The Online Photographer

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

Circus by Bruce Davidson
Hardcover: 101 pages
Publisher: Steidl The Masters (August 1, 2007)
11.8 x 11.6 inches

~Out of Print~

Used copies from Amazon U.S.
Used copies at Amazon U.K.
email Howard Greenberg Gallery for possible availability

Bruce Davidson is a major figure in what might be called humanistic photojournalism, having produced a number of brilliant studies over a long career. He has consistently worked in the classic black-and-white documentary mode. He's probably best known for East 100th Street, a photo documentary of a Harlem neighborhood in the late 1960s, but he also produced the early 1960s Brooklyn Gang and a large body of work on the civil rights movement. This book collects Davidson's photographs of three different circuses over a decade. The first and by far the most poignant is Clyde Beatty's in 1958, in the waning days of traveling Big Top circuses. Next is Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, looking out of place in a huge concrete coliseum in North Carolina in 1965. Last is an almost quaint family-run circus in Ireland in 1967.

Davidson's focus isn't so much on the show-biz side as on the prosaic reality of the lives of the circus folk. The great Emmett Kelly makes an appearance, but The first section of the book in particular delves into the life of Jimmy Armstrong, dwarf-clown of the Beatty circus. Some of these photographs have become iconic; here they are presented as intended, part of a sympathetic look into the lives of these working people. The photographs themselves are remarkable; incisive, beautifully composed, all rich tones and glowing highlights, with grain actually adding to the impact.

The book itself is also beautifully crafted. It's relatively large, of simple embossed cloth adorned by inset photographs on both front and back covers. The photographic reproductions are excellent; varnished tritones with remarkably good shadow detail. The book is introduced by a short but touching preface by Davidson. Sam Holmes contributes a much longer post-script that explains how Davidson came to photograph the circuses, and goes into some detail about the lives of the characters involved.

All in all a lovely book, especially for anyone who likes documentary photography as art. Or, if you just like the circus.

Eye Mind Spirit: The Enduring Legacy of Minor White
Hardcover: 80 pages
Publisher: Howard Greenberg Gallery; 1st edition (February 1, 2009)
9.7 x 8.7 inches

~Warning: availability may be limited~

Published at $50

$31.50 from Amazon U.S.
£36.90 at Amazon U.K.

Given his immense impact on photography in America, it's amazing to me how little is available in print regarding Minor White. He taught an entire generation of prominent photographers during his years at Rochester Institute of Technology. Pete Turner, Paul Caponigro, Jerry Uelsmann, Peter C. Bunnell, Nathan Lyons, even David Plowden all studied under White.

Currently you can still find The Moment of Seeing: Minor White at the California School of Fine Arts (2006). It's a rather dry account of his early years teaching in San Francisco just after WWII, but it scarcely touches on his artistic or æsthetic philosophy, and contains very little of his actual work. Rites and Passages (Aperture monograph, 1978) is quite good, but long out of print. His classic Mirrors Messages Manifestations goes for $500 and up if you can find it.

Hence this new book is a welcome, if slender addition to available sources. It's associated with an exhibit late last year at Howard Greenberg Gallery. It's a modestly sized but beautifully printed book in simple red linen cover with an inset photograph. There's a concise preface by Peter C. Bunnell, well known critic and curator of the Minor White archive at Princeton—and of course a student of White's at RIT. Next is a thoughtful essay by Nathan Lyons, describing the intense circle of devoted students and photographers orbiting around Minor in the late 1950s, a time when the world of photography was far, far smaller than today.

The selection of images includes some "greatest hits," but also many I've never seen before. The duotone reproductions are quite good, comparing favorably to those (admittedly much older) in Rites and Passages. If you like Minor White's work, or merely want something of him in your library, you'll want to seek this out. It's only an edition of 1500, and my copy is labled #1329, so don't delay.

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Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "I echo your remarks regarding Circus, Geoff. I purchased a copy last spring but forgot about it until last fall. It was like finding a $50 bill in my sofa cushions. I find Davidson's bodies of work completely immersive, rather like a good movie. I had the privilege of meeting Bruce two years ago. He's a remarkably humble fellow despite his many accomplishments and accolades.

"The most remarkable memory I have of that evening was learning how he has kept touch with so many of the subjects featured in what appear to be casual 'street' images. Walking through his 'Subway' series, as well as his 'East 100th Street' work he could often recount post-image life histories of so many of his subjects it just dropped my jaw. ('Oh, she became a NY public librarian and married a professor at NYU. This guy served a 5-year stint in jail for armed robbery but now works at a community center and has three kids. I went to his wedding.' Etc.)

"When I met him he claimed to be winding-down, now that he was well into his 70s. He remarked that much of his time was being spent quietly reorganizing his image archive with an assistant in his NY apartment. He commented briefly on one large personal project looming but gave the impression of slowing down.

"So it has been with quite some chuckles that I have since seen his name appear as a featured speaker / participant at what seems like a steady drizzle of events! Go get 'em, Bruce!

"Also, thank you for the heads-up on the Minor White book. It immediately brought to mind that I know relatively little about this influential fellow's work. So, despite having taken a pledge (to myself) not to buy any more photo books, I clicked the link above and a copy is making its way to me. (Now I have to take the pledge again.)"

Featured Comment by Bob Zimmerman (not Bob Dylan): "Odd that you would be writing about Bruce Davidson just as Bob Dylan releases the cover of his new album featuring a Bruce Davidson photo."

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 Introduction: a few days ago I mentioned that my next-door neighbor here in Wisconsin, Todd Sattersten, happens to be the co-author of a new "book about books," The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You. I asked Todd if he'd write a post for TOP recommending a select few business books that pertain to the kinds of business problems that photographers contend with. Here are his recommendations. —MJ

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By Todd Sattersten

Let me start with dispelling two falsehoods that persist about entrepreneurship:

Myth #1: Nine out of 10 businesses fail in the first five years. This myth has been dispelled by research from the Small Business Administration, but the message persists. StartupNation by Jeff Sloan and Rich Sloan reported that 40% of companies where thriving after three years, and only 18% had filed for bankruptcy. Startups That Work by Joel Kurtzman presents more definitive data from a study conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers that quantifies the failure rate at less than 6%.

Myth #2: You should start the company by yourself. Most entrepreneurs leave their jobs because they don’t want to work for or with anyone. This is dangerous. The data is clear that companies founded by more than one person are more successful and grow faster. David Gage, in his book The Partnership Charter, says that 94% of hyper-growth companies have two or more founders.* The Kurtzman research also chimes in on this idea, saying that "Founding teams with a diverse set of skills tend to be far more successful than a single founding entrepreneur, especially if the members of the team worked together previously and had complementary skills and personalities."

