Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Known particularly for her luminous still lifes, Jan Groover has achieved a reputation among viewers, critics and collectors for her contribution to contemporary fine-art photography. This book features a selection of her work.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Groover's artful color photographs of kitchen utensils transform the mundane into the surreal. A picture might juxtapose a fork, vegetables and a spatula, creating a mysterious, elegant microworld in which familiar forms take on new meanings. This American photographer's precise yet richly colored triptychs of suburban New Jersey lawns and clapboard houses present suburbia as a sane refuge. Her calm, detached New York cityscapes of empty lots and abandoned buildings exude an almost perverse serenity. And her elaborate tabletop still-lifes of bottles, fruit, bones and goblets are darkly beautiful meditations on time and mortality. Groover's most recent pictures, sunny views of her new home in the French countryside, seem to be complex allegories on the interplay of nature and society. Szarkowski, former director of photography at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, limns Groover as an artist whose goal is to reinvent photography and to clarify its history. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

The tabletop still life--a genre with a faint Victorian mustiness--has been reinvented in the last two decades by a handful of photographers. Groover brought one of the most interesting minds to work upon the project. Her work is not limited to still lifes (much else is included among these 57 plates), but her reputation rests primarily upon them. Her statement in the late 1970s that "formalism is everything" clearly staked out a modernist territory, but even then, in her breathtaking close-ups of kitchen implements, there was more than just form. Of tangles of houseplants, fruit, forks, knives, spatulas, and subtle color, Groover made elegant epiphanies of domestic life, and in her more recent platinum and color still lifes she continues to use objects as emblems if not full-blown metaphors. Clearest to read are homages to twentieth-century still life masters Giorgio Morandi and Edward Weston, although her formal reach extends beyond theirs, primarily in lighting and inventive manipulations of the view camera. In his delightful accompanying essay, John Szarkowski surely overstates when he says Groover is the only photographer of her generation to be carrying forward Weston's heritage (his pictures, Szarkowski says, are "about pleasure"). Still, his insight about Groover is sharp and on-target: she is a major photographer whose pictures offer abundant pleasure. ~--Gretchen Garner