What was your latest theoretical/analytic/critical/art related photography book?

TheFlyingCamera · Feb 10, 2015

We here on APUG have a tendency to obsess over the technical. This is entirely understandable - the Internet as a discussion forum lends itself very nicely to technical discussions, because technical discussions deal in ideas that are precise, measurable and demonstrable. Conversations about ideas, though, are hard enough to have in person, let alone on an impersonal medium like a web chat forum. I'd like to encourage the attempt.

In that regard, what theoretical/analytic/critical books on photography have you read lately? Examples - Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, On Photography by Susan Sontag. I don't want to limit this conversation by bookending it (so to speak) with these two classic texts, or to suggest that they form the only structure of understanding what it is we do, why we do it, and how photography constructs meaning. And if anyone has their own thoughts on the subject, I have zero objections to articulating it without the context of a specific book.

Eric Rose · Feb 10, 2015

I applaud your attempt. I remember one former member who tried really hard to get APUG'rs to enter into a discussion along these lines. I think his parting shot was we could all "eat shit and die" Passion was not something he lacked.

To be honest I probably haven't read any critical books on photography in years. I rather enjoy reading bloggers who have intelligent things to say about past and present photography. I struggle with some of the new photography and try very hard to understand it.

TheFlyingCamera · Feb 10, 2015

Eric Rose said:
I applaud your attempt. I remember one former member who tried really hard to get APUG'rs to enter into a discussion along these lines. I think his parting shot was we could all "eat shit and die" Passion was not something he lacked.

To be honest I probably haven't read any critical books on photography in years. I rather enjoy reading bloggers who have intelligent things to say about past and present photography. I struggle with some of the new photography and try very hard to understand it.

Roll with that, then. Whose blogs are you reading, what did they say, and what did you think about it?

I'm a little too invested in APUG to stage a Grand Exit with a giant middle finger. If the discussion goes nowhere, it goes nowhere, but as always, it could be worse: it could be raining. I'd just put it out there that those who want to participate and contribute positively are welcome, and those who find this topic uninteresting, well, please just move along, nothing to see.

Trask · Feb 10, 2015

I don't read about photography as much as I go and look at exhibits that are in town, and see how these other photographers have approached their art -- and see how I react to their efforts. If TheFlyingCamera will permit me to make perhaps a neutral comment, I do find that when I look at books that discuss photography, I often feel that the author(s) writes in a manner that obfuscates with obtuse language, as if you were reading an art history thesis by someone trying hard to impress with language. I would welcome commentary that was written more in "plain English." Perhaps it's simply that as I'm not initiated into the prior history of the discussion of photography, I'm entirely missing the context. So, being positive, I'd like to read such commentary.

pdeeh · Feb 10, 2015

The last thing I read was Stieglitz On Photography , edited by Richard Whelan and published by Aperture.

The thing that struck me about him - putting aside his clearly rather tireless efforts on behalf of Photography (with a capital P), and even allowing for his time, place and - yes- class - was what a tremendously pompous and self-regarding arse he was, along with his capacity to be tremendously enthused about something one year and the next to dismiss it with utter contempt.

Critical and academic writing often comes in for a battering from some at APUG (usually on the premiss that only those who can practise a skill have the ability to preach about it), but Stieglitz strikes me as a good counter-example to that tendency.

Still, it was an interesting and entertaining read despite that. One doesn't have to agree with (or even like) something to find it of value, after all.

TheFlyingCamera · Feb 10, 2015

Trask-

If you haven't read anything before, and would like some foundational material, then the two I mentioned, Sontag and Barthes, are worth tackling. They're not overly obtuse with language.

I go to see a fair amount of shows myself, and I always love looking at images, regardless of how they're made. For me, at least, I'm not so much worried about HOW they're made anymore - most physical techniques are things I either know how to do or know how to figure out how to do, if I want to go down that path. I'm getting more interested in the WHY someone made the image that they made - why they chose the subject they did, the perspective they took, and why I react to it the way I do.

TheFlyingCamera · Feb 10, 2015

pdeeh said:
The last thing I read was Stieglitz On Photography , edited by Richard Whelan and published by Aperture.

The thing that struck me about him - putting aside his clearly rather tireless efforts on behalf of Photography (with a capital P), and even allowing for his time, place and - yes- class - was what a tremendously pompous and self-regarding arse he was, along with his capacity to be tremendously enthused about something one year and the next to dismiss it with utter contempt.

Critical and academic writing often comes in for a battering from some at APUG (usually on the premiss that only those who can practise a skill have the ability to preach about it), but Stieglitz strikes me as a good counter-example to that tendency.

Still, it was an interesting and entertaining read despite that. One doesn't have to agree with (or even like) something to find it of value, after all.

I'm starting to read Edward Weston's Daybooks now. I'm having a very similar reaction to Weston - yes he was a brilliant photographer and a leader in a movement that dramatically altered the course of photography for the later two thirds of the 20th century, but his writing is very self-serving, his writing style very stilted in that early 20th century Modernist way, and the Newhall's introduction to it is even more gag-reflex inducing for their strident polemic against Pictorialism. But I'm going to make a valiant effort to get through it because I want to know more about him.