So, start now and find a friend.

But, of course, it's not that easy. Being in business is about more than shooting pictures or baking bread or fixing cars. Taken mostly from The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, here are five books to help turn your hobby and passion into a business:

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber—Gerber’s message is that most new business owners don’t have a problem with the technical parts of the business, but fall down with the managerial and entrepreneurial parts. He says business should be built like franchises are, with strong systems that allow repeatable results.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, 20th Anniversary Edition by Al Ries and Jack Trout—What is the first company you think of when I say "MP3 player"? Apple owns that space with its iPod product line. The authors say that this first-in-mind spot creates enormous market advantages.** And if you can’t replace the market leader, redefine the category. Become the best children’s photographer in your Zip Code, for example.

Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith—Selling services is very different from selling products. Beckwith says everything hinges on the quality of the service and making the value of the service concrete in the customer’s mind. This is a great book that is a quick read and will change your view of marketing your services.

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin—Once you have the message for your business, you need one person to tell the next. Godin says that the companies, products, and ideas that win are the ones that spread the furthest. Same holds true for your reputation. Do something remarkable; people will talk.

The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham—Most entrepreneurship books just don't deliver. The wide variability in fledgling businesses makes it nearly impossible to write a universal prescription for success. Books about the entrepreneur who made it big are often filled with more celebrity and celebration than hard-won lessons and real life pain. The Knack is the exception. This new book just came out in December 2008 and was not included In The 100 Best, but the rich and relatable stories are the same ones that have made Brodsky and Burlingham's "Street Smarts" column in Inc. magazine so compelling over the last 14 years. The opening story alone is worth the price of admission.

Todd
Todd's website

*This is just anecdotal, but one thing I've noticed over the years is that many successful pro photographers are actually husband-and-wife teams. It's more often the case that the wife is some combination of bookkeeper, studio manager, secretary, marketer, scheduler, fixer of lunches, etc., but I've known more than one couple (including one very high-profile one) where a husband performed those tasks for his photographer wife. —MJ

**Strong positioning is essentially what I was recommending in this essay. —MJ

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TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845–1945
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre (Sept. 2008)
10.9 x 9.3 inches

$60 ($37.80 at Amazon U.S.)

-       (£37.32 at Amazon U.K.)

This relatively compact volume is the catalog for the traveling exhibition, a joint project of George Eastman House and the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG). You'd have a hard time finding a better brief summary of pictorialism as a movement within photography. The exhibition includes prints from numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and private collectors.

The first chapter following a series of plates is a perceptive essay by Eastman House curator Alison Nordström and archivist David Wooters that nicely summarizes pictorialism and its place in both photography and the broader world of representational art. Subsequent chapters discuss pictorialism in Japan, Australia and the Czech lands. There is also a sampling of the writings of prominent pictorialists.

The reproduction quality of the included images is quite good, given the obvious difficulty of emulating numerous different types of print. The paper stock is a smooth coated off-white, and reproductions are very nicely toned to match the widely varying 'colors' of the various monochrome prints in the exhibition. My only gripe is that the actual print form is listed in an appendix, rather than in the caption beneath each plate; you have to go to the back of the book to find out that Alvin Langdon Coburn's "Fifth Avenue from the St. Regis" is a platinum print.

The exhibition is currently at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, through May 31st. By all means see it if you're in the area. After several visits I can attest to the fidelity of the book's plates, though they are no substitute for seeing the actual prints. The largest portion of the works are platinum prints, though there are also a goodly number of silver gelatin and gum/bichromate prints, with a smattering of less common forms like bromoil. Some are printed on heavily textured paper for graphic effect, which is impossible to reproduce in book form. 

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House Calls with William Carlos
Williams, M.D.
Hardcover: 106 pages
Publisher: powerHouse Books (Sept. 2008)
8.3 x 6.5 inches

$29.95 ($21.86 at Amazon U.S.)

£19.99 (£13.19 at Amazon U.K.)

This little book is a brief account of the experience of then-medical student Robert Coles (now a leading child psychiatrist and sociologist and prolific author) going on house calls with the great physician and poet William Carlos Williams in the early 1950s. It includes some of Williams' poems. The book is beautifully illustrated with black & white photographs taken in 2006–2007 by Thomas Roma. The photographs show the still-standing New Jersey homes and buildings visited by Coles and Williams more than a half century ago. It's a modest tome, but the photographs show much of the same subtle grace and shabby grandeur displayed by George Tice's images of the same area.

I'm a rural family doctor who still makes house calls, occasionally with medical students, and this book simply nails it. It gets the sense of community, the knowing nods from the neighbors when you visit a sick octagenarian, the terror and promise for the young student. Simply a lovely little tome. You may be able to discern from the scanned cover image that my copy has been well thumbed.

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This is mostly not on topic, but by coincidence, three old friends have recently published books—although the books are probably as different as they could be—and I thought I'd mention them in the spirit of getting the word out. Plain old plugs.

Jim Schley is a poet, teacher, and editor who lives "off the grid" in a solar house he and his wife Becky Bailey built on the back side of a ridge in Vermont, and he's recently published his first full-length book of poems, As When, In Season. The story of how Jim and I became friends is one I've told many times, but not many TOP readers have heard it so I'll tell it again. My family moved to Milwaukee when I was seven. My Dad had bought a house that wasn't finished yet, so we lived above the restaurant in a motel north of the city for a few months. The motel is now surrounded by other buildings, but in 1964 it was in the middle of nowhere; so, at the end of October, Jim told his mother that there was an unlucky boy in his class who was going to move into their neighborhood soon who had no place to trick-or-treat. That led to an invitation from Jim's mother Imy for me and my brothers to come trick-or-treat with them.

Later, my mother wanted to do something nice for the Schleys in return, so she invited their family to lunch at the local soda fountain, a classic old-time lunch counter in the local pharmacy. Come the big day, we were clearly supposed to be on our best behavior, with our mothers hovering over us being extremely nice to each other and closely monitoring our politeness. This created a certain tension—which provoked Jim's subversive streak. So, mid-meal, he took a mouth full of orange drink, pointed his straw at me, and fired. He and I both thought this was hilarious, our mothers were suitably mortified, and we've been fast friends ever since. The decades are adding up now.

Articles about Jim have appeared in The New York Times and NEWSWEEK, and Garrison Keillor has read Jim's poems on the Prairie Home Companion and included one in his popular compilation Good Poems. As When, In Season is a generous, complicated, lovely little book.

Cue theme music: the Beatles' "Paperback Writer." Dear old friend and Dartmouth roommate Ed Gaffney recently published his fourth legal thriller, a bonafide pulp fiction blockbuster called Enemy Combatant. He says that of his four books, this is by far his favorite. Now, I'm sure Ed has told me before that he was writing a book, but, heck, I'm writing a book—everybody "writes books." I didn't know he meant actual neat, nifty, published blocks of paper with shiny covers and blurbs and everything, for sale in stores! I'm impressed.

