The Online Photographer

So...long story, but I have to get new carpet in the house.

Turns out a lot of carpet is made of really nasty stuff...the fibers, underlayment, and treatments can all emit VOCs, and carpet is the #1 cause of indoor air pollution.

My carpet is apparently worse than that. The guy who lived here before me was—let's not speak ill of the departed—frugal, and carpeted the whole house with very cheap, very poor-quality carpeting. This nasty cheap carpeting, it turns out, has been slowly disintegrating, and it's what makes our house so dusty (you find this out with an environmental test that involves setting out a patch of sticky plastic similar to a large piece of transparent tape for a prescribed amount of time, then sending it in to a lab to get whatever settled on it analyzed). Meanwhile, both my son and I have had chronic respiratory problems...which are very probably the fault of, but in any case are not helped by, all the tiny cheap-crap carpet fibers suspended in our indoor air that we've been breathing all these years.

So I have to get the carpet out of here. Starting with the biggest piece, in the living room.

This, however, is a considerably bigger job than you might think. I'm told I have to empty out the living room for the carpetlayers. And the living room in my 1000-square-foot house is almost a third of the entire area of the house. All the other rooms are smaller (some, like closets, much smaller) and have significant portions of their square footage already occupied by things like beds and furniture, and bathroom and kitchen fixtures. The bottom line is that there's not enough room in the rest of the house to accommodate all the stuff from the living room as we try to empty it.

The worst problem: about 750 books, a good portion of them oversized, in four large bookcases. You can't move the books in the bookcases, but the bookcases need to go out of the room.

So I'm in the process of laboriously boxing up all the books and putting them on 2x2 runners in the basement (the basement can get wet, and water and books do not get along). Then we'll move the furniture to the garage, while the car temporarily resides in the driveway.

Once the living room is empty, it seems like it should be painted before the new carpet goes in...that way if the painters get paint on the old carpet, nobody cares. And before I get it painted, I should probably replace the 55-year-old windows. But all that means I'll have to coordinate several sets of workmen unless I want to leave my house torn up for an indeterminate amount of time.

One task leads to another.

So anyway, on to the subject of this review: the Kindle.

I first wrote about my then-new Kindle in December 2010 (it says Part I, but I never got around to Part II*). Here's the executive summary: first I loved it, then I fell out of love with it and stopped using it much, and now I find myself using it more and more. I don't love it any more, but I do like it quite a lot. (End of executive summary.)

Three things make the experience of reading on a Kindle worthwhile: first, every book can be a large print book. You can adjust any book to the type size you prefer. Secondly, the Kindle Lighted Cover, which you can find on this page. The built-in LED light is much handier than you might think. I don't use it very often, but when I need it I really appreciate it. Finally, it's very satisfying to be reading a book review in a magazine in the middle of the night, open the Kindle, download the book, and be reading the book within minutes—without leaving your bed or chair.

I've gotten very used to reading on the Kindle, to the point that I've actually bought a few Kindle books that I already owned hardcopies of.

There are a few things I don't like about it: mainly, its inherent typographical inelegance, which deprives me of a pleasure I do get from real books, and second, the fact that it deprives me of visual orientation. There's no physical sense of where you are in a book as you read, and no distinctive physicality that makes one book different from another in size, feel, design, color, quality, and so forth. All books on the Kindle look alike...all books look like the Kindle. Flipping to and fro in a book isn't easy, and anyway you can't remember "about how far you were" when you found something you want to flip to.

Also, the Kindle store is a bit chaotic. Editorial quality control is a significant issue. For instance, the free version of Walden leaves out all the quotations (!). And you might not even know that unless you read the reviews. This criticism extends to the Kindle's interface, too—on mine, all I get is an alphabetical list of all the titles; there's no way to organize them any better than that. New ones might have been improved, I don't know.

The Kindle is really for what I've come to call "straight-through" books—books with just text that you read from start to finish, with no real need to skip around in them. And the more recent, the better—it means that the publisher will have been more likely to prepare the Kindle file with care. Just as I've bought Kindle books of titles I already owned in hardcopy, though, I've also bought hardcopies of books I only had on the Kindle. There's something reassuring about knowing what you have is in the fixed and immutable form approved by the author and the publisher.

But here's the niftiest thing about the Kindle, at least if you ask me today, after a hard day yesterday getting the great living room project started: I have 70 books on the Kindle, and I can lift them all literally with one finger. Seventy paper books fill about three boxes and make my back hurt. My seventy books on the Kindle weigh (with the case) exactly one pound (the newest one is lighter). And of course the Kindle can hold a lot more books than that without gaining a gram of weight.

