Your most thumbed photo-book?

First and Last by Walker Evans.

Man, this is a hard one to answer. My book collection is getting rather ridiculous (or so my girlfriend tells me), but I enjoy them. Print quality in the last 30-40 years is superb. I'd say that my most viewed one recently is Michael Kenna's Photographs and Stories. It's a collection of photos, one from each of the 50 years from 1973-2023. He provides an anecdote at the back of the book for each photo, which is not typical of his other books. I thoroughly enjoy both the photos and the anecdotes.

Dale

Not a book, but my November/December 1990 issue of View Camera Magazine got pretty pretty beat up…perhaps a chemical stain or two.

It contained an article describing how to make carbon prints. I would have it open next to me at each step of the process. I’d give it a go, fail, reread the article and go, “Oh, I missed that part.” or find that I had interpreted something wrong.

After months of failures and other learning experiences, I finally hand copied the instructions to save the magazine.