And here's the funny part—he's not even the writer in his family. I'm not quite sure of the official name of the genre Ed's wife Suze writes in—"romantic thriller" sounds about right—but she's written so many that Amazon maintains a dedicated Suzanne Brockmann store.

Oh, and speaking of blurbs, look who they're letting write blurbs these days:

Amadou Diallo's most recent book The 50 Greatest Photo Opportunities in New York City is an interesting idea—a guidebook specifically for photographers. There's so much to see in New York, why not organize your sightseeing with photo ops in mind? Makes perfect sense to me. But then, it would.

While I'm at this, I can't resist a shout-out to my youthful, glamorous and small friend Hil—she knows who she is—who makes a handsome living in L.A. ghostwriting "autobiographies" for Hollywood megastars. I'd mention her name, but she's enjoined by contract to never whisper a word about her involvement in her books, and I don't want to risk getting her in trouble. I've known actual CIA agents who weren't so secretive!

Finally, it turns out that my next door neighbor here in Waukesha, Todd Sattersten, is as nuts about books as I am—but he loves books of a very different stripe. Just the other day, February 5th to be exact, he and co-writer Jack Covert brought out their book The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You. Todd's wife Amy Buckley, an amateur photographer who recently asked my help in putting together a knock-down photo studio in their house (I keep meaning to write a post about that) tells me that this is no flash-in-the-pan interest of Todd's—he's been eating, sleeping, and breathing business books for ten years (Jack for 25), has a huge collection of them, and really knows his way around the genre.

I've asked Todd if he'd write a short piece for TOP about business books that would be specifically useful to photographers, and he said he would. It might be a week or three, but you can look forward to that.

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Floating around aimlessly on Amazon yesterday looking at photobooks, I was surprised to find that Larry Burrows: Vietnam is still in print. I thought it became unavailable long ago. Larry Burrows—an Englishman—was, as you probably know, perhaps pre-eminent among the photographers who died covering the war in Viet Nam (pre-eminent as a photographer, I mean; they are all equals in their sacrifice).

Longtime readers will also remember that a photograph of Burrows' Leica by Ronen Zilberman is perhaps the most poignant picture ever made of a camera. (It's probably one of the cameras he's wearing below, in fact.)

The book I have is Larry Burrows: Compassionate Photographer, which really is long out of print. The picture below, reproduced alone on a page approximately the size you see it here, is the last picture in that one.

Larry Burrows, Feb. 7, 1971

Mike

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Featured Comment by David: "Mike, I have the book—Vietnam—I bought it new several years ago. It's a big book so it does the pictures justice. And I can remember as clear as day the feeling of almost disbelief when I first looked at the photographs—that someone could compose, expose and make photographs of that quality in those rapid-moving conditions. The book is in storage back in J., so I can't check it and I don't recall the name of the sequence that covered the death of the man in the helicopter gunship. [The man is Crew Chief James Farley—the story is called "Yankee Papa 13." —MJ] I mention that because I think a lot of people think of that sequence when they think of Larry Burrows' pictures. But in fact it is the colour photographs that grabbed me the most. They seemed to have been taken by someone who had all the time in the world to get all the elements right, and who had a master's eye for knowing what the scene would translate to in two dimensions. Quite apart from his skill as a photographer I have a soft spot for him—as I suspect many do. For what it is worth, he and Werner Bischof are the two photographers who have enriched my life with their photographs."

Featured Comment by Mike Hess: "When I started out assisting a wedding photographer, it was for the experience (i.e., no pay). However, he did give me a great Christmas gift which was this book. It was the first real photography book (other than how-to) that I ever owned. It contains some of the most hauntingly beautiful images. The romanticized ideal of the war photographer is probably Burrows' fault. If it wasn't for marriage and common sense, I honestly probably would have tried to become one."

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

 Light: Science & Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, 3rd Edition

By Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, and Paul Fuqua
Paperback: 320 pages
Focal Press (March 21, 2007)
9.7 x 7.4 inches
List price $39.95

$29.75 from Amazon U.S.

£21.84 from Amazon U.K.

I suspect that I'm like most devoted amateurs, in that I have almost exclusively photographed using available light, occasionally resorting to on-camera flash for holiday parties and other indoor events. Not surprisingly, my indoor people-pictures universally sucked: harsh, mug-shot lighting with stark shadows and inky black backgrounds. I browsed through a few books on lighting and flash photography, but found them mostly useless: lots of vague generalizations and spiffy portrait examples, yet I still was mystified as to how flash and studio lighting really worked. It all seemed like black magic.

Light: Science & Magic decodes the mystery. It's easy to overlook on the shelf at your local B&N or Borders; the cover illustration is a little odd, and it lacks the splashy large photos other lighting books are filled with. But it's a brilliantly logical and straightforward introduction to studio/portrait lighting for beginners, standing head and shoulders above anything else I've seen.

The introductory chapter outlines lighting as the "language of photography," and identifies three basic principles that organize everything else. These are: the critical rôle of the apparent size of your light source, the three types of surface reflection that determine the appearance of your subject, and the concept of the "family of angles" that control direct reflections. The remainder of the book fleshes out and organizes these principles into a kind of mental "toolkit" for lighting anything. The authors emphasize that photographic styles and fads come and go but the tools remain constant. They also advise the reader to learn and grow with the gear you already have, before rushing out to buy more toys.

The second chapter present a commendably clear description of the physical nature and behavior of light, and its interactions with objects, as it pertains to photography. You'd think this would be obvious stuff, but the clarity and logical rigor of the discussion were very...er, enlightening. Subsequent chapters delve into the details of the three types of reflection (diffuse, direct, glare) and provide the most comprehensible description of polarization I have ever seen. The discussion is accompanied by simple, lucid diagrams that
illustrate the concepts nicely. Chapter 4 discusses surface appearances, how the interaction of light source with the reflective characteristic of an object determines its appearance to the eye or camera. The discussion neatly segues into a clearly diagrammed analysis of lighting a partly reflective object optimally.

This is much easier reading than one would think; the concepts and their application flow so logically and are so clearly explained that it's entertaining rather than a dry slog. Using lighting and management of reflections to provide clues to the three dimensional shape of a subject seems simple by the time you get there. Chapters on lighting metal and glass might seem pointless if you plan on taking portraits of people, but the lessons they teach about managing direct reflections are directly relevant to avoiding nasty eyeglass reflections. Chapter 8 finally delves into portrait lighting, with the usual review of key light/fill light/rim or hair light/background light planted firmly on the principles previously explained.

