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

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chriscrawfordphoto

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Someone else mentioned A.D. Coleman. I'd recommend him to start. His writing is more accessible than most contemporary art criticism, and Coleman is very, very knowledgeable about photography and has a genuine love of it that many other well-known critics don't. I heard him speak in person in Chicago about 16 years ago. He's a very interesting person and I learned a lot from him. I was an art student at the time.
 

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IMO, the internet, more specifically chat rooms are NOT set up to deal with difficult, dense, and often provoking text. Reading criticism is very important to me, however conversing about theses topics,, when not in person, is like a free for all of "badness" coming down the s%*t-hole. ITS a bad thing to bring up these writers and their books that they have brilliantly written. If you do read them, keep it to yourself. if you have found it enlightening, keep it to yourself. Sharing this enlightenment with other people, makes other people feel "less than" and makes you sound pompous, elitist, and VERY HIGH BROW, snooty. I always suggest keep your mouth shut and keep walking'! Share only on a need to know basis. If you absolutely need to share and discuss criticism, art theory, philosophy, ---Share with a private e-mail of a trusted friend, who has intimated that he/she is also interested in "said" topic.
 
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TheFlyingCamera

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IMO, the internet, more specifically chat rooms are NOT set up to deal with difficult, dense, and often provoking text. Reading criticism is very important to me, however conversing about theses topics,, when not in person, is like a free for all of "badness" coming down the s%*t-hole. ITS a bad thing to bring up these writers and their books that they have brilliantly written. If you do read them, keep it to yourself. if you have found it enlightening, keep it to yourself. Sharing this enlightenment with other people, makes other people feel "less than" and makes you sound pompous, elitist, and VERY HIGH BROW, snooty. I always suggest keep your mouth shut and keep walking'! Share only on a need to know basis. If you absolutely need to share and discuss criticism, art theory, philosophy, ---Share with a private e-mail of a trusted friend, who has intimated that he/she is also interested in "said" topic.

The only way to break the cycle you're talking about is to yes, indeed, SHARE what you learn. Fight the rising tide of anti-intellectualism. Read something, ask questions (in public!), answer them if you can for others, and let them know about where you got the idea and why you care about it. Yes, internet forums are an at best awkward place to have these discussions, but hiding discussions of ideas away in private chats just to make some people feel better about themselves because they're not being challenged is only to perpetuate the idea that ideas and critical thinking are somehow "elitist", "snooty" and "pompous". I grew up with what I always thought of as a reasonable vocabulary, and when I got out of college and met some people who were perturbed by my use of words that had more than two syllables, I realized that it's actually quite substantial. But instead of thinking that I'm trying to make them feel dumb by using words that they're not familiar with, my actual feeling is the opposite - I'm using my natural language and vocabulary to communicate an idea, and I'm using complex vocabulary because I actually think you're smart enough to understand it. If you're not familiar with a word or an idea, there's a thing called a dictionary - use it. If you don't want to look up words you don't understand, I don't think you're stupid - I think you're lazy, which is the much bigger sin.
 

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The only way to break the cycle you're talking about is to yes, indeed, SHARE what you learn. Fight the rising tide of anti-intellectualism. Read something, ask questions (in public!), answer them if you can for others, and let them know about where you got the idea and why you care about it. Yes, internet forums are an at best awkward place to have these discussions, but hiding discussions of ideas away in private chats just to make some people feel better about themselves because they're not being challenged is only to perpetuate the idea that ideas and critical thinking are somehow "elitist", "snooty" and "pompous". I grew up with what I always thought of as a reasonable vocabulary, and when I got out of college and met some people who were perturbed by my use of words that had more than two syllables, I realized that it's actually quite substantial. But instead of thinking that I'm trying to make them feel dumb by using words that they're not familiar with, my actual feeling is the opposite - I'm using my natural language and vocabulary to communicate an idea, and I'm using complex vocabulary because I actually think you're smart enough to understand it. If you're not familiar with a word or an idea, there's a thing called a dictionary - use it. If you don't want to look up words you don't understand, I don't think you're stupid - I think you're lazy, which is the much bigger sin.

+!

I do not dumb down my language and my writings for the general public, only for children. If someone is too lazy to look up words [high light the word, right click to copy, open a new tab, go to www.google,com, past, carriage return, read, duh how hard is that????] I have no sympathy. I look up slang and colloquialism from poster who are in other parts of the world.
 
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TheFlyingCamera

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I wouldn't even "dumb it down" for kids - I'd be more patient, and explain something they didn't understand, because usually kids are sufficiently curious that they'll show you they don't understand something, and they'll even ask you what that means... but it's all in how you speak to them. Act arrogant and demeaning, and they'll clam up.
 

Tony Egan

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A few of the usual subjects here. I highly recommend Light Readings by AD Coleman. I can pick this up and re-read chapters over again. The writing seems ageless to me.
Robert Adams writes well. Susan Sontag and I don't connect that well. John Berger is somewhere in between.

(I just noticed one of the books Undue Noise, is music criticism. If that floats your boat, Andrew Ford is a great writer on that subject)

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Wrong thread - this is the NON-technical discussion :smile:

Ooops. :smile:

I look at photography art in books all the time, and go to galleries and museums as often as I can. Thanks for the correction.
 