Ian Grant · Feb 10, 2015

I've always kept my Technical books away from the monographs and exhibition catalogues, books on photographic history and the shelf of books on critical theory. The latter are in the house the former down the garden in the darkroom.

My last purchase was Geoff Dyer - The Ongoing Moment (A Book about Photographs), I like to read critical theory every so often, I think it's important to be able to contextualise your own work, that took me back to University twice

Two books I re-read occasionally are: Dialogue with Photography, Paul Hill & Thomas Joshua Cooper, and Inside the Photograph, Peter C. Bunnell. I also look at a PDF version of Paul Hill's Approaching Photography - the PDF was never released officially due to Copyright issues, it's more than a straight PDF of the book and I've never seen a PDF like it since it was an eBook way ahead of it's time. (Paul allowed his students to download a copy_

Ian

Ken Nadvornick · Feb 10, 2015

TheFlyingCamera said:
I'm starting to read Edward Weston's Daybooks now. I'm having a very similar reaction to Weston - yes he was a brilliant photographer and a leader in a movement that dramatically altered the course of photography for the later two thirds of the 20th century, but his writing is very self-serving, his writing style very stilted in that early 20th century Modernist way, and the Newhall's introduction to it is even more gag-reflex inducing for their strident polemic against Pictorialism. But I'm going to make a valiant effort to get through it because I want to know more about him.

I'm just finishing them. It only gets worse...

Ken

cliveh · Feb 10, 2015

TheFlyingCamera said:
We here on APUG have a tendency to obsess over the technical. This is entirely understandable - the Internet as a discussion forum lends itself very nicely to technical discussions, because technical discussions deal in ideas that are precise, measurable and demonstrable. Conversations about ideas, though, are hard enough to have in person, let alone on an impersonal medium like a web chat forum. I'd like to encourage the attempt.

In that regard, what theoretical/analytic/critical books on photography have you read lately? Examples - Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, On Photography by Susan Sontag. I don't want to limit this conversation by bookending it (so to speak) with these two classic texts, or to suggest that they form the only structure of understanding what it is we do, why we do it, and how photography constructs meaning. And if anyone has their own thoughts on the subject, I have zero objections to articulating it without the context of a specific book.

I think any book can be art related by virtue of how you may define and set your own photographic project to interpret it in a form of creative ideas. This could be a paragraph from Shakespeare or Lewis Carroll or even a photographic interpretation of a train line diagram. With any photographic project you may set yourself, you are only limited by your own imagination. Or am I missing the point of this OP?

TheFlyingCamera · Feb 10, 2015

cliveh said:
I think any book can be art related by virtue of how you may define and set your own photographic project to interpret it in a form of creative ideas. This could be a paragraph from Shakespeare or Lewis Carroll or even a photographic interpretation of a train line diagram. With any photographic project you may set yourself, you are only limited by your own imagination. Or am I missing the point of this OP?

I don't think you're completely off the mark, unless you're meaning to say that for example, Henry Horenstein's "Beyond Basic Black-and-White Photography" (which happens to be an excellent introductory technical manual) is Art with a capital A. And while I can certainly be inspired by (and have been, many times) monographs or exhibition catalogs, that's not exactly the same thing. I know most people don't read exhibition catalogs, but there actually is a fair amount of very intelligent writing that goes into the prefaces, explanatory texts, and philosophical discussions about the exhibition being catalogued (I'm as guilty as the next person for not reading the texts of exhibition catalogs, as I'd much rather look at the pictures).

Sirius Glass · Feb 10, 2015

When I recently started a thread on technical books on optics and photography I was looking for books like Modern Optical Engineering Warren Smith, A History of Photographic Lenses Kingslake and Optics Eugene Hecht. Instead is got responses with general photography books like The Negative Adams.

I wanted to separate the technical books from the general photographic technology which is not all that technical.

Patrick Robert James · Feb 10, 2015

In an attempt to keep this in the positive-

I thought the Ralph Gibson book Reflections was interesting but it rarely gets mentioned. I used to have a copy, but lost it. Ain't cheap anymore.

Why People Photograph by Robert Adams is worth a read.

The Daybooks succeeds well as a passage into a photographers mind and what his life was like as well as how his dedication took a toll on it. If you take it as such, you can learn from it. It is after all, a diary of sorts.

As far as blogs go, A.D. Coleman has a good one. (His book Light Readings is also good) He is dismantling the myth surrounding Robert Capa's D-day images right now on his blog. I always had the feeling that whole thing smelled funny... Melted emulsion? Lost images? Paaaaleeeease.

Also, Blake Andrews has an interesting blog. He keeps it humorous. Quite a sharp mind that fellow has. Highly recommend it.

I give Concientious a pass but I won't say why because I am attempting to keep this positive.

One problem these days, and it has always been this way, is that photographers form "tribes" and if you aren't part of the tribe, you get excluded and sometimes derided. Think f/64 and Mortenson. I have seen a few these days. One is the big Ivy league cabal. My point to this is when reading criticism online, you have to contemplate the source instead of taking it as gospel. Some popular photographers have almost no "criticism" either even though they put out some real doozie images. I'll refrain from mentioning names there as well. "Criticism" these days is more about PR than true thought; written by one photographers by another photographer who happens to know him.

