Category: Books
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Syllabus, by Lynda Barry
I just finished reading Lynda Barry’s book Syllabus (Amazon), which documents the work she did through her creative arts course at University of Wisconsinin the 2010s and packages it up as a kind of self-serve course in comics/art/creative practice. It’s a book with a highly unusual format.
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Larry Sultan on the institution of family
Larry Sultan has made one of the most well-known photobooks about family, Pictures From Home (Amazon). It’s deeply personal work, and involved the intimate collaboration of his parents in making images that might otherwise appear somewhat exploitative. In this short interview, he talks about the work through a different lens – the family as an…
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Rato, Tesoura, Pistola – Pedro Guimarães, with Nuno and Emma-Sofie Engstrøm Guimarães
Lovely project, and I also found lots to think about in this reference to an Italo Calvino story: In Italo Calvino’s short story The Adventure of a Photographer, written in 1983, the protagonist Antonino Paraggi embarks on a solitary, philosophical journey into what is described as the “madness” of photography. Wryly observing the photographic obsessions…
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Chauncey Hare – Quitting Your Day Job
Spoiler alert: I really enjoyed this account of Chauncey Hare’s work by Robert Slifkin, which I encountered after I saw him talking about Hare with great enthusiasm in this video:
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Chris Killip
We went to the exhibition at the Photographers Gallery, and I picked up the accompanying retrospective (Amazon, Bookshop.org). I was expecting something of a diatribe, but I discovered his work to be far richer and welcoming. He certainly has an ideological point of view, and is not shy about it, but his empathy and deep…
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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…
Andrew Sleigh 