Current Reads: Photography Books
Education is important. You’ll hear me say it many times if you hang around here long enough. Learning and being educated is a deeply ingrained belief Emily and I both have. In my eyes, continued education is mandatory for growth as an artist. Seeing and experiencing enhances what you create.
My professors, Peggy Levison Nolan and William McGuire, had the most amazing photography book collections, rows upon shelves of photo books that fed your eyes and mind to no end. If you’ve ever printed film yourself, you know it takes time… hours… a darkroom printing session for 20 or so prints from my negatives would take me hours. Testing and correcting, over and over and over to ensure I made the print colors exactly as I wanted takes time. With waiting time on my hands, I would look at Peggy’s books. Saul Leiter, William Eggleston, Tina Barney, Bettina Rheims, Stephen Shore, Sally Mann, Lee Friedlander, Richard Avedon, Alfred Stieglitz, Garry Winogrand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Miller, the list goes on and on. I loved it all. I recall Bill telling us his current Amazon cart at the time had $1,000 worth of photography books in it and he was just waiting until the next payday to press order.
Slowly I am beginning my small collection of photography books. Thanks to my mother who also collected a few photo books over the years it is beginning to look nice. The current books I am reading and looking at are below.
Jose Villa – Fine Art Wedding Photography
This book is a gem for wedding photographers, film or digital. A master of his craft, Jose shares his wealth of knowledge and “shows us [that having] a cohesive assemblage of artistry, personality, and service can help you create a successful wedding photography business,” even with a niche as unique as medium format color film photography for weddings, he keeps his clients coming back as their lives and families grow. Discussing topics at length, Jose shares information on his to lighting and shooting techniques, his secrets to capturing more natural moments, his approach to photographing engagement sessions and wedding days, and real-life examples of how to create a lasting business for yourself as an artist. “Today’s most successful wedding photographers do more than merely document; they craft images artistically to fit a comprehensive design. A couple chooses a photographer based on how his or her style fits into the overall vision for the wedding.” Your ability to create and articulate the vision of a couple through your style will be what makes you desirable, lean into it.
His take on Wedding Photography elevated the whole industry and earned the label of “most influential photographer of our decade.” You’ll find me any Sunday evening, absorbing all he shared in this book.
Peggy Levison Nolan – Real Pictures
Tales of a Badass Grandma (as she intended the book to be titled). A mother of 7 children with more than that in grandchildren, her work revolves around her life, her family, her home, and the stages of changing motherhood. From having everyone to having only herself and the things left behind.
“We all realized the gift of our mother’s close watching- that the beautiful, richly described pictures of our everyday lives created an idealized auxiliary to the messiness of actual life.” Children, toys, dust, hair, clothes, unclothed, chaos, and stillness. “Her practiced eye calmly homes in on the rarely noticed.” The dirty tissue on the chair, the water on the shower wall, the unmade beds where one once slept, bracelets left on the windowsill, all lend to a sense of fleetingness that happens in daily life. “The pictures describe an artist embracing the fullness of the world she helped create, and we are all the better for it.”
If you ever have the chance to work with Peggy it is the chance of a lifetime. Two years of lecturing, discussing, learning, and printing by her side pushed me in many ways over the years. She has this wonderful grit to her, a passion for film, and a thirst to share her knowledge. I attribute my ability to edit skin tones to working with her. Her eye for magical light and unmatched color correction created the warmest, buttery skin tones in her prints. Humble, natural, and genuine, her book resonated with the onlookers of family.
Proud to hear Peggy had a show in Paris this past year.
Sally Man – Immediate Family
Another mother who loved to document her family. In this book of images, Sally Mann explores moments with her three children at their home in the foothills of Virginia. Mann uniquely shoots a large format film camera. If anyone has photographed with this tool you know it’s no easy feat, the tripod, the bellows, the lens, the composition, the focusing, the metering, manually setting your settings, then you’re ready to insert your 8-inch by 10-inch slide film to expose for your one image. That’s all you get. The beauty of these negatives is they are so large that the details captured are incredible and unattainable by any other size negative.