Sirius Glass

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+!

I do not dumb down my language and my writings for the general public, only for children. If someone is too lazy to look up words [high light the word, right click to copy, open a new tab, go to www.google,com, past, carriage return, read, duh how hard is that????] I have no sympathy. I look up slang and colloquialism from poster who are in other parts of the world.

I make exceptions for children when necessary not as a matter of course.
 

smieglitz

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What Photography Is - James Elkins

Back in December 2013 I made a trip to the emergency room of the local hospital because I was experiencing angina. Handy foresight allowed me to grab a copy of James Elkin's "What Photography Is" that I had recently ordered as a followup to his book "What Painting Is." I thoroughly enjoyed the latter work in which he compared Painting to Alchemy and thought I might be in for a similar amusement with the book on Photography. Not so.

"What Photography Is" begins as a critique of Barthe's "Camera Lucida" and ends up being a somber interpretation of the medium. It focuses on photography not as art or on its vernacular function in supporting memory and emotion, but as being a medium that allows us to perceive things that normally do not register via our human visual system. Technical photography such as that produced in photographing nuclear explosions, photomicrographs, etc., is discussed. Elkins not only dwells upon what is normally impossible for us to see, but also what is impossibly hard to look at.

His prime example of the latter class are rare and generally suppressed photographs taken of the antiquated (and now banned) Chinese execution method known as Lingchi or "Death By One Thousands Cuts" reserved for only the most heinous capital criminals and fomenters of sedition. (I'll leave it to the readers to investigate the details of this gruesome torture should they wish further elucidation.) The practice of Lingchi was also mentioned by Sontag in "Regarding the Pain of Others" (2003) as this article (http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2003/aug/03/society) relates:

"Sontag blames the eyes' indiscriminate lust, claiming 'the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked'. Her book, unillustrated, caters to neither hunger (though she does tantalisingly describe a photograph that obsessed the perverse philosopher Georges Bataille, in which a Chinese criminal ... [being executed] rolls his eyes heavenwards in transcendent bliss)."

Elkins, Barthes, and Sontag with a bit of the early surrealist Bataille included. Whew! In ER, reading this critical mix while awaiting a determination as to whether I were to have my chest ripped open in a few hours Lingchi-like, I found it quite surreal, synchronistic, and alarming when I overheard the attending ER night shift nursing staff debate whether they would be ordering "Chinese" take-out for dinner. However, that experience was not quite as surreal as my earlier ER adventure 10 years beforehand when I lay prostrate on that cold cardiac cath lab table as Eminem emanated through the overhead speakers:

"that'll jumpstart my heart quicker than a
shock when I get shocked at the hospital by the doctor when I'm not cooperating
when I'm rocking the table while he's operating (hey!)
you waited this long now stop debating 'cause I'm back,
I'm on the rag and ovulating
I know that you got a job Ms. Cheney but your husband's heart problem's complicating")



I generally enjoy Elkins' work and have several volumes including: "How to Use Your Eyes;" "Why Art Cannot Be Taught;" "Pictures of the Body:tongue:ain and Metamorphosis;" and "The Object Stares Back:On the Nature of Seeing." But, "What Photography Is" was not as light reading as the others.
 

MattKing

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I think: "A great (or poor) book to read in the hospital emergency room waiting area" would be an interesting "review" comment.
 
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TheFlyingCamera

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While not exactly a theoretical/critical book, I received last night a copy of "The Plot Thickens", an exhibition catalog from the Fraenkel Gallery, showing a wide range of vernacular and art photography side-by-side, from a show at the gallery that closed just in January of this year. The juxtapositions of Eadward Muybridge, Diane Arbus, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, William Henry Jackson, and anonymous photographers from the early to mid 20th century are fascinating, not only as a view into the mind of a single curator, but as a way to look at how we define what is and is not "art". I have another book on the way to me with a related theme of the photograph as object, also from a museum collection.
 

Moopheus

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"What Photography Is" begins as a critique of Barthe's "Camera Lucida" and ends up being a somber interpretation of the medium. It focuses on photography not as art or on its vernacular function in supporting memory and emotion, but as being a medium that allows us to perceive things that normally do not register via our human visual system. Technical photography such as that produced in photographing nuclear explosions, photomicrographs, etc., is discussed. Elkins not only dwells upon what is normally impossible for us to see, but also what is impossibly hard to look at.

Yeah, you would think that for academic theorists, photography would be hard to get a grip on, since it such a broad and amorphous category. The best they can do is look at narrow bands of the thing, which makes for a kind of blind-men-and-the-elephant problem. Generalized pronouncements can always be countered with, well, what about this over here? You didn't look at that.

For the practitioner, it's questionable how much it matters. Critics look at the results of your work, they don't help you make the work. I've worked in publishing for a long time, and it is my experience that very few writers, for instance, pay much attention to academic theory; it is of little help to them when they're on a deadline.

