Category: Books
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Family photography
Since photography was invented, people have been photographing family for all the reasons photographs are taken: money; love; the desire to document what’s important or fleeting; to capture a snapshot in time; to tell a fiction or fantasy; to construct an identity, or produce propaganda. We all do it, whether we call it art, commerce, […]
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Bernd and Hilla Becher
This is the best photography book I’ve read in 2022 (and I’ve read a few this year!). It helps if you like the work of the Bechers, but it’s also very well put together, with useful, clearly-written essays, and a surprisingly revealing, wide ranging interview with their son, Max Becher, at the end of the […]
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Beate Gütschow: LS/S
I’ve had this book for a long time, but recently revisited it, as I’ve been thinking more about landscape photography. In the first half of the book – the LS (Land Scape) series – Gütschow recreates imaginary 17th Century landscape paintings with digital collage. The essays and quotes following this talk about many of the same […]
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Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs of People/Places
There are two kinds of books about photography. Serious books about artists (monographs, retrospectives, histories or collections of a genre) and how-to guides (how to use your DSLR, how to take black and white photography, how to take stunning portraits, etc.). The first kind assume you’re a consumer of art. They introduce you to new […]
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A good surface is full of clues
I read Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi this summer (buy from Amazon). I’m exploring photobooks and this is one that comes up again and again as a must-read. I was predisposed to Soth’s work because i know him first as a blogger and YouTuber, which I imagine he might find amusing. It’s a mix […]
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Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning
Buy from Bookshop.org (affiliate link) This is one of Aperture’s ‘Workshop’ series, in which photographers talk about their work as if they were leading a workshop. I don’t have any others in this series, but I do have a couple of other Aperture books, and like those, this is a lovely object: nice paper, great […]