New Books at the local public library

[NancyP]

I have that first version and it is great. I am studying the examples now, and am trying to look at fashion magazine ads to guess how they might have been lit.

[Isaac]

Group F.64: Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and the Community of Artists Who Revolutionized American Photography -- After years of research, I began to understand the individual members as people and artists, and the dynamics between the members that allowed them to unite as a group.

Photographer's Paradise: Turbulent America 1960-1990 -- It is with photojournalists such as Jean-Pierre [Laffont] that the myth of the foreign correspondent that has inspired so many young photographers came about. Today, his profession is in transition, and this method of work is a dying trade.

Hillary: The Photographs of Diana Walker -- As a photographer, sometimes you can tell when you are being led, and you wait. Other times you shoot because you know it is just what you think it is. And then there are times that are so true that you feel it in your bones and sometimes in your heart. You follow your instincts. You must, as this is who you are and why you are there.

Photography Today -- A survey that provides enough photographs and photographers and context, to make a list of photo books you'd like to see.

[AreBee]

Isaac,

Have you read Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang? If not, I recommend it to you.

[Isaac]

Thanks, Slobodan recommended Picture This back whenever, and the local library has a copy. (And pdf's have been ripped and posted to various web sites.)

[Isaac]

Capture the magic : train your eye, improve your photographic composition -- Often, while teaching workshops, I find that when I tell students to tighten up a composition, they simply zoom their lens. By doing so, they negate the effect of the focal length they originally selected. It's far better to keep the focal length (for its desired effect) and move the entire camera -- and the photographer -- either forward or back.

Part teach-by-example and part showcase of the kind-of landscape photography that LuLa members seem to like.

[Isaac]

Landmark : The Fields of Landscape Photography -- Like most of my professional colleagues though, it is the man-altered, or rather, man-inhabited kind of landscape photograph that I find most stimulating, rather than the pristine, operatic visions of, say, an Ansel Adams. … With more than one hundred 'voices' in Landmark, the effect is bound to be a cacophony, I welcome it. … We are confused about the earth and our place on it. It is only right that we would find our bewilderment, mixed with our curiousity and passion for art, reflected in these plates.

Once Upon a Playground : A Celebration of Classic American Playgrounds, 1920-1975 -- The variety of equipment manufactured between 1920 and 1975 turned out to be greater than I'd expected when I began this photographic project. … equipment in the shape of rocket ships, satellites, and lunar landers from the 1960s and '70s … equipment in the shape of Native American and Asian caricatures …

[Isaac]

Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe : A Biography -- That many of these early collectors happened to be gay is a detail of no small significance. Indeed, the sexuality of the collectors and curators who garnered such focus on photography … should not remain a mere footnote in art history.
…
Wagstaff established the marketplace for photography, for better or worse, spending unprecedented sums in the auction rooms of London and New York on a medium to which a second thought had rarely been given.
I am convinced that Wagstaff's role was equal to Szarkowski's in securing respect for photography as an art form.

* A comprehensive essay about Sam Wagstaff's impact on photography's place in the art world might have boiled down to 45 pages, but this is a 388 page gossipy biography.


Henri Cartier-Bresson : Here and Now -- … the more than 30,000 photographs that he left to posterity have been carefully conserved and classified by the foundation that bears his name, and it is obvious to all that the concept of 'the decisive moment', while applicable to some of his most famous pieces, is far to restrictive to encompass this vast body of work.
…
Through his meetings with the Surrealists, it was as if he had been programmed to become a Communist. … From the moment when Cartier-Bresson began to collaborate with the Communist press, in the spring of 1936, his subjects were largely determined by the editors for whom he worked and the ideology they championed.

Makes the photographs intelligible in a way I haven't seen before.

[Isaac]

Thinking Art : An Introduction to Philosophy of Art -- …a systematic and understandable introduction into a number of basic concepts and theories from philosophy of art.

