The Online Photographer

Omigod (as my students used to say nonstop). How did I ever resist this? Stumbled across it at the bookstore yesterday. Had to set anti-impulse-purchase shields on high. A gorgeous, dazzling, and actually pretty darn good coffee table book of camera porn, it's a big, sumptuously-produced, lavishly illustrated book of pictures of cameras. (U.K. link.) The book's own subtitle gets it quite wrong: it's not a history of photography at all, it's a history of cameras—a splendid, broad parade, hitting all the high points, covering the peaks from the earliest pre-1839 beginnings to the Leica M8. In many cases, the pictures of cameras are shown next to photographs taken with them or that might have been taken with something very similar: for instance, Joe Rosenthal's own Speed Graphic is shown next to his photograph of the raising of Old Glory at Iwo Jima. If your photography hobby leans toward an interest in cameras—or, equally, if you actually have an empty space on your coffee table (and if that's true I have not been doing my job)—then this might be for you.

It has a bit of scholarly weight behind it, too, since it's a production of the George Eastman House, one of the best photography museums in the United States and one of the few that has assiduously collected cameras.

One I could not resist is Danny Lyon's Memories of Myself, which I finally bought. Not yesterday; ten days ago, from Amazon. Regular readers of this site are well aware that I'm constantly going on about how you can support the site by buying stuff from Amazon through our links—baby buggies, Weber grills, power drills, doesn't matter what—but what you might not know is that, with very few exceptions, I almost never earn enough from the sales of any particular book to actually pay for a copy of that book. For example, I wrote about Eugen Herrigel's book Zen in the Art of Archery the other day, and readers bought 14 copies of it through the link, actually quite good for a non-photography title, but the proceeds on my end don't amount to what the book costs (I already own that one, though). The point is simply that I still have to watch my book purchases carefully, and buy only what I really want. Alas, TOP World Headquarters is not awash in a sea of the latest books, implications to the contrary notwithstanding.

I've mentioned Memories of Myself several times, but I didn't own it when I mentioned it. A used bookstore near where I live had a copy, and I first saw it there and subsequently stopped in several times to "visit" it—i.e., page through it while sitting on one of those funky little rolling stools that you find in bookstore and libraries. (Don't worry about whether browsing the merchandise is ethical or not—believe me, I do my part to support that store.) Anyway, on my fourth time through, the book was gone—somebody had bought it. After another week or two had passed, I decided I was still thinking about it and that this was another one I couldn't live without, so to speak. So I dropped the bucks for my very own copy. (And no, to answer another common question, I can't order from Amazon through my own links.)

So how is it, now that I own it? Well, I don't know. It came five days ago, but I've left it in its shrink wrap. Why? Partly because I like confluence. There's a right time for everything—I spent my day off yesterday shopping for a bicycle, which seemed to make it a good time to watch The Bicycle Thief on DVD last night. And partly just to savor that peculiar but familiar mix of anticipation and feared disappointment...sometimes it's happened that I enjoy exploring a book by paging through it a few times, but find on closer study that it's really not quite as good as it seemed. (That happened with this book, for one. I initially thought it was wonderful, but as I began to deconstruct my reaction for a potential review and "look at it through other peoples' eyes," I realized that much of its richness was coming from what I was bringing to it—that is, from the fact that I knew the work of many of the "heroes" covered in it deeply and intimately before I ever turned the first page. What the book was doing was reminding me of all that, not necessarily providing enough evidence of it for people who would come to the book's subjects cold.) On the other hand, once you get to know a book it can seem even richer and more wonderful when you finally sit down and get to grips with it. You know, like the way you sometimes hear a cut of music five or six times and then, a few weeks or months later, encounter it again and really listen to it, and really hear it, for the first time. I strongly suspect that will happen with Memories of Myself.

I think the reason I like the book so much is that it gave me a clearer picture of Lyon as an artist and photographer than I'd had before. I have The Bikeriders, and I knew of one or two of his other projects, but I really didn't know much about the broader reach of his work. What Memories of Myself did was to give me a more democratic overview, and it raises him in my esteem—he's better than I knew previously.

I'll keep you posted on Danny. So far this is one of the books of the season for me, but I'll know more when the plastic comes off.

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