I have seen a few videos done by museums and the like that bring in a group of photographers and curators and at first glance they promise to be interesting. I can rarely get through them when I try to watch but that is just my short attention span. Some may find them interesting and worth looking for.

bdial · Feb 10, 2015

I think this fits;
I just finished Group f.64: Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and the Community of Artists who Revolutionized American Photograpy by Mary Street Alinder.

It's a good read and an interesting view of the dynamics playing out in photography as art in the 1920's and 1930's. There is much mention of Stieglitz as well and the rivalries that played out between him and the western photographers.

Thomas Bertilsson · Feb 10, 2015

Tim Rudman's toning book. That's probably the only technical book about photography I've read cover to cover. That was probably five years ago.

I don't get into the technical aspect of photography much. It's not very exciting to me. I am more about the tangible side of things, and I love looking at photographs at exhibits, galleries, or personal rendezvous. Very few technical books inspire me to make better photographs, I guess is at the heart of it.

TheFlyingCamera · Feb 10, 2015

Patrick Robert James said:
In an attempt to keep this in the positive-

I thought the Ralph Gibson book Reflections was interesting but it rarely gets mentioned. I used to have a copy, but lost it. Ain't cheap anymore.

Why People Photograph by Robert Adams is worth a read.

The Daybooks succeeds well as a passage into a photographers mind and what his life was like as well as how his dedication took a toll on it. If you take it as such, you can learn from it. It is after all, a diary of sorts.

I'm just getting started into them (the Daybooks) so I really don't know what I'll find yet, but I'm deeply concerned by the Newhall's introductory admission of how heavily redacted they are. Granted they're still Weston's words, but when he took a razor and a bonfire to his writings to purge his thoughts down to what he thought was 'acceptable' in retrospect, it feels like to me when Michelangelo's grand-nephew redacted all his poetry to put the gender of the pronouns in "proper" format (ie from a male speaker to a female subject).

TheFlyingCamera · Feb 10, 2015

Thomas Bertilsson said:
Tim Rudman's toning book. That's probably the only technical book about photography I've read cover to cover. That was probably five years ago.

I don't get into the technical aspect of photography much. It's not very exciting to me. I am more about the tangible side of things, and I love looking at photographs at exhibits, galleries, or personal rendezvous. Very few technical books inspire me to make better photographs, I guess is at the heart of it.

Wrong thread - this is the NON-technical discussion

Ian Grant · Feb 10, 2015

cliveh said:
I think any book can be art related by virtue of how you may define and set your own photographic project to interpret it in a form of creative ideas. This could be a paragraph from Shakespeare or Lewis Carroll or even a photographic interpretation of a train line diagram. With any photographic project you may set yourself, you are only limited by your own imagination. Or am I missing the point of this OP?

In my early teens I read a number of pre-WWII novels by Arthur Brett Young - a Halesowen based doctor, my mother had bought them through a book club, but it was many years later that I realised how they'd influenced me. By then I'd been making images in the Wyre Forest Coalfield, had exhibitions, one on an abandoned canal and then spent 5 years photographing the Black country, where the Industrial Revolution began in the UK and having large funded exhibition.

It was only 4 or 5 years later (late 1990's) while studying Industrial Archaeology at Birmingham University that I realised (or maybe admitted) I'd been photographing in the areas Arthur Brett Youg had written about, but then they happen to be local to where I live in the UK.

Ian

Sirius Glass · Feb 10, 2015

TheFlyingCamera said:
Wrong thread - this is the NON-technical discussion

Are you going to get technical on us in this thread?

pdeeh · Feb 10, 2015

Patrick Robert James said:
the Ralph Gibson book Reflections
.

Do you mean Refractions

(I can't find anything called "Reflections" in the publications section of the gibson website)

Ian Grant · Feb 10, 2015

pdeeh said:
Do you mean Refractions

(I can't find anything called "Reflections" in the publications section of the gibson website)

Deja Vu

Ian

doughowk · Feb 10, 2015

I've tried wading thru works by Sontag (eg, contemplating the pain of others),Barthes, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams & John Berger. But I'm not trained in critical art theory to really understand their points.
At a lower level, I'm reading thru Lustrum Press's "theory" books with essays written by various photographers ;and find them very stimulating. The books include "Portrait Theory", "Nude Theory", "Landscape Theory", "Contact Theory" and "Fashion Theory".

Eric Rose · Feb 10, 2015

Here is a screen shot of my blogs bookmarks. Not all are updated on a regular basis but I cycle through them when I have some down time.

Patrick Robert James · Feb 10, 2015

pdeeh said:
Do you mean Refractions

(I can't find anything called "Reflections" in the publications section of the gibson website)

Yes, that is the one. I guess i was only two letters off. Not bad.

Nodda Duma · Feb 10, 2015

Just read "Photography: The Whole Story" edited by Juliet Hacking. Covers ground-breaking photographs (or examples from a photographic era) chronologically with critical discussions on what makes them special.

What was your latest theoretical/analytic/critical/art related photography book?

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