… an aesthetic judgement is always about one specific artistic event, one specific work of art, or the artwork of one specific artist … An art philosophical statement, on the other hand, is … a claim or judgement about the essence of art: it always concerns an art form or art in general. … Quite often, an aesthetic judgement is immediately accompanied by an art philosophical justification.

* Later chapters build on earlier chapters, so much more understandable to read through from the beginning.

[NancyP]

Thanks for all the info. I saw the f64 book at the store, will pick it up on the next trip.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... much more understandable to read through from the beginning.

You don't say!

[Isaac]

The Art, Science, and Craft of Great Landscape Photography -- My approach to learning landscape photography can be summed up in 10 words: master the science and craft, and the art will follow.
…
In high-contrast situations, our visual system divides the scene into various zones and analyzes the local contrast in each zone independently. … We then assign brightness values within zones, and don't really pay much attention to brightness differences across zonal boundaries. For a scene to look natural, the local contrast must look right in each zone. … you can expose both the highlight and shadow regions somewhere close to midtone, which means both regions will have near-ideal contrast and color. Then, by using a Cornsweet illusion-like pair of tonal gradients, you can marry the two regions in a way that our visual system finds believable.

[DeanChriss]

If you can find it anywhere, "This is the American Earth" (1960) is a true masterpiece. It's a large format book written by Nancy Newhall with photos by Ansel Adams.  

[Isaac]

"This is the American Earth" is available to my local library through Link+

However, although I do still look at Ansel Adams photobooks, so much has changed.

[DeanChriss]

"This is the American Earth" is available to my local library through Link+

However, although I do still look at Ansel Adams photobooks, so much has changed.

Yes, much has changed, but this is not a typical Adams photo book. Newhall's writing is as good as Adam's photography and compliments it perfectly in the book. It's the combination of the two that makes it so powerful. The book is also a landmark in American history, being credited with spawning the modern environmental movement. Back in the day Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called it "one of the great statements in the history of conservation".

[Isaac]

Thanks, I'll keep it in mind.

[NancyP]

I am enjoying a book by Frank Goelke, Thoughts on Landscape. Nice low key reflections on why he photographs his chosen subjects:
http://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Landscape-Collected-Writings-Interviews/dp/1936102064

bought used at a local store for under ten bucks. Can't always believe what you see on Amazon....

[Isaac]

Maybe you can sell it to Amazon for a profit.

[Isaac]

The Essence of Photography: Seeing and Creativity -- … I feel that important lessons can be learned from those experiences if they are delved into as more than mere anecdotes, but as essential learning experiences. I present these experiences throughout the book in hopes that they can be instructive, but with a recognition that they might be viewed as little more than personal anecdotes. I hope the instructional aspects greatly outweigh the anecdotal.
…
… a critic from the Los Angeles Times referred to my images as third-rate Ansel Adams attempts, and specifically pointed to my most popular image, Basin Mountain, Approaching Storm, as the quintessential example of the shallowness of my work. Six years later, in a critique of another exhibit of mine, the same critic wrote about the power of my work, and pointed to the very same image as an example of that power.

[Isaac]

Photography and the Art of Chance -- Most photographers, collectors, and curators would prefer to suggest that a picture speaks for itself and therefore the circumstances of its production are immaterial … But the notion of pictures speaking for themselves is problematic if not paradoxical, and inference of mastery from any particular photograph, due to the role of chance in the medium, is unwarranted.
…
[This book] interprets their photographs and texts in the light of the entangled histories of photography, art and chance … It links a series of practitioners … William Henry Fox Talbot … Julia Margaret Cameron … Alfred Stieglitz … Frederick Sommer … and John Baldessari.

[Isaac]

Women Photographers: From Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman -- This book aims to present variety and diversity. The variety and diversity of women who took -- and take -- photographs. Their life stories, their way of looking at things, and their pictures. Fifty-five women from the beginnings of photography to the present day.

Browse the book

"That is probably why so many women have sidestepped into photography. As a medium it had simply not yet been taken over by men." Cindy Sherman