Can potentially replace up to 50 heavy boxes full of paper books...
my aching back is jealous.

Of course, there are many types of books that are absolutely unsuited to the Kindle. Not only photography and art books and other illustrated books, but poetry, beautiful books of various kinds, antique books, signed books, books with personal meaning, heirlooms. And of course, as a quick glance at Amazon's Kindle page confirms, my Kindle is outdated now. My oldest paper book is outdated too...the lowercase F's look like S's, and the binding is shot. Of course, it was printed in Ireland in 1818, so some wear and tear is to be expected.

I don't know how many of my paper books I would be happy replacing with Kindle books, but a local bookshop has now taken more than 16 boxes of books from my house that became surplus to requirements in part because I now have the Kindle. Certainly, shabby old paperbacks of classics that are available on the Kindle for $0.00 up to a buck or two are no longer needed in physical form.

In fact, the Kindle seems to have created a shift in my buying habits: recently I seem to be buying fewer paper books, but better ones. My paper book collection has benefited, on the whole.

On balance, I like my Kindle, and I use it a fair amount. I would definitely get another one, especially at the modest price they fetch now.

Oh, and I now have half a dozen books on my phone, too, which I'll read happily for up to half a hour. It's really nice to have Huckleberry Finn with me when I find myself stuck in a doctor's waiting room...

...Like the doctor I'll have to go see about my back if I'm not careful about lifting all those boxes full of books.

Mike

*Unless you count this as Part II. Please?

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that appear on TOP on Sundays.

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Featured Comment by Ivan: "I own Kindle Touch and like almost all about it except for one major thing (as you put it): 'inherent typographical inelegance.' What makes the matter worse, there is absolutely no technical reason or limitation to provide richer typographical experience. Kindle could handle more fonts (as Nook does) and publishers could format ebooks much better. But it seems to me that nobody cares. Perhaps they are protecting paper books market by intentionally degrading ebook visual quality, similar to what the movie industry initially did by supporting VHS format."

Featured Comment by dwig: "I second Gill's recommendation of using calibre as a library management and conversion tool. I also suggest that anyone seriously interested in ebooks check out the forums at MobileRead. In addition to excellent forums, MR has its own user-contributed library of DRM free ebooks. These are generally very carefully formatted ebooks done by amateur craftsmen."

Featured Comment by Steve Rosenblum: "I am in complete agreement with your Kindle experience. I was an early adopter and went through the same sequence of initially really liking it, then nearly abandoning it, and now a modest resurgence in Kindle use. I agree with the general inelegance and disorientation of the reading experience. If you really love books as 'objects' onto themselves then Kindle will not scratch your itch. The other issue for me is that I frequently read a book and then hand it on to a family member or friend so that a single book may be read by many people. You can only do that in a limited way with Kindle by loading the book once to someone else with a Kindle. The access that Amazon Prime members have to free Kindle content on 'loan' has alleviated this somewhat.

"Where the Kindle really shines is if you travel quite a bit—you can take as many books or other content with you as you like and it weighs next to nothing. Kindles have been heavily adopted by road warriors. Also, the ability to acquire a book instantly is hard to resist. The convenience is starting to win me over."

Those of you interested in Lightroom 4—with the caveat that you need to be the kind of person who learns software well from books (not everyone does)—might want to check out Martin Evening's new Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers. Martin has a reputation for producing the most comprehensive and complete instructional books, the corollary being that they're not the most accessible (try Scott Kelby's The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book for Digital Photographers, due May 18th, for that). I'm not the least bit qualified to actually review this book, because I don't use Lightroom and I'm a bit of a nitwit with software anyway, but it's a magnificent book—hefty, thoroughly organized, and copiously illustrated. I suspect most people wouldn't read this per se but will use it like a one-volume encyclopedia, looking up whatever they need to know at the time.

It's dedicated to the late Bruce Fraser, originally the author of Real World Camera Raw and Real World Image Sharpening, two of the most important and influential technical books of the digital era.

Vincent Laforet
Here's another interesting-looking book that's gotten a bit lost in the shuffle. Following the phenomenal success of Joe McNally's The Moment It Clicks, which was a big bestseller in its category, another editorial/assignment photographer of equal stature has produced a visual tour of how he works. Vincent Laforet's Visual Stories gives a good selection of his work with explanatory text and a lot of practical advice and technical details along the way.

