Tobin Levy's FASHION BOOK REVIEWS... Mario Testino’s third book, Alive(Bullfinch, $60), a visual diary of the fashion photographer’s recent travels and photo shoots, has received almost as much attention as its treacly foreword by Gwyneth Paltrow. "The photographs of Mario Testino," she gushes, "are much like the man himself. Irreverent, assertive, and most of all full of life—brimming over with life, as if to push its very essence at you." Although word has it that Gwyneth once rejected the Testino lens for that of another cameraman, she is now rakishly devoted to the "Dr. Feelgood" of fashion photography. "We have laughed and worked in the gardens of Long Island, cavorted and eaten through the raw and dark streets of Naples, and amused each other through parties, always joking in Spanish or taking absurd snapshots of each other."
	She has good reason to be proud of her new best friend. It seems everybody who’s anybody loves and is loved by Testino. Heidi Klum, Shalom Harlow, Julianne Moore, Kyle MacLachlan, and Helena Christiansen were among the glitterati who turned out for the Manhattan book party Gwyneth threw in his honor. Unfortunately neither a fabulous party nor a fabulous introduction guarantees a fabulous book. (even Style.com had a hard time coming up with anything positive to say about this book in their review. Shrouded in luminary adulation, Alive has evaded serious scrutiny that would otherwise unveil a collection of photographs—most of which have never before been published—that is as incongruous as it is one-dimensional.
	Many of the pictures featured in Alive reflect the Testino trademark. A Hawaiian beach is sunny and idyllic, and a handsome Brazilian couple kissing in a night-time swimming pool is laudably voyeuristic. They elicit unrepentant desire, and are the types of images that propelled the Peruvian photographer to A-list stardom, landing his work on the pages of magazines such as Vogue, Bazaar, and Vanity Fair, and prompting Dolce & Gabbana and Gucci to employ his eye for their advertising campaigns. But here these informal portraits and exotic landscapes are pared with industrial skylines, a slew of discernible bodies and faces at Hollywood fetes, the Royal Ballet, regal South American interiors, and bullfighters in Beziers.
	"Photography can take you somewhere that you could never go to in your own life, or sometimes even in your own imagination," writes Testino. "I am lucky enough to travel a lot…This book will hopefully take the people who look at it along with [me]." Testino’s social and creative success has relied heavily upon his position as a half-outsider, fawning over his subjects with whom, over the last two decades, he’s fallen in and out and back into favor.
	Now Testino is relinquishing that image, offering the lay and lowly visual access to an admittedly inaccessible world. His world. The resulting travel album is filled with a medley of images taken, for example, while flying over Rio de Janeiro in a helicopter, or surrounded by nubile models at Visionaire party in Paris, or in the back of a van with a mostly naked Sara Foster and Ashley Hamilton. They are polished and beautiful postcards with access. Symbols of exclusivity rather than invitations to come inside and share the good times. The only people who will look at the pictures and [be able to] imagine being there were, in all probability, actually invited but unable to attend..
	If not an effective vehicle for armchair travel, then what else does this book have to offer? "We have tried to assemble the pictures into a story," explains Testino, "each picture leading to the next, rather than juxtaposing violently different kinds of images. I am so used to plunging from one world to another, day after day, that I suppose this book is a way of pulling themes together, of laying strands side by side to make visual sense of all the things that bombard me." A black and white portrait of Johannesburg cooks precedes a lush Peruvian mountainside in its natural color. The neon lights of Buenos Aires are followed by a black and white shot of the back of a sports car.
	The book tosses out over a hundred visually and thematically disparate images, shuffles them together and expects the reader to make sense of them as a whole. Sequential photos of a little boy in Lima, Lotta Burenius in Tangier, an anonymous hombre in Rio de Janeiro, Hamish Bowles, and Victioria Fernandez are linked by hats—they’re all wearing one—that are not altogether the same. Is there a story there because their heads are covered? Despite Testino’s lofty goal to transcend a personal travelogue, Alive maintains the narrative and organizing principal of a family photo album, which is to say there is no organizing principal and no story to tell. At least not one that means anything to anyone but the man behind the camera and, perhaps, his friends...
	Testino wanted to call this book Out of Fashion because of its incorporation of landscape and reportage, and departure from the constraints of commercial photography, the purpose of which is " to get people to buy things." While Alive may not be selling perfume or clothes, the obsequious foreword and accompanying picture of Testino and Gwyneth sharing a table at a New York gala suggests the opposite. The book is merely a contrivance to sell the photographer himself. Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been Super Mario’s World. -End Go to prior review ƒditions 7L
	Question or Comments? E-mail Tobin. About Tobin Levy: Originally from Austin, Texas, our new contributing book editor comes to us from Talk magazine. She has also contributed to Elle, American Health, and Philadelphia Magazine. She is currently a freelance writer in New York City where she lives with Xena Warrior Princess...her cat.