The last chapter, "Traveling Light," finally gets into details about the actual gadgets you might want to use, like umbrellas, strobes and soft boxes. It's a pleasure to read something that stresses the principles at work, and the concept of designing the lighting of a photograph, rather than the latest expensive strobe.

I can honestly say that this book has dramatically improved the quality of my own portrait photographs (mostly of long-suffering immediate family members). I don't think there are any better print sources out there for someone who wants to get a handle on lighting.

Geoff

As a postscript—I can also enthusiastically recommend a website for those interested in learning more about off-camera flash and portable strobe lighting; that would be David Hobby's wonderful Strobist, which includes extensive tutorials and lots of info on cheap DIY options for professional-quality lighting results. Great stuff. —GW

Mike adds: I don't want to step on Geoff's toes—he decides what he wants to review, and of course what he wants to say—but Light: Science and Magic also happens to be the basic lighting text I've been recommending for years. It's included in the chapter called "Technical Books" in my book about cameras and lenses, Lenses and the Light-Tight Box.

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Featured Comment by Mike Peters: "Back in the old days of K64 and Fuji 100 color transparency film, I used to shoot corporate annual reports and magazine editorial work. I used strobes extensively, carrying anywhere from 50 to 300 pounds of packs, heads, stands, light modifiers, knicknacks and gewgaws to be able to make pretty light anywhere under any circumstances. I even had a generator so I could have flowing electrons to power up where no power existed.

"Being able to light stuff was what separated the pros from everyone else; it was what kept you in business. Now, with digital I can shoot in almost total darkness without ever using a flash and get amazing results. Thank goodness I don't have to schlep hundreds of pounds of lighting gear anymore. But then, neither does anyone else. We can all shoot away at 6400 and fast lenses. Pphotography is pretty democratic now.

"However, knowing lighting can have an advantageous effect on your ability to shoot in natural light. You know what you can get just by looking at light. Even if you can't control the light, you can sometimes control the subject or where you stand to make things better.

 "Another good book is Matters of Light & Depth by Ross Lowell—you know, the Tota-light guy. He makes understanding light very easy, diagrams and all. I don't know if it's in print anymore [yup —Ed.], but It's worth getting.

"The best thing though is to look at images, paintings and movies that have what you consider to be good light. If you learn how to look, you can infer quite a bit about how the lighting was done, and get a grip on the qualities of the light, such as is if soft or hard, direction, height, and how it brings out or suppresses texture.

"Light creates mood and that mood plays with your emotions. Done right, good light will make you feel something about the image that sometimes even the subject matter will have a hard time doing."

The Printed Picture by Richard Benson (MoMA, October 2008)

My brother Charlie likes to talk about "expert theory." The theory is pretty sensible: when you really want to know what's what about any subject, find someone to listen to who really knows what he or she is talking about.

Richard Benson knows printing inside and out. He's been the Dean of the Yale School of Art and he's a winner of the MacArthur "genius grant," but he's also been a working printer, to go-to guy for repro expertise for dozens of fine photography book projects, limited editions, reproductions, and so forth. He's an academic, but he's got ink on his hands.

The Printed Picture is an exhibition catalog from a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that is up now and will remain on view until June 1, 2009. Here's our review, written by Geoff Wittig, and here's Jeff Ladd's review from 5B4.

If TOP can be said to have a mission—well, beyond being diverting—it's to connect current practitioners to photography's culture—its history, past accomplishments, major figures, and intellectual traditions. The building of a personal library, or at least a small collection of favorite books, is one way to go about this. For such a purpose, The Printed Picture hits on all cylinders: it's readable, greatly informative, and chock full of superb (and enjoyable) illustrations (and not the ones everybody else uses or that you've seen twenty times before, for which I'm grateful). It will take its place at the core of my own book collection (and I'm going to be thinking about how I can get myself to New York before June). I can't imagine it being out of place on the shelves of anyone who really cares about looking at pictures. I hope it stays in print for a long time, but be sure you get it while you can. Highly recommended.

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Mike

Illustration: Lee Friedlander, Richard Benson, Newport, Rhode Island, 1984

The Printed Picture:

$37.80 From Amazon U.S.
£22.50 From Amazon U.K.
CDN$45.96 From Amazon Canada

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Featured Comment by Tony McLean: "An excellent book that is superbly illustrated. Mr Benson's research into the various printing processes is very thorough. However, he certainly won't have won any friends amongst the gum-bichromate community (who tend to be very protective of their process). Mr Benson describes it as a 'poor process' twice in the same paragraph (page 136). Mr. Benson also states that the platinotype process was invented in 1877 by William Willis. I understand that William Willis's first patent of his process was granted in 1873, with improved patents granted in 1878, 1880 and 1887. Overall, this is an excellent book and a must for your book-shelf. Probably the best value for money of any book I've bought this year."

I can only count books that TOP readers order through Amazon, but by that accounting, readers purchased 360 copies of the Steidl reprint of Robert Frank's The Americans, based on our review, and 239 copies of Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (the latter count includes Q4 2007) based on this review. Those were "our" best sellers this past year. I think those two were the only books that sold more than 200 copies, although numerous books sold between 100 and 200. Probably the most surprising were that 119 people bought 2008's second printing of Saul Leiter's Early Color (a bit of an acquired taste for some people, I should think, although we did talk it up quite a lot. The first printing was January, 2006).

I think the most popular technical books were Minimalist Lighting by Kirk Tuck and The Moment It Clicks by Joe McNally, each of which sold a handful less than 100 copies to TOP readers.

The big surprise, book-sales-wise, was of course Fred Herzog's fine Vancouver Photographs, a book of color pictures taken mostly in Western Canada in the 1950s and 1960s that had remained unknown until relatively recently. Following our review, the book jumped from #2,200 or so to #1 on Amazon Canada overnight. TOP readers snapped up 143 copies of that one before it unfortunately sold out within just a few days; many people were left with their orders unfilled. Fortunately you can still see many of Fred's photographs at the Equinox Gallery website.

Fred Herzog, Winner Café, Portland

And don't forget—no matter where you live, you could do a similar project in your own town or neighborhood. Someday, everything that is ordinary and unremarkable to you will be distinctive of this time period, and many of your pictures of things we take for granted today will be of things or people that have changed or gone. No one will ever take a photograph in 2008 again, for instance—think of that.

________________________

Mike

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Eric Meola contacted me yesterday to say he'd seen our Photo Book of the Year nominations and to alert me to his own latest book, India: In Word and Image. I haven't seen it—I'm guessing because my bookstore has it hidden in the "Travel" section or something like that. So I went to his website to check out some of the India pictures.