Just as knowing a subject and teaching it are not exactly the same skills, being very good at something and writing about it engagingly are not exactly the same skills either. Publishers churn out these books at a furious pace, and in many of them you "feel the churn." To put it perhaps a little more bluntly, Vincent's pictures are better than his book. The prose is a bit leaden, and the tone of the advice is of one who is, shall we say, not entirely accustomed to giving advice to adult photo enthusiasts (I don't know about you, but I don't need to be told to leave the lenscap in the camera bag and that the purpose of a UV filter is actually to protect the front element of the lens). But, throughout, you do get a very good sense of what it's like to be "out there," constantly faced with the challenge of coming up with something new, good, and different in the context of a specific assignment. There's plenty that's practical in the discussions, including some bones thrown to the gearheads.

The book comes with a DVD that has several dozen short QuickTime movies on it. As you know, I don't generally care for videos (it means I have to turn the music off). But I have to say that, as with the book, I found these (I only watched a few) to be a bit undercooked. For instance, the pictures are only shown at the beginning and the end, whereas the time you want to see the image is when he's talking about the specific elements of it. Most of each video is "talking head," except you also see his hands coming into and back out of the frame...so, I found myself distractedly watching his hands fly about as I listened to him say a bunch of stuff that's already in the book. I think it might have been better to do the opposite—begin and end with the talking head shot and show the picture as he talks about it. Also, I see absolutely no point in showing each image starting zoomed in and then slowly zooming out on it until you (briefly) see the whole thing—it's not appropriate when the entire still image is the point of the discussion. The technical information at the end of every video is of little interest and has the feel of filler (feel the churn, baby, feel the churn).

Vincent Laforet has a superb feel for B&W. This picture, taken for the front page beat that he covered for a full two years, had to include a recognizable New York City locale—here the planetarium at the American Museum of
Natural History on Central Park West.

As for the pictures, there are, as you might expect, some great ones, and then some really great ones. You certainly get a strong sense of the vast range required of an editorial photographer. Oddly enough, considering most of his work is in color, Vincent Laforet seems to have an uncommonly good feel for black-and-white—or maybe that's because only his very best B&W shots made the book. He's very fond of anti-tilt-shift, or whatever you call that style—using a tilt-shift to limit depth of field (diorama mode?). It's a technique I don't personally care for—although you might, and he's good at it. He's particularly good with aerial photography, so Visual Stories will be of special interest to anyone who likes aerial photography or wants to try it. (I've only done it once, but I really enjoyed it, and highly recommend the experience.) There are aerial photographs throughout the book.

All in all a reasonably informative albeit not terribly entertaining session spent looking over a top editorial photographer's shoulder.

There's also an eBook version of Visual Stories available from the publisher, but it costs more than Amazon's price for the printed one.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Bahi: "Opinion about Evening vs. Kelby for Lightroom books compares to opinion on the Mac vs. Windows for operating systems, though there are peacemakers in both areas.

"I've supplied dozens of these books to photographers while delivering Lightroom tuition and have two recommendations that come from the results of that ongoing, multi-year experiment using Kelby's and Evening's LR 2 and LR 3 books.

"First is that if you can afford it and if LR is your main image editing app, you should get both—they're different and offer complementary approaches. As you say, Mike, Evening is very thorough and a good reference.

"The second recommendation to any photographer is to not dismiss the Kelby as having too little information, based on the chatty writing style—Scott has the enviable ability to help you learn without your realising that you're learning. (A rare gift.) Even people who don't particularly like his writing style do find themselves learning quickly using his books. There are now other good LR books appearing, too, the Bampton in particular.

"For those who prefer video learning, Messrs. Reichmann and Schewe do a good turn. They're quite the Vic and Bob of workflow, those two."

Featured Comment by Eamon Hickey: "In case anyone is interested (and begging your pardon, Mike, for gauchely referring people to my own story on a different web site), I wrote a short article on Vincent Laforet's excellent aerials for Rob Galbraith's website a few years ago. It's got a lot of how-he-does-it info for folks interested in the nuts and bolts.

"It also leads off with what is still one of my favorite photographs, an aerial that Vincent shot over Central Park that is one of the most lovely and visually unexpected (yet simple when, after half a second, you grok it) images I've ever seen. For those who like pictures better than articles, you can see it at Vincent's website without my accompanying ramblings."