A somewhat theoretical book that might be more useful would be something like Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception, which tries to analyze how we actually derive meaning from visual art.
 

pdeeh

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I think you're quite mistaken in suggesting that photography is such a broad medium as to defy academic discussion.

The same could be argued for almost any scheme of human endeavour, especially perhaps in the arts.

The insistence on treating photography as somehow special and different, and thus not amenable to being discussed in the same terms or using the same criteria as other media, is to the detriment of thoughtful reflection on photography.

What's more, all the professional artists I know take academic theory rather seriously, and few or perhaps even none would suggest that theorising and thinking hard has no impact on the final works they make.

There is a rather Romantic notion that The Artist needs no more than their Genius, but that is far from the reality of how artists generally work - in whatever medium, photography included
 
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cliveh

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What's more, all the professional artists I know take academic theory rather seriously, and few or perhaps even none would suggest that theorising and thinking hard has no impact on the final works they make.

I agree with the other parts of your post, but navel gazing and disappearing up your own backside won’t improve a natural instinct to press the shutter for a given composition.
 

pdeeh

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Well that's a good thing Clive, as it's quite a stretch to make your interpretation from what I've said
 

Ian Grant

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I agree with the other parts of your post, but navel gazing and disappearing up your own backside won’t improve a natural instinct to press the shutter for a given composition.

I disagree. I think a good background in Critical theory is important and that self criticism and self analysis are key to improving your own work in any art form including photography.

I'd been making images for over 20 years and working in photography professionally, also commissioning work from other photographers before changing direction in 1986. I'd done very little personal work between 76-86 mainly die to lack of time.

So from 1986 onwards I began re-evaluating my personal work and soon decided on some major changes, th edecision, at the same timew I began reading Critical theory books. They made sense and as I began making new bodies of work I actually found it easier to make the work I wanted.

It's not just what you photograph, it's what are you trying to say, who or what is your audience, and every now and again it's necessary to re-evaluate.

Maybe the most important dedision I made was to produce bodies of work, coherent possible exhibition sets, that definitely came from reading numerous books, theory and mongraphs.

The changes in direction and reading Critical theory, then going on workshops (Peter Goldfield, Pail Hill, Peter Catrell, Fay Godwin & John Blakemore), just confirmed I was going in the right direction. About 10 yeas later I decided I wanted to learn more about contextualising my work, it was years since my last academic study and I made a decision to go back to University and study Industrial Archaeology (my work had gone in that direction). Later 2001-3 I did an MA in Photography, ultimately that came down to being able to analyse your own work, contextualise it with reards to photography/photographers as awhole, work to chosen criteria.

The bottom line is that I'd chosen the right way for myself in the late 1980's, I'm critical of my own work, edit quite ruthlessly. I'm lucky that I've mingled with like minded photographers who's opinions I respect and that has helped as well.

Ian
 

Moopheus

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I think you're quite mistaken in suggesting that photography is such a broad medium as to defy academic discussion.

I didn't say it defied academic discussion. I said it defied universal generalizing. Maybe your artist friends take it seriously, but not all photographers are artists. Many years ago I was a student intern at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and I'm pretty sure that the analysis I was doing to the photos on my desk was different from what your friends do. Was Sontag going to help me suss out tiny fluctuations in brightness of quasar images? Or understand what they mean?
 

cliveh

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I didn't say it defied academic discussion. I said it defied universal generalizing. Maybe your artist friends take it seriously, but not all photographers are artists. Many years ago I was a student intern at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and I'm pretty sure that the analysis I was doing to the photos on my desk was different from what your friends do. Was Sontag going to help me suss out tiny fluctuations in brightness of quasar images? Or understand what they mean?

What Susan Sontag knew about photography, you could write on the back of a fag packet.
 

Ian Grant

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What Susan Sontag knew about photography, you could write on the back of a fag packet.

You're muddling two things, there's photography from a technical aspect (as another photographer) and photography from a (non photographer) viewers perspective. Sontag's work is dated now but mostly still valid, as is John Berger's.

You don't need to be a composer or musician to listen to music, but you can comment and write about it in a very valid way, that's all Sontag is doing.

Ian
 

cliveh

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You're muddling two things, there's photography from a technical aspect (as another photographer) and photography from a (non photographer) viewers perspective. Sontag's work is dated now but mostly still valid, as is John Berger's.

You don't need to be a composer or musician to listen to music, but you can comment and write about it in a very valid way, that's all Sontag is doing.

Ian

But I don't mean from a technical aspect, but from an aesthetic aspect.
 

Moopheus

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Sontag's work is dated now but mostly still valid

So was she right the first time, or the second, when she said she was wrong the first time?

How did photographers get along before there was all this theory? Hard to imagine now.
 

cliveh

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Anyone can read the aesthetic, Sontag's partner is in the business and a well known photographer. She's talking about generalities though not individual images.

Maybe you need t re-read.

Ian

Her partner has nothing to do with this.
 

pdeeh

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How did photographers get along before there was all this theory? Hard to imagine now.

How did we all get along before we had ... Chemistry theory, string theory, relativity theory, you name it theory ... ?

The prevalence of this sort of anti-intellectualism is very worrying, it seems to me.

Why think about anything?
 
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