A spread from India

When I replied to him I added a P.S. as a spontaneous afterthought: "You must be a happy guy—you seem to have developed a strong style and you seem to really love it. There's nothing better than that." Later I fretted that that might have come across as condescending (he didn't take it that way), but I meant it 100% sincerely: you can see it in the pictures, and then there it is, writ bold in 28 words: "Most photographs are in color, but color has, for me, become its own subject, so that my images are simply abstract studies of the interplay of color itself." Just what the pictures project.

Finding your own distinctive concerns in photography—a rich enough vein where you're happy enough to stay—is hard, and rare. His style might not be my own exact cup of tea (call me hidebound, but my allegiances with this subject matter remain stuck on the late Raghubir Singh), but the important thing is that it's his and he's really good at it. And from here, it's refreshing to see such clarity of mission, expressed equally well visually and verbally. I envy that, sometimes. And I'm not even the envious sort.

Even if one of Eric's best-known shots is actually in black-and-white!

_____________________

Mike

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Featured Comment by Bruce Appelbaum: "Eric did a workshop one night earlier this year at Adorama. I already had a copy of his previous book (Last Places on Earth), love it, so I signed up. Loved him and what he had to say about photography and his way of doing it. When I saw that India was coming out, I pre-ordered it from Amazon sight-unseen. What a great book!

"For those of you in the NYC area, Adorama runs a series of workshops weeknights and Sundays. The best of them are those sponsored by Canon and Nikon, featuring great photographers showing their work, discussing their style, and giving away their secrets. And even better—these 2.5–3 hour workshops cost $25, which is refunded in the form of a $25 gift certificate. I've attended the $25 special workshops given by Meola, Joe McNally, and Seth Resnick in the last year, and have signed up for a few more for 2009. Even better: these are not shill sessions for Canon and Nikon, they are great learning experiences."

The Life of a Photograph, Sam Abell (National Geographic Focal Point, October) (U.K. link)

The Printed Picture, Richard Benson (Museum of Modern Art, November) (U.K. link)

The Creative Digital Darkroom, Katrin Eismann and Seán Duggan (O'Reilly, January) (U.K. link)

The Americans, Robert Frank (reissue) (Steidl, May) (U.K. link)

101 Billionaires, Rob Hornstra (self-published by the photographer, no month of publication given)

Athlete, Walter Iooss (Sports Illustrated, May) (U.K. link)

Asakusa Portraits, Hiroh Kikai (Steidl, May) (U.K. link) (hat tip to Conscientious)

Invasion 68: Prague, Josef Koudelka (Aperture, August) (U.K. link) (hat tip to 5B4)

Annie Leibovitz at Work (Random House, November) (U.K. link)

Helen Levitt, (powerHouse, March) (U.K. link)

Conversations with the Mob, Megan Lewis (University of Western Australia Press, 2008, no month given)

The Moment It Clicks, Joe McNally (New Riders Press, February) (U.K. link)

The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy, (W.W. Norton and Co., November) (U.K. link)

America, Zoe Strauss (AMMO, November) (U.K. link)

The World From My Front Porch, Larry Towell (Chris Boot, April) (U.K. link)

Minimalist Lighting, Kirk Tuck (Amherst Media, May) (U.K. link)

Front Street, Kotzebue, Dennis Witmer (Far to the North Press, October) (U.K. link)

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Notes: This year I've decided to be strict and limit the list to books actually published in 2008. This eliminates some books we featured and discussed in the past year such as Saul Leiter's Early Color. I think next year I'll loosen the criteria somewhat, to include slightly earlier publishing dates and books we either reviewed or featured on TOP within the year in question. But not this time. (But look for a "2007 Books We Missed" post in the next month or two. Or three.) If you're wondering about books that appear on everybody else's list but not on ours (such as Beaufort West): I haven't seen 'em, and I haven't seen enough of the work to be willing to wing a nomination (as I did above with Conversations with the Mob, for instance, brought to our attention by Paul Amyes). Because TOP might be thought of as a "educational" site rather than a purely art site, I have included selected technical books. I have also limited the list to books that cost $100 or less. Links are to the U.S. Amazon, with U.K. links in parentheses, or to the best source. Finally, I would have nominated The Oxford Project (published September 2008) but it appears to be already out of print.

________________________

Mike

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Featured Comment by Katrina Fried, Associate Publisher, Welcome Books: "Hi Mike, I'm the publisher of The Oxford Project and I just wanted to let you know that the book is definitely still in print and easily available through Amazon, bn.com, most independent booksellers, or directly from us through our online store. I wonder where you saw or heard that it was out of print? Thank you sincerely for all the kind words you've posted about the book—it's voices like yours that have made it possible for The Oxford Project to find such a wide and embracing audience.

Mike replies: Thanks Katrina. I think that was my mistake—without realizing it, I must have been looking at Amazon U.K. where it is not listed as being available. Sorry!

More signs of the Apocalypse: I tend to hate Annie Leibovitz like the worm hates the plow. Some of her stuff is just so horridly schlocky; and I maintain a standardized stance of genial contempt for celebrity photography; and the rest is sour grapes, all sour grapes.

But on the other hand, I'm not one to hold back credit where credit is due, so I have to admit that Annie Leibovitz at Work is a pretty fine little book. Ms. L. turns out to be thoughtful and articulate, so the copious text makes for good reading: it's undeniably fascinating to read about such high-profile shoots. And lots of the good, early* work is here, and even some of the ewww pictures look pretty good printed small. I think it would be the rare photography buff (of which I am assuredly one) who would not either learn something from this, or enjoy it, or (like I did) do both.

In short—hold yourself—I bought this. I paid Own Money for it. Seriously.

So now if you encounter a skeleton on horseback brandishing a sickle, you can say, "Well I'll be darned, there goes another one."

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Andrew Bush, Woman caught in traffic while heading southwest on U.S. Route 101 near the Topanga Canyon Boulevard exit, Woodland Hills, California, at 5:38 in the summer of 1989 [deep breath]

Parts and sums: Sometimes one can have a good idea, take good, fashionable pictures around that idea, put all the good fashionable pictures together in a nicely-made and well-designed book, and—it still won't amount to much. That, unfortunately, is my take on Andrew Bush's Drive, which is getting a lot of attention and no doubt causing excitement in galleries with a need for work that is safely edgy. To my eye, the pictures not only don't add up to much, they actually diminish each other, and this (popular) book is one that for me is less than the sum of its parts.