Here's the situation: A TOP reader from Down Under* has received a prestigious commission to shoot photographs for an upcoming book. He would like to arm himself for the meeting with the publishers with some books that have state-of-the-art black-and-white photographic reproduction, and he needs a few recommendations.

My problem is that I don't see a lot of current photo books unless I buy them, and almost all of the books I own that have standout reproduction quality are old and out of print. (For instance this one, which has really lovely quality. And might be my "desert island" monograph, if I had to pick only one.) I recommended Salgado's Africa to him, but beyond that (surprisingly!) I was at a bit of a loss.

Can anyone recommend a book or two? Again, it would have to be a book that has not just adequate, not just good, but really superb monochrome repro....

Thanks in advance....

Mike

*At least I think it's down under—New Zealand; that counts, doesn't it? Or is "down under" the exclusive property of you Aussies?

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The New York Times Magazine Photographs (U.K. link, Book Depository link)

Edited by Kathy Ryan, Director of Photography, New York Times Magazine

Preface by Gerald Marzorati, Editorial Director emeritus, New York Times Magazine

448 pages; 11.7 x 9.9 x 1.8 inches; $75, currently half off at Amazon U.S.

Published by Aperture

-

Reviewed for TOP by Geoff Wittig

Gerald Marzorati's preface to this book begins with this sentence: "There never really was a golden age of magazine photography." The Editor of the New York Times Magazine from 2003 to 2010, Marzorati points out that even in the heyday of LIFE and Look magazines, film, and subsequently television, had a much greater hold on popular imagination than print media. Yet the still image has its own unique power, from a capacity to freeze time for prolonged inspection to its own aesthetic beauty. Even as mass media outlets for photography dwindle, still images continue to have a hold on us that video clips don't seem to match.

The New York Times Magazine is essentially the "last man standing" among print media venues for "serious" photography in the United States. Other publications have either folded or (yes, Time and Newsweek, we're looking at you) have reduced their photographic content to a shriveled remnant. The Times Magazine has in contrast become more adventurous and lavish in its photography. As noted in the preface, in the mid-1990s the decision was made to greatly expand the magazine's photographic coverage and to make color available throughout. The relatively antiquated rotogravure process is used for the magazine's photoreproductions, because it cleverly compensates for the thin paper stock and provides rich darks unattainable with more conventional web offset printing. The magazine also has an editorial staff devoted to creatively employing photography to help tell stories, and access to a huge stable of photographers representing a vast range of styles.

The magazine's current photo editor, Kathy Ryan, uses the foreword to describe the process of brainstorming and developing photo essays, from the initial idea to selection of a photographer to interpret it. One of this publication's visual hooks has been "cross-assigning"—sending a landscape photographer to cover a hard news story, say, or a fashion photographer to take portraits of gang members. The editorial staff know that the magazine is competing for readers' time and attention, and thus the photos can't just tell a story; they have to grab us by the mental lapels via the unexpected, the shocking, or the strikingly beautiful.

The book itself is quite large and hefty, with a minimalist cover design. The photo reproductions are very good, varnished on heavy semi-matte stock. Unfortunately, quite a few are printed across the fold; in a few cases only about 20% of the image is on the opposite leaf, apparently an absurd triumph of hipster design over photographic integrity. Typography is good but not great; text is set in an old style digital Garamond lacking text (lining) numerals, but readability is fine.

The first section of the book addresses portaits. Each image is captioned with the date of publication and a note from the photographer. Some of the notes are terse, but many of the photographers discuss the interaction with their subject, or the interpretation they were aiming for, in ways that add further depth to the photographs. Many of the portraits have become iconic—the smoldering intensity of Miles Davis's gaze in Anthony Barboza's photo, the unexpected serenity of the severely burned survivor of a terrorist bombing (Kinneret Bussany) in Gillian Laub's picture. The photographers cover the gamut, from Nan Goldin to Nigel Parry, Dan Winters to Erwin Olaf to Chuck Close; a huge range of interpretive and visual styles. The next section covers documentary work, and serves to emphasize how unique the Times Magazine has become as a venue for photjournalism here in the States. From Susan Meiselas and Mary Ellen Mark to Eugene Richards and Sebstião Salgado, from James Natchwey and Gilles Peress to Antonin Kratochvil, the stylistic range, the visual impact, and the storytelling power of the photographs are remarkable. Again, many of the images have become icons, including Salgado's Dante-esque view of hundreds of laboring gold miners and Franco Zecchin and Letizia Battaglia's poetically shocking photo of a Cosa Nostra murder victim and grieving family.

