If you’re going to subtitle a biographical book “a life in pictures,” you better make a concerted effort to design the narrative carefully around the pictorial illustrations. Unfortunately, Chris Welch’s efforts to meet his titular mandate were mediocre at best, and at no point did I feel like I was on a visual journey through the life of David Bowie… Bowie is an artist who rose to stardom with a carefully curated (and extremely well documented) visual image that made him into an icon as much, if not more so, than his music did, so it should have been exceedingly simple to narrate his life alongside a selection of photographs showing his life’s personas. While the book does contain some lovely photographs throughout, Welch’s accompanying text is lack lustre and rarely pairs well with the visual story - and forget about any sort of concerted effort towards a graphic design sensibility to blend the two storytelling mediums. The photographs appear haphazardly throughout the chapters, contain little in terms of captioning or credits, and are far from revelatory, so reading the book (in any sense of the form) quickly became a fool’s errand. The only reason that I’m going to keep the book in my collection (for now, at least) is because a few of the images are worth saving, since the print quality is decent, but if I find a better composed pictorial biography this one may get relegated to the scrapbook/printwall. ( )