. Pages away, two drowsy-looking cuttlefish seem to be, well, cuddling. Taking in the riot of colors, patterns, faces, ornaments and adaptations is like seeing the world through awestruck new eyes—but isn’t that what great photographers are for?
—Katherine Sharpe
