Thank you.
… and some book recommendations.
Thank you for taking a few minutes of your valuable time each week to hear from me. I know that we live in times when our attention is constantly pulled in many directions. You honor me with your time.
Some books…
I want to share with you some of my favorite photography-related books I read this year. They are in no particular order. Some are still in print, but all are easily found used. The Avedon, Sontag, and Arbus books are also on Audible.
PH Emerson: The Fight for Photography as Fine Art. This is a beautiful book published by Aperture with many photos by Emerson and, quite remarkably, correspondence between him and Stieglitz that makes for interesting reading. It’s fascinating to read about the handwringing over the photograph’s status as art.
Avedon: Something Personal. Some things in this book are somewhat controversial, but it was an interesting read about a larger-than-life character and talented photographer. I like his work so much in his American West project I copied the style in a self-portrait last month:
Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer. Did you know that Alan Arbus, Diane’s ex-husband, played the psychiatrist on MASH? Well, I didn’t. But that is not what the book is about. Arbus was a unique person, and so was her photographic vision. The more one learns about her, the easier it is to understand how she made the photographs she did. It is not a book of photos, but the book references many of her most famous works. The book also led me to spend some time looking at her earlier 35mm work.
The Negative. This was the second in Adams’ famous trilogy. It’s my favorite. I read it sometime in the late 1980s and re-read it a couple of weeks ago. If you shoot film, you owe it to yourself to read this book.
Earth With Meaning. Alan Cohen is probably a photographer you don’t know about. He started with a degree in nuclear engineering from my undergraduate alma mater, North Carolina State University. Then as a graduate student, he discovered photography and studied with Siskind and Winogrand. His abstract images in this book explore the land as metaphor. For example, he might show you some bricks from where the Berlin Wall once stood, or he might show you a border between two countries. The photographs are sublime. Frankly, without the captions they would have little meaning to the viewer, but the photos have quality independent of the captions.
On Photography. I read this book by Susan Sontag as an undergraduate. I re-read it this year. Sontag had a remarkable intellect, and she had opinions. I agree with some of them. My favorite chapter of the book is called The Heroism of Vision.
Fritz Henle: In Search of Beauty, Fritz Henle loved the square format. He started using a Rolleiflex in the late 1920s and stuck with the brand all his life. His compositions in the square are worth spending time studying. Here’s one example of his work that is fitting as we dive head-first into a new year:
The Diver - Fritz Henle Happy New Year!