Next comes photo-illustration, once again displaying a huge stylistic range from Joel-Peter Witkin's gothic grotesquery to David LaChapelle's neon confections to Stephen Wilkes' inventive visual Haiku. Some of the images are obviously a long way from traditional photography, but as visually arresting metaphors they serve to emphasize the accompanying text. You can't help but admire the wit behind some of the images.

The style chapter delves into fashion photography in the broadest sense, from clothing and design to architecture and food. Once again there are numerous images by well-known photographers from Lillian Bassman to Martin Parr. I'm about as ignorant of fashion as one can be, and I find in-you-face opulence tacky, but there's no denying how striking most of the photographs are.

The penultimate section covers a number of extended photographic projects, from Giles Peress's "A Vision of Iran" to Gregory Crewdson's "Dream House" to Nadav Kander's series of portraits of members of the Obama administration. It's difficult to imagine another mass media magazine publishing something like Crewdson's cinematic fantasy, or a composite portrait of what it's like to be 13 years old from the perspective of multiple different photographers.

The final chapter is a large selection of tearsheets from the magazine reproduced at reduced size. The intent is to put the photographs back into the context in which they were published—complete with text, headings, juxtaposed smaller images and overall page layout. The result is sort of like Errata Editions' facsimile series of photobooks; the reproductions aren't large enough to study the photographs per se, but it shows you the designer's intent.

It would be hard to imagine a better showcase in book form for where contemporary photography is today in the United States.

Geoff-

Amazon.com link

Amazon U.K. link

Book Depository link

For other links please go here

ADDENDUM: Here's a full alphabetical list of the photographers whose work appears in The New York Times Magazine Photographs: Lynsey Addario, Ruven Afanador, Peter van Agtmael, Christopher Anderson, Kenji Aoki, Marc Asnin, Josef Astor, Roger Ballen, Anthony Barboza, Richard Barnes, Lillian Bassman, Letizia Battaglia and Franco Zecchin, Andrew Bettles, Jodi Bieber, Ellen Binder, Olaf Blecker, Richard Burbridge, James Casebere, Barron Claiborne, Chuck Close, Fred Conrad, Gregory Crewdson, Carlton Davis, Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Jillian Edelstein, Mitch Epstein, Donna Ferrato, Larry Fink, Lendon Flanagan, Leonard Freed, Lee Friedlander, Sally Gall, Tierney Gearon, Ashley Gilbertson, Nan Goldin, Katy Grannan, Stanley Greene, Lauren Greenfield, Thomas Hannich, Charles Harbutt, Lyle Ashton Harris, Alexei Hay, Todd Heisler, Lizzie Himmel, David Hockney, Reinhard Hunger and Sarah Illenberger, Nadav Kander, Edward Keating, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Hendrik Kerstens, Martin Klimas, Jeff Koons, Mikako Koyama, Antonin Kratochvil, Karen Kuehn, David LaChapelle, Brigitte Lacombe, Joachim Ladefoged, Jean-Pierre Laffont, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Gillian Laub, Annie Leibovitz, Laura Letinsky, Ettore Malanca, Kurt Markus, Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark, Matuschka, Robert Maxwell, Gareth McConnell, Ryan McGinley, Hellen van Meene, Raymond Meier, Susan Meiselas, Jeff Mermelstein, Sheila Metzner, David Montgomery, Sarah Moon, Abelardo Morell, Vik Muniz, James Nachtwey, Dewey Nicks, Simon Norfolk, Erwin Olaf, Michael O'Neill, Martin Parr, Nigel Parry, Paolo Pellegrin, Gilles Peress, Mark Peterson, Jack Pierson, Matthew Pillsbury, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Platon, Reza, Eugene Richards, Jeff Riedel, Matthew Rolston, Paolo Roversi, Sebastião Salgado, Horacio Salinas, Tom Schierlitz, Gary Schneider, Collier Schorr, Zachary Scott, Stéphane Sednaoui, David Seidner, Alfred Seiland, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Malick Sidibé, Laurie Simmons, Taryn Simon, Stephanie Sinclair, Rodney Smith, Sage Sohier, Mike and Doug Starn, Laurent van der Stockt, Thomas Struth, Sam Taylor-Wood, Joyce Tenneson, Scott Thode, Larry Towell, Lars Tunbjörk, Deborah Turbeville, Paolo Ventura, Massimo Vitali, Bruce Weber, Stephen Wilkes, Damon Winter, Dan Winters, Joel-Peter Witkin, Katherine Wolkoff, and Harf Zimmerman.