“Some [photographs] are gifts to me from my children; gifts that come in a moment as fleeting as the touch of an angel’s wing. I pray for that angel to come to us when I set the camera up… We put ourselves into a state of grace we hope is deserving of reward, and it is a state of grace with the Angel of Chance.” It takes time, patience, and the ability to sense A moment. Her work is raw, sensual, romantic, nurturing, bold and motherly. Nudity and children are ideas when mixed that can make people nervous, yet as a mother, I see and care for my child naked all the time. The most naturalness can still be perceived as provocative. Growing into the role of a mother myself I acquire a deeper understanding of her work as the years go by.
“We are spinning a story of what it is to grow up. It is a complicated story and sometimes we try to take on the grand themes: anger, love, death, sensuality, and beauty. But we tell it all without fear and without shame…. How is it that we must hold what we love tight to us, against our very bones, knowing we must also, when the time comes, let it go?”
John Szarkowski – Looking at photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art
This “picture book” is a collection of black and white photography that has work dating back to the invention of the medium. John Szarkowski, the author, was the photography director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991. In 1973 he compiled this “highly foreshortened… visual interim report” from the museum's forty years of photography collecting. He did not intend for it to be a history of photography, but as a reader, I beg to differ. Each page presents different lessons on various facets of the medium. From the progression of image-making techniques to the change in subject documentation, through his detailed descriptions of historical photographs, Szarsowski shows us how to carefully look at, dissect, and write about what we see in photographs.
“The one hundred photographs reproduced in this book represent less than one pre cent of the Museum’s photographic holdings. This selection is thus a small sample of a tiny part of photography’s achievement.” This book's uniqueness lies in its inclusion of the greats to the unknowns.
The last line of his introduction struck me the most accompanied by a chuckle at its truth. “The future of this beautiful, universally practiced, little-known art will be determined by young and unborn photographers, who will decide how best to build on their rich and ambiguous tradition.”
Peggy and Bill were lucky to have John Szarkowski during his time as a visiting professor in 1993 at FIU.
The newest addition to my collection…
Vivian Maier Developed – The untold story of a photographer nanny
My original introduction to Vivian Maier was in Bill’s History of Photography class. Her work and story caught my attention back then. I didn’t want to stop looking at her work, emphasized even more when learning the mysterious that is Vivian Maier.
In this biography, Ann Marks uses “her complete access to Vivian’s personal records and achieve of 140,000 photographs to reveal the full story of [the] photographer extraordinaire.” Featuring “more than five hundred images… never seen before, placed in the context of her life.”
For a woman who repeatedly proves to be a mystery on the outside, on the inside “she expressed herself through photography, creating a secret portfolio of pictures teeming with emotion, authenticity, and humanity… No one knew that behind her detached veneer was a profoundly intelligent, empathetic, and inspired artist and activist, so artistically gifted that her body of work would become one of the greatest photographic discoveries of the century.”
Walking the streets with the children she nannied, carrying her twin-lens German RolleiFlex TLR she documented various facets of daily life. The RolleiFlex is designed to be held at the waist, looking down onto the reversed view to compose your image. This allowed for “inconspicuous picture taking.” She photographed an array of subjects over the years; landscapes around her, her travels, the working class she encountered, families, celebrities, people on the street, portraits, adults, children, posed, unposed, exteriors, interiors, dolls, reflections, some of the most intriguing for me are her self portraits. Vivian was fearless and had ambitions for her work. “Symmetry, pattern, and textures became fundamental to Vivian’s work, and were elements that she would emphasize throughout her career.” Creating art purely for herself, pushing her craft and skills all the while living the modest life of a nanny. She found “beauty in both the pristine and the twisted and focused on items ignored by most.”
Undiscovered during her lifetime, a trunk of slides purchased and developed by a man named John Maloof led to the discovery is this interesting artist. “The Los Angeles Times wrote that Vivian’s work was “characterized by crisp formal intelligence, a vivid sense of humor, and a keen grasp of the serendipitous choreography of daily life.”
Never stop emphasizing seeing, asking formal questions, and pressing the limits of what photography can do. For you make the world richer when you do.