Then there are times when the opposite happens. If you told me somebody had put out a whole book consisting of pictures of sky and sea taken on one single stretch of beach, my involuntary snort would probably be audible from a little too far away. Yet Debra Bloomfield pulls off a sort of minimalism-with-variations sonata with Still, a sleeper of these holidays. (Nobody's talking about this one, except me.) It's not like any one of these pictures takes the top of your head off, but one after another the oceanscapes (some of which are nearly entirely sky) start to seem like figurative Turners, trompe l'oeil Rothkos; you feel alone looking at them, as the photographer must have been alone on the beach. The colors seem as endless as the sky, and the pictures take on a cumulative power that's peace-inducing while not being sleep-inducing. (Don't look at online thumbnails; they don't convey. Even the JPEG of the book cover, below, is not nearly as nice as the book cover actually looks.) A lovely, quiet book you might otherwise miss—and this week's "Recommended by M.J."

______________________

Mike

*cf. record-store-clerk opinions about Woody Allen, the Rolling Stones, etc., etc.

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Be a booster and boost
Amazon U.S. link
Amazon U.K. link
Amazon Germany link
Amazon Canada link
B&H Photo link
Adorama Camera link

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "A few years ago Robert Weingarten published a superficially similar book called 6:30 am, comprised entirely of early morning photos of the ocean taken from his home on the shore. Like Bloomfield, he used a Hasselblad exclusively. He had an associated exhibition at George Eastman House; very large inkjet prints, all square, consistently orange/red color palette. Yet the book and exhibition seemed less than the sum of their parts; more repetitive than consistent. It was hard to escape the impression that Weingarten was saying, 'don't you wish you lived here too?' Bloomfield's Still: Oceanscapes has a lot more range. She shows the ocean demonstrating all sorts of personalities, most of them beautiful. Kind of like Michael Kenna in color, in a good way."

Featured Comment by Randy Cole: "Mike, If you've lived in LA and recognize the woman in the pink Corvette, you will probably appreciate Drive. If not, you probably won't. A book of photos of random people driving? Sounded like stupid hype to me, and then I started looking at the photos. Now I think I'll buy the book. A book of more or less random photos of beach and sky? Now that one doesn't do much for me. No offense, but we're out of synch on these. Keep up the good work anyway! (Note: The woman in the pink 'Vette is Angelyne. Haven't heard of Angelyne? Just Google her name. Only in LA....)"

The Printed Picture
by Richard Benson
MoMA, 2008
Hardcover, 338 pages
10.9 x 8.2 x 1.2 inches

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

$37.80 From Amazon U.S.
£19.50 From Amazon U.K.
CDN$47.22 From Amazon Canada

Like many photographers these days, I have essentially no darkroom experience. I started out shooting Kodachrome 64. Those little yellow boxes of gem-like slides appeared a week or two after being dropped off for processing, and if you told me they were developed and mounted by elves, I couldn't contradict you. The whole process seemed like magic. I was consistently disappointed by prints from my slides, however, even from "custom" labs. I started scanning and digitally printing them myself more than ten years ago—about a century in digital years. I started reading about all photographic media, from Daguerreotypes to Cibachromes, just to comprehend what was pictorially possible. I compiled a motley assortment of printing guides, books on "alternative processes," treatises on halftones and photogravure, all sorts of stuff. Each taught me a little more, yet never enough.

What I really needed was this book. Benson is a bit of a polymath, former Dean of the Yale School of Art and an expert in photographic reproduction in book form. His resumé includes the monumental four volume The Work of Atget and many of Lee Friedlander's books. The Printed Picture is an effortlessly erudite and witty survey of the entire history of pictorial printing processes, from 15th century woodcuts to the latest digital methods. Benson's organizing principle: the physical and æsthetic characteristics of a given printing method constrain and modify the meaning of the image reproduced by it. In roughly chronological order, he concisely summarizes each printing method, illustrated with reproduced examples. Most are pedestrian images chosen to illustrate the process more than the content, though some are astonishing feats of craftsmanship.

Benson's book proceeds from initial efforts at relief printing from woodcuts or metal type, where ink is applied to raised surfaces, through intaglio methods where the ink is held in engraved channels, and planographic methods like lithography where the ink is laid on a flat surface and transferred to paper. Benson describes the principles and mechanics of each printing form in enough detail to understand its relation to subsequent methods. As a result, the evolution of modern four-color offset lithographic book printing from drawing on stone with a crayon actually begins to make sense.

The author's account of the development of silver-based photography is equally clear. In just a few concise, beautifully written pages, he explains the fundamental principles of silver-halide based image capture, latent images, development and fixing, and the difference between developing-out and printing-out papers. Each early process, from Daguerreotype to albumen prints to non-silver methods (carbon, cyanotype, platinum/palladium etc.) receives the same lucid attention. I repeatedly found myself thinking, so that's how it works—and why various prints look the way they do.

From there Benson moves on to photography in ink, the rather complex story of how the silver-halide photographic image came to be reproduced in print by non-photochemical means. He identifies the primary problem: emulating the continuously varying tone of a photograph with discontinuous, discrete dots of ink. Reading Benson's admirably clear description, I was for the first time able to comprehend the basic nature of halftone reproduction, and why offset printing (rather than direct plate-to-paper) was such a breakthrough. Ever wonder exactly how a Woodburytype was made? A rotogravure? Or a collotype? This is your book. I don't think you'll find a clearer explanation of the details of duotone black and white printing or of standard offset book and magazine printing anywhere.

Benson concludes with a relatively brief discussion of digital printing, from its crudest origins to the latest inkjets. And he places the current inkjet dichotomy—matte prints on cotton rag paper versus glossy/luster prints—firmly in the context of printing history. It's analogous to the difference between a platinum print on matte paper versus a gelatin silver print, or a photogravure on soft paper versus a collotype on clay-coated stock. The æsthetic distinctions are simply another tool for us to use. Finally, Benson expresses a healthy skepticism toward "scientific" color management, noting that how the print actually looks to the educated eye always trumps any numerical measurement. Getting caught up in the minutiæ of the craft can murder the art.

This book is so deftly written that it's easy to plow through it over a weekend. It's just as useful as a resource on the shelf. Great stuff.

Those interested in more online can read this fascinating 1997 interview of Benson by John Paul Caponigro.

____________________

Geoff

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Featured Comment by ycl: "For those in (or about to visit) New York, a visit to the accompanying MoMA exhibition, also entitled 'The Printed Picture' and curated by Benson, is well worth a look. Although I'll probably buy the book, there's nothing like actually eyeballing the various examples of printed media in person to see the differences and similarities. And for TOP readers, particularly illuminating is the final gallery, in which Benson displays various examples of inkjet-generated prints next to their gelatin-silver (and other) equivalents—comparisons that demonstrate, without any doubt, that modern inkjet prints (created by desktop pigment-ink printers) are at least as good (at least in image quality) as prints using traditional methods.