I'll have more to say about it in due course, but I just thought you'd want to know that I received Vivian Maier: Street Photographer yesterday. (It's available for pre-order in the U.K. and it's not in stock at The Book Depository yet.)

As you probably already know, Vivian was a Franco-American nanny who photographed obsessively on the street in complete obscurity for many years. Her work was abandoned in a storage locker as she lay dying, only to be rescued by several adventitious purchasers, one of whom was a young man named John Maloof. John soon realized the significance of his acquisition and has been working to stabilize, publicize and disseminate the archive ever since.

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer is the first full-scale publication of her work apart from a show catalog. A special book, in many ways. More anon.

Mike

P.S. Incidentally, my book came well packed and well protected, attached with shrink-wrap to a piece of cardboard inside the shipping box.

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Featured Comment by Sherwood McLernon: "I received my copy yesterday as well and have to say it exceeded my expectations. I think of it as the book that I had hoped The Americans by Robert Frank would have been, but wasn't. I thought the reproductions were excellent and a lot of the subject matter fascinating. All in all a very satisfying book."

When: Friday September 30th, Saturday October 1st, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day and Sunday October 2nd from 12 to 5 p.m.

5B4 is parting with hundreds of photography and art books that are priced to sell. Many are rare and out of print, some signed or inscribed by the artists. Have been collecting for 25 years and now parting with a selection of my library.

Here's the link.

If I get in the car right now I could make it....

Mike
(Thanks to James Erlandson)

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Matt Weber, NYC 1991, from The Urban Prisoner

What our readers are buying so far this quarter. Just counting Amazon and Amazon U.K., shipped books only (pending orders not counted):

Andre Kertesz (Editions Hazan) (U.K. link), 173 copies

The Urban Prisoner: Photographs by Matt Weber (not available in the U.K.), 32 copies

Ernst Haas: Color Correction (U.K. link), 145 copies

Koudelka: Gypsies (U.K. link), 198 copies. British publisher Thames & Hudson isn't shipping to the U.K. yet, so that's U.S. only. Aperture is the publisher here. (Incredibly, I couldn't get Aperture to email me a few public relations JPEGs for our article—even though they told me they have them prepared and ready to go. I even made a toll call to their PR Department to request them. Web publications get no respect, I tells ya, no respect at all.)

The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes, (U.K. link), 31 copies.

A spread from Ernst Haas: Color Correction, which makes a great
companion piece to Saul Leiter's Early Color

For links for others countries and to The Book Depository, see here.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Jeffrey Goggin: "Geez...I'm five for five! I have to slow down on buying books...one of these days."

Just thought I'd mention this.

As you might know, photobook bindings can actually be quite fragile things.

The first thing I do when I get a new book is to open it gently from the front. Depending on how stiff the binding is you might not want to open it all the way. Then I go through the entire book taking a bunch of pages at at time—five, ten, or 20 depending on the size of the book and the feel of the binding. I open the book at each point and gently press open the binding—not hard enough to stress or crack it and often not as wide as you will eventually want to open it when reading or looking at the book, but enough to flex it and get it to start to relax. This helps keep the binding from "cracking" at some later point.

When taking the pages in bunches, it's preferable to open them in between signatures rather than at signature breaks (the book tends to want to fall open at signature breaks so just part the pages where they seem to want to stay together).

Then I turn the book upside-down and go through it again from the back, doing the same thing again. This helps keep the binding square and prevents it from getting cocked.

A cocked or "slant" binding is when the spine doesn't want to
stay square with the boards.

When you go through only part of a photobook, you might want to open it in a few places in the part of the text block you didn't go through. The binding will naturally get progressively looser with use, and it helps keep the book sound if this process is evened out throughout the volume.

If you notice a spine starting to become cocked, turn the book upside down and page through it from the back, smoothing the fold or break down as you go.

Careful handling of the binding at all times is important to keep the binding from becoming shaken, but the habit of going through the book front-to-back and then back-to-front a few pages at a time when it's brand new does a lot to help keep the binding healthy for the rest of the book's life.

A shaken binding or spine is when the text block becomes quite loose and unstable in the binding case but hasn't fully detached.

