Some Photography Books That Helped
This week’s book stack has a photography theme. I know I’ve mentioned Tim Carpenter’s To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die before, but it’s probably one of my favourite books on the subject. I would say it has an appeal for writers, artists, and other creative folks as well. Anyone interested in seeing, the creative process, etc. You get the feeling that the author has poured everything he knows into what is almost a commonplace book, but not, because it is so well thought out and arranged. Something I think about all the time, and he just gets at in a razor sharp way in so many passages, is the fact of this question: “Do you see a pattern here: a parallel between the limitations of living and those of making?” He also talks about “thinking with and through the camera.” Limitations go hand in hand with possibilities, for Carpenter, and I am down with that.
“Do you see a pattern here: a parallel between the limitations of living and those of making?”
I realize that my book stack happens to be entirely of white dudes, except for Moyra Davey’s brilliant book Index Cards. And ugh, that really saddens me…but it’s partly due to the fact of the prevalence of aforementioned dudes in photography-world. I mean, I also have books by and about Annie Leibovitz and Francesca Woodman and Vivian Maier, and Sally Mann, and have talked about them here in past posts. There are lists of famous women photographers (still lacking women of colour on these lists generally). Even a list of Canadian women photographers and from around the world. I do have a couple of great books, compilations, of women photographers, and I also recommend them. This is a lovely one. And this one.
“I am trying to find a new way to work”
Anyway, I just now learned (or my memory is jogged) that Davey and I had the same first camera — read about that here. And more on her here. Probably when I’m done writing this post, I’m going to reread Index Cards. I love it. Because, she will say something I need to hear on repeat in my head like, “I am trying to find a new way to work.” I cannot read this sentence often enough. And then, she gives advice to herself, like, “Refrain from quoting authors I’ve only read secondhand.” She, like Carpenter, shares her wealth of knowledge so generously. She shares Janet Malcolm’s thoughts on the camera’s ability to “reveal hidden and unseen truths.” Malcolm says, “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”
And I love thinking about the optical unconscious, and how this plays out when we make photos.
These are photographers who are also writers, and certainly deep readers, much as Robert Adams is. I’ve talked about Adams’s books, including Art Can Help, numerous times here. His books have meant so much to me, that I couldn’t resist when Steidl put out this latest volume consisting entirely of quotations, words, that helped Robert Adams. Words That Helped is actually so beautiful I’m resisting my usual dog-earing. Which says a lot right?
Next is Tim Davis’s I’m Looking Through You, which is a clever title which I love and envy. There are several images that I would (not literally) kill to have made. But I appreciate his text, his writing also, so much. He says, “It is one of my few consistent beliefs that there is an infinite amount of significance in the universe, an almost bottomless well of telltale to draw from.” He talks bout the process, how he can “almost WILL an image into existence.” But also: “there are bad days; days where it’s hard to know whether to pull the car over here or keep driving.” Flipping through this book almost always gets me itching to hop in the car and head somewhere out of the suburbs. Or just get out with my camera anywhere.
Next in the stack is Joel Meyerwitz: A Question of Color. (Hard for me to not put the U in colour there…). From the publisher:
“During the late 1960s, Meyerowitz carried two cameras: one loaded with monochrome stock, the other with color. Just how, when, and why American fine art photographers switched from black-and-white image-making, prized within the gallery system, to color photography, once seen as the preserve of tourist photography, has been the cause of much debate.”
Maybe this book is in part a case for just doggedly following up on the questions we ask ourselves, whatever they may be. It’s fascinating to compare the black and white to the colour image that Meyerwitz made. It’s not like today, switching an image to monochrome in Lightroom. The images differ temporally as well, even if only slightly. Meyerwitz talks bout how he travelled to Europe in 1966. “When I came out of the door in the morning — what then? Go left? Right? And if I would make a right, then for the rest of my life everything that followed followed because I turned right.” He talks about how realizing that allowed him to go with his decisions, “open-heartedly.” At this time he learned to rely on his “appetite for seeing.” “I had to stay connected to that curiosity and inspire it in myself,” he says.
Author by Beowulf Sheehan is a current inspiration for me, and once I get my act together here this is something along the lines of what I want to emulate on my much much tinier Edmonton scale. I’ve already done some author photos as well as other portraits, but want to make it a project. Stay tuned :)
Lastly, Winogrand Color. Whenever I look through a book like this, it inspires me on many levels, and it also serves to remind that you don’t need a new camera, new gear, whatever. You just need to get out, and look. You need to find the meaning, wait for the gesture.
All of these photographers make it look easy but if you get out there, you know how tricky it is. How rare.
But also, how worthwhile. All I know is I want to get out and see things after looking through and reading these books. Even if I fail or come up empty. To have the curiosity and excitement to wander around with your camera looking, that’s a delight. That’s a good way to live.
And speaking of having the delight of wandering around with a camera with fresh eyes and curiosity, I had the pleasure of doing just that last September 2023, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We’ve been waiting to share the photos (and the outtakes!) since then (which has been an interesting exercise in and of itself in the age of Insta). The exhibition, Exchanging Glances, with photos by myself and Liane Neves from Porto Alegre opened in Brazil recently and will be in Edmonton later this spring. There was a ton of press about the show in P.A.! You can see some of it as shared by Liane on her IG. This photo taken by Liane’s friend the night of the reception is SUCH A DELIGHT!
You can do a flip-through of the catalogues for the entire project including the Porto-Alegre — Edmonton one here. You can see that the curators did an amazing job of finding “rhyming” photos of our two cities. And I still have a ton of outtakes that I’m super proud of and will be eventually popping up from time to time on my Instagram. So lots of fun things on the photography horizon!
Thanks for reading and for being here.
Shawna