"Also, a showing of Richard Benson's own photographs at Pace MacGill on West 57th Street just concluded a couple of weeks ago. The show touted in particular the process by which Benson produced these prints—called 'multiple impression pigment-inkjet prints,' which are generated by an inkjet printer that Benson configured to print a single image in successive stages.

"Apparently, each final print was the product of being run through a printer nine or 10 times. (I'm not exactly sure whether it was one color at a time, or some other process). The resulting images were indeed, as the press release said, 'deeply saturated and vivid.' "

Featured Comment by kman: "After reading this book review (without actually reading the book)—it sounds just like the book that many people who deal with the printing industry should read. As a commercial printer myself I can vouch for all of the color issues that photographers and designers have with color. A good explanation of how things are actually produced on an offset press and other forms of printing is always good for those who are involved in these activities/environments. It always amazes me to speak with a photographer and find out they do not know what a half-tone is, and then to watch their face light up as I give them my loupe and tell them to look at the 'little' cmyk dots. As Mastercard would say, 'priceless.' "

Featured Comment by Dan: "I've just seen the exhibition at MOMA and it is fantastic. I took the better part of an afternoon to follow it closely, and it was a great experience. I wanted to buy the book, which was on sale next to the exhibition, but the price was US$60?!? I'll definitely order it from Amazon at $37 though...."

Lost Balls, Charles Lindsay. Charles Lindsay is a serious photographer of long standing with many fine projects to his credit. Here he's created luminous, masterful and humorous photographs out of situations that most golfers will sympathize with. Ever seen the famous picture of the golfers being chased off the green by an angry bear? It's his, and it's here. Photographers could almost study these pictures as an object lesson in how to compose. The perfect gift for any friend who's both photography enthusiast and golfer.

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The Call of Trains, Jim Shaughnessy. A book to treasure for anyone you love who likes either Americana or trains. A life's work in stunning, dramatic, deep-toned black-and-white, guaranteed to contain pictures you'll come back to visit again and again. Many of the pictures are from the '50s and '60s, and have a social-documentary and nostalgic aspect aside from their pictorial charm. Not just for the train buff on your list, but definitely for the train buff on your list.

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The Antarctic: From the Circle to the Pole, Stuart Klipper. Talk about luminous landscapes! A labor of love, obsession, and determination, this unique book is the summation of six trips Stuart Klipper made to the Antarctic over a period of twenty years. For all their impressiveness in the original, panoramic photographs can be hard to handle online and in books; this book, which is large but not huge and opens from the top, strikes me as a particularly elegant and suitable treatment of the format. The many pictures have a surprising variety and depth. Perhaps predictably, I like best the ones that center on the human presence in Antarctica, but lovers of pure (and dramatic, and very beautiful, and—yes—luminous) landscapes are very well served too. If there's a better book on the continent, I'm not aware of it.

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Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign, Scout Tufankjian. It was a reader, in the comments, who turned me on to the work of Brooklyn, N.Y. photographer Scout Tufankjian, whose immediate, intimate, and thorough coverage of the epic Obama campaign makes perfect fodder for a book-length photojournalistic project. Many of the pictures, which really catch the energy of this campaign, can be seen on her website. An impressive example of a devoted (and talented) photographer capturing history as it happens.

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The Daily Coyote, Shreve Stockton. Everybody has an animal lover or two on their gift lists, and this is truly a book that's good to give. Not so much a book of photography as a book about life and love that happens to have photographs (although you'll not be disappointed with those), Shreve Stockton's tale of raising an orphan coyote pup in her tiny Wyoming cabin (she was making her way from San Francisco to New York City when she found her adopted home) will move and delight anyone who has ever lived with or loved an animal. I don't mean to be crass, but this one's guaranteed to get you points and plaudits from your giftees. Seriously. I've bought two to give—so far.

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What the World Eats, Peter Menzel. Photography as sociology. This is a simple idea—pictures showing families from all over the world with one week's worth of the food they typically eat—but it's deeply fascinating, especially for people who are interested in food. The current title is a repackaging and abridgment of last year's Hungry Planet, which is still available and which I would actually prefer (also available in paperback). This is a coffee table book that really does belong on a coffee table—it will interest the most casual browsers but reward careful inspection too.

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Equus, Tim Flach. I honestly hardly know what to make of Equus. Horses as top models? Equine-based art? A photo-technical tour-de-force, you'll see every imaginative treatment you can think of here—horses as high fashion, abstracts avec le cheval, hyper-intimate details (including horse fetuses), horses from every angle (including directly underneath), individual specimens that can only be described as gorgeous, fantasy landscapes with equine accents—no car, no human supermodel, no haute couture has ever been treated with more sumptuous lighting, more spare-no-expense technique, more excessive stylishness. Appropriate for mere horses? You kinda have to say, who cares?

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Seen Behind the Scene, Mary Ellen Mark. For forty years, still photography behind the scenes of movie sets has been one of the ways that renowned documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark has paid the bills. In this surprisingly fascinating collection of the best of all that work, Ms. Mark and her editors have created a book that at once caters to celebrity culture and also shows its bones. It's at the same time an important photography book and a book that will find an audience among people who don't know or care the first thing about photography or photographers.

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Instamatic Karma, May Pang. Both words in the title date the book, and the Beatles fan on your gift list might find it hard to believe that there are people pushing thirty who weren't alive when Lennon was murdered. Time does get behind us, doesn't it? This book of personal snapshots of an undisputed legend of music have a quality that is casual, elegiac, and real. This won't be mistaken for high art, but it's got the same sort of appeal of some of the many books of snapshots that have come out recently. And it seems curiously transparent to the role of photography in its subjects' lives.

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Hot Chicks with Douchebags, Jay Louis. Every list of gift suggestions needs one gag title, right? I don't know if this will do, but I thought I'd try. Admit it, though—no matter how hip you think you are, if you count your decades on more fingers than you need to make a peace sign, you have no idea what to get for older teenagers and early twentysomethings, do you? This book's a bastard in many ways—it's derived from a website, its photos are scavenged, and if you're not in the target audience, its "humor" is pretty sure to grate. But lots of them whippersnappers like the website, and just maybe this will get a laugh from someone on your list you're seldom privileged to hear a chuckle from. Worth a try?

Good luck.

_____________________

Mike

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By John Camp

My wife died a year and a half ago, of metastasized breast cancer. There was deep and continuing grief—I’m still sort of a sad guy—but there were also daily, practical things that had to be done after her death.

She was an immunologist, with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, while I was a writer (we both had a lifelong fascination with nature, which is where our interests crossed.) She had a substantial working office in our home, while I worked out of a condo in downtown St. Paul.

Recently, I’ve been trying to consolidate my life—to get out of the condo, which I no longer need, because Susan’s office is there as a work space, right downstairs from my bedroom.

Which is where we get to the books.