Note that the terms "cocked" and "shaken" are technical bookseller's terms, not just random descriptive words. Traditionally, most of the terms booksellers use to describe condition have been carefully worked out by tradition and common agreement.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Tom Passin: "As a former hand bookbinder, I applaud your care. The only change I'd suggest is to alternate bunches from front and back, working your way to the middle, as Phil Cook mentioned in the Comments Section. Also, with a fragile book, you might want to not open it all the way for each batch the first time through, but go through it twice before really flattening the pages."

Friends, the new edition of Gypsies from Aperture is a flat-out masterpiece of photography and bookmaking. I received mine yesterday and it is even better than I'd hoped. With the picture selection restored to the original intentions of the photographer and the original book designer, Milan Kopriva, and the reproduction quality raised to the best of modern standards by Gerhard Steidl, the work is made new.

Considered one of the photobook high points of the 20th century, the Robert Delpire edit still has its charms. But far from diluting the impact of the pictures in the older book, the opposite happens: if some of the older pictures are too well known, like great music that's been heard too many times, the new pictures add richness and context and both enliven and renew the better-known ones.

Many of the horizontals are two-page spreads, but few seem diminished by it in this case. And a number of horizontals are fold-outs, making the interruption a crease rather than a gather. The reproductions are large despite the modest size of the book. The paper is matt and the repro resembles photogravure in style and feel—quite different from the earlier book, yet even more appealing in my opinion.

For anyone interested in social documentary, an absolute must-have, and I can't see how any photographic library wouldn't be enriched by this. This edition will surely remain prized both by the market and by lovers of photography long after the new copies are gone. A superlative presentation of important work and a magnificent and wonderful achievement by all concerned. Very highly recommended.

Mike

Again:

Amazon link
Amazon U.K.
Our page for other links
Book Depository

P.S. Just as a point of interest, the repro prints for the book were made by our friend Voja Mitrovic.

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Just republished—one of the all-time great photo books, the book that made Josef Koudelka's reputation—Gypsies.

I hadn't intended to buy this because I already have the original. But Stan B. writes to tell me that I need it anyway. He says the reproduction in the new edition is far superior to the original, and that there are many (49) new pictures—the added photos every bit as good as the 'first batch,' according to him.

Discount for hyperbole if you must, allowing for the fact that Koudelka ranks #1 among my all-time favorite photographers in the World ever; but this is as close to a must-have as photo books get. I'm sure I will have more to say about the new edition, and how it compares to the original, after my copy arrives.

I would say his best book is this one, but good luck getting that.

The new Gypsies is from Steidl, so Steidlimbo* looms. You have been warned.

Amazon link
Amazon U.K.
Our page for other links
Book Depository

Mike
(Thanks to Stan)

* Steidl has only one press and runs it around the clock. When editions sell out, they have to await their turn for reprinting, and sometimes that never happens. Availability is therefore always dicey with Steidl titles. Sometimes there are plenty of copies; sometimes there just aren't. Sometimes there aren't for a while and then there are; sometimes the opposite. You just can never be sure.

For example, it appears that Ernst Haas: Color Correction, which we were talking about just the other day, has already entered Steidlimbo. Possibly helped along by us, I must admit.

UPDATE: To clarify—the new Gypsies is being published by Aperture in the U.S. and Thames & Hudson in the U.K., but in both cases it's printed by Steidl at Number 4 Düstere Strasse in Göttingen, which in turn means that the hazard of potential Steidlimbo pertains. Sorry for any confusion I caused by not making this clear earlier.

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Photo by Iain McKell, from the series "The New Gypsies"

Featured Comment by Mark Seel: "If you like Gypsies, you should check out 'The New Gypsies' by Iain McKell. These travelers are from the British Isles, but they look pretty authentic. Interesting stuff from an up-and-coming photographer."

Featured Comment by Kirk Tuck: "Absolutely my favorite documentary photographer of all time. I love Gypsies and will buy this edition just because I've worn out the previous one. Good call. Thanks for the heads up."

I don't mindlessly copy publisher boilerplate into book notices, but in this case Steidl's sales writeup is both incisive and interesting, so I repeat it here in full:

Ernst Haas is unquestionably one of the best-known, most prolific and most published photographers of the twentieth century. He is most associated with a vibrant colour photography which, for decades, was much in demand by the illustrated press. This colour work, published in the most influential magazines in Europe and America, also fed a constant stream of books, and these too enjoyed great popularity. But although his colour work earned him fame around the world, in recent decades it has often been derided by critics and curators as 'overly commercial,' and too easily accessible—or in the language of curators, not sufficiently 'serious.' As a result, his reputation has suffered in comparison with a younger generation of colour photographers, notably Eggleston, Shore and Meyerowitz.

