Steve McCurry. Animals

The production is lavish, as these large-format TASCHEN editions tend to be: heavy coated stock, deep saturated inks, a page big enough to let a tiger fill it. Steve McCurry's photographs of animals get the reverent printing usually reserved for old masters. The object is beautiful before you have judged a single image inside it.

Beautiful, and that is where the trouble starts. What sits between these covers is not a project but a theme, a few decades of travel photography raked through for every frame that happens to include a creature. The animals are the sorting key, not the subject.

These theme volumes exist because the name sells them. A recognizable style plus a universal subject equals a reliable gift-shop object, and there is nothing wrong with that until it is presented as something weightier. The packaging keeps promising a statement the contents were never assembled to make.

This is now a familiar move from him. The earlier On Reading did the same with people and pages, another handsome anthology assembled around a motif the archive was mined to fit. The method produces a pleasant flip-through and a weak argument, since a theme is not the same thing as an idea.

Sequencing might have rescued it, and mostly does not. The frames are grouped loosely by kind and geography rather than built into any rhythm, so the experience lands closer to a slideshow than a composition. A strong edit can turn an archive into a story; this one settles for a catalog.

There is also the matter of how the frames were made. His signature look, the syrupy color and the flawless composition, has drawn steady criticism for heavy processing and for a tourist's-eye framing of the wider world. Line a hundred such images up together and the sameness of the treatment starts to work against the variety of the places.

The individual pictures can still stop you. A camel silhouetted against burning oil fields, a dog asleep against a sleeping man, a bird loose in a blue-walled room: these carry genuine charge, and the recurring sight of animals threaded through human life has a real strand of documentary feeling to it. The eye that made the famous frames has not gone anywhere.

An anthology this thin, though, asks to be judged as decoration, and as decoration it is very good. The problem is the gap between the ambition of the printing and the modesty of the concept, a coffee-table volume dressed in the vestments of a serious monograph.

Which leaves the real question hanging over every gorgeous spread: when the color is pushed this far and the composition polished this smooth, are these animals still being documented, or have they become one more beautifully lit piece of set dressing in a career built on exactly that doubt?