World's Hundred Greatest Waterfalls, The

Reviewed by Bryan Swan

Yoshikazu Shiarakawa is a famous, well renowned Japanese photographer who has undertaken very ambitious projects in the past and who has consistently produced some of the most impressive photographic works of the modern age. In 2003 he began a project to photograph 100 of the most impressive, tallest, widest and most storied waterfalls on the planet, for which World Waterfall Database founders Bryan Swan and Dean Goss were hired as consultants. The project was completed in 2007 and was launched with a lavish exhibition that traveled around Japan for several months. This book is essentially the promotional catalog for both the exhibition and the three-volume book which was the end result of the project.

This book runs just over 100 pages in length and provides at least one photograph of each waterfall which was selected to be featured in this project. Some of the the pictures are very small, especially by comparison to the main 3-volume book, but the level of detail Shirakawa achieves in his photograph is still quite evident. Shirakawa's compositional style is grounded in more traditional methods of photography, but he is among the very best at emphasizing the power and force which a waterfall can exhibit, and that alone makes this book resoundingly impressive.

The biggest downside to this book is it is printed only in Japanese and is not widely available outside of Japan. Copies will likely eventually surface on eBay and the Amazon Marketplace, but until that point, this will remain a hard one to get a hold of. This book also appears to have no ISBN because it was used primarily as promotional material, so the likelihood of it being orderable is slim. Should you run across a copy, its worth picking up for a glimpse into this project (especially considering the cost of the full three-volume set of the big books may approach $1,000, if you again can even find it domestically).