Paradoxically, however, there was also a side of his work that was almost entirely hidden from view. Parallel to his commissioned work Haas constantly made images for his own interest, and these pictures show an entirely different aspect of Haas’s sensibility: they are far more edgy, loose, complex and ambiguous—in short, far more radical than the work which earned him fame. Haas never printed these pictures in his lifetime, nor did he exhibit them, probably believing that they would not be understood or appreciated. Nonetheless, these works are of great complexity, and rival (and sometimes surpass) anything done at the time by his fellow photographers. This book is intended to correct the record.

Ernst Haas has long fascinated me for just these reasons. My critical thesis about him was that he was an innovator who "became invisible" because he was so widely and so thoroughly copied. If you do things no one has ever done before, but then everybody else does them too, what's left to distinguish your original work from that of the later imitators?

I doubt this book will succeed in rehabilitating Haas, especially as there can be no case for authorship—a book not directed or approved by the photographer can't entirely be a true reflection of the photographer's work even if he took all the pictures. But it's fascinating to see the attempt made so forthrightly. I'll be looking forward to seeing this.

Here are the links: Amazon, Amazon U.K., Book Depository.

Ernst Haas, Greenwich Village, New York, 1950s

Read a little more about Haas in context here. Presumably many of the images included in this book can be seen at the Ernst Haas Estate website under the heading "Collection of Newly Discovered Photographs."

Mike

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Featured Comment by Maarten B.: "I don't comment often but this one is really a must-have book. Wonderful."

Featured Comment by M: "Thanks for posting this. Haas' work has inspired me almost my entire photographic career. I don't think he has ever gotten the acclaim he deserves. First the art world considered only black-and-white photography to be art. Then, after Haas opened everyone's eyes to what color could do, he was dismissed again in favor of color photographers of the '70s and '80s. No one did so many breathtakingly beautiful photographs as he did, in my opinion. Can't wait to get this book."

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "Not taking Ernst Haas seriously is a bunch of hooey. This is the guy that made my generations say 'You can do that with color? Wow!' And then lots of us went out and tried to do it. But he was also a great teacher. I once met him in the early '70s and saw him working with students. And his message was 'You can do that with color!' Amazingly enabling. Much of the look of our world in the later third of the twentieth century came straight out of his camera. You gotta take that seriously. (Let the revisionist snobs mull that over.) I owe him."

Featured Comment by Rob Atkins: "I've been spending a lot of time with Color Correction since it arrived a week ago. Steidl has done justice to a master of color photography, making up for some of the shortcomings, in my mind, of the 1989 Abrams book Ernst Haas Color Photography. The reproduction is superb in the new book, and it goes a long way to establishing Ernst in his rightful place as an innovator and artist of unique distinction. Color correction indeed.

Not every photograph in the book is a masterpiece, honestly. But all are the work of a master, and as such, I want to see everything. We can learn from Ernst's seconds and thirds, as we can from his select images; they all come from the eye and mind of a master photographer. To quote Edward Steichen: 'He is a free spirit, untrammeled by tradition and theory, who has gone out and found beauty unparalleled in photography.'"

Featured Comment by Koen Lageveen: "I'm no Haas connoisseur, but while looking to buy one of his books I ran into this one and bought it outright. It is wonderful in every way, also as a book about Haas I guess, but perhaps not the book of his work to own because as you say he didn't edit or even see it. Perhaps someone can advise, which is? In the meantime I will say that I thoroughly enjoy this book and find it is full of very inspirational color photography."

Mike replies: There are good Haas books but no great ones (unless this one is). His great popular hit was The Creation, and I also have Color Photography which I like better. But honestly I see more interesting things from him just surfing the web, and I don't turn to either of those books very often just for pleasure.

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "Addendum: I just received this book and have only had time to fly over it once. But it's certainly a gotta-have for early color junkies like me. All this talk of color lately, and my natural proclivity toward good color, are prompting me to see if we can put together a good 'early color' show at the museum (Art Institute of Chicago). We have a pretty good permanent collection but we also know where to get some terrific loans. And we have new photo galleries opening shortly and in the next few years. Hmmm...stay tuned."