Consolidations
Between us, we had literally thousands of books—well, a couple or three thousand, anyway. I never really counted. There were probably a thousand in my downtown office, and another couple of thousand in the house. Many of hers, the technical books, I had no use for: I could literally not understand a single page in them, except perhaps the author acknowledgments. It seemed foolish to keep them as memorabilia, when others might actually make some good use of them. So they went first: her colleagues took some, and others went to Goodwill.

Our joint books, mostly on such things as nature and gardening, I kept.

My books, on writing and on the arts—almost all on painting and photography—I’ve been trying to consolidate in my house. In doing that, I encountered a conceptual puzzle that I’ve run into before, in other library consolidations (there were several in our lives).

I have about 1,200 books on painting, and about 500 on photography. I tried to count them for this article, but kept losing track of where I was, for reasons I’ll mention below.

The art and photography books fell into two categories: "about," and "how-to." The how-to books went up to a small painting studio I have in an attic, and that was that. (Although I haven’t finished sorting them, so it may not be all that simple.)

The "about" books included guides, encyclopedias, general histories, period histories, style histories (Baroque, Mannerism, etc.), museum guide books (selections of works in a particular museum), art by nation (Russia!) and even by city (Santa Fe), theory, biographies and autobiographies, monographs, and a bewildering assortment of cross-over books: Monet and Modernism  (file under "Monet" or "Modernism"?); Do you put the History of American Art with general histories, or at the beginning of a section on American art? What do I do with a photo book called Sex, which has aluminum covers held together with a spiral spring and is mostly pictures by a photographer I’ve never heard of, of a naked Madonna (the pop star, not the Madonna.) I’m inclined to put it with another book called Madonna Nudes 1979, which was made by another photographer I’ve never heard of…but what would I call the category?

Size discrepancies
This was complicated by the problem of limited space: the biggest books are huge: James Nachtwey's Inferno is fifteen inches high. Avedon's In the American West is fourteen inches high.  On the other hand, Gregory Crewdson's Beneath the Roses is only twelve inches high, but is more than sixteen inches deep. It sticks out of the shelf like a photographic erection.

You see the problem? If you space your library shelves to accommodate all the books by height, enough are very tall that most of your space is wasted, because most of the books are normal-sized—that is, less than a foot high. Get rid of the tall books, and you could add an extra shelf to the wall.

The solution is to have an "over-sized book" shelf like they do in libraries, but then you wind up with most of those categories listed above, in two places—once in the regular sized books, and once in the over-sized.

Solutions
At the moment, I’ve categorized them this way: Painting on one side, photos on the other.

Then for both:

Dictionaries, encyclopedias, general histories, theory, biographies, national art, city art, museum handbooks, periods, themes; a special American section, because I have a lot of books on American painting and photography; and then monographs, alphabetized.

Part of this project—not yet completed—resembles a kind of archaeology. How did I get four books by Annie Leibovitz? I don’t even like Annie Leibovitz. Yet, there they are, and I don’t remember buying a single one of them, and on the shelves at my office they’d never stood side-by-side.

Then there are the catalogs.

In the early '90s, I went to Sothebys, the New York auction house, out of curiosity, and wound up subscribing to their catalogs on photography sales. I'd get a few every year, for several years, and dump them in a pile when I was done looking at them, only to excavate them again during this reorganization. I haven't really decided whether to keep them or not—they may be headed for recycling—but they do provide an interesting snapshot of what photography prices were like as little as fifteen years ago. In the auction for Saturday, April 23, 1994, the David Hockney photo collage "Canal and Road, Kyoto," no. 6 in an edition of 10 (this was an original work of art), was estimated at $6,000 to $9,000. A famous vintage Wynn Bullock photo, entitled "Child in the Forest," was estimated at $2,500–$3,500. A terrific Joseph Sudek vintage still life was estimated at $3,000 to $5,000. There were some high prices: a famous Alfred Stieglitz photo of Georgia O’Keeffe, clutching a robe about her, was estimated at $200,000–$300,000. That might have been the most expensive photo in the catalog. But if you were to try to buy it today, you could probably add at least another zero to those estimates….

Distractions
I've finished shuffling most of these books more-or-less into place, but I have to say, I’m not satisfied. I tried to count the books for this article, but kept failing, because I'd come across books that were obviously misplaced, at least, conceptually, and that would distract me from the running count.

What do I do with The Artist and the Camera, Degas to Picasso, which is a book about how painters use photography? What about The Downtown Book, a photo book on the New York art scene in the '90s? Painting or photography?

As I sit here looking down the shelves, these questions pop up like mushrooms.

Not that it’s unpleasant, at all. Reorganizing a library actually gives you a lot of time to think, and interesting things to think about.

Now, if I could just figure out what to do with the thrice-cursed Madonna books.

_____________________

John

John Camp, 64, of St. Paul, Minnesota, is better known as John Sandford, a best-selling thriller writer—he's written twenty-seven novels, all of which appeared at one time or another on New York Times best-seller lists, several going to number one. He won a Pulitzer Prize in written journalism in 1986, and has a life-long interest in journalistic photography. He is the financial backer and sometime photographer for the Tel Rehov archaeological dig in Israel's Jordan Valley, under the sponsorship of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (Google it if you'd like to volunteer.) Last January he embedded with the 2-147th Assault Helicopter Battalion in Iraq, flying into Baghdad and with a medical evac unit, and in September covered the demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. He has two children and a grandson, with another grandchild on the way.

Featured Comment by Matt Mills: "I used to work in the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Library, at the College of Santa Fe, and we frequently encountered similar problems. There is already a brilliant system, thoroughly worked out: Library of Congress number system. There are a bunch of libraries out there that use it; College of Santa Fe and University of Arizona both have extensive photography and art collections and if they have an entry for a book in their catalog, you can find it online and use their classifications and subject headings. If you're really intrepid, you can catalog all of your books and label them (our system was actually to put labels on blank bookmarks that stuck out of the top of the books). There's free software for libraries, even. I'm too lazy to do it for my own books, but then I only have a few hundred. Maybe I should before they grow into the thousands...."

ADDENDUM:

The "art side" of John Camp's library.

Featured Comment by DSR: "John (and others): I feel your pain. I am up to about 1200 photo books (and about 1,000 others) and have built new bookshelves twice now to house them. The third bookshelf addition is not far in my future.

"When I was growing up, my beloved grandfather collected classical record albums and he owned several thousand. When he would take me record shopping, we would often bring something home only to find he already owned it! We laughed about that each time but I was always secretly dumbfounded how this could happen over and over. It was immaterial, since the record store was always happy to take back anything.  After all, my grandfather was their very best customer. Well, I have become my Grandfather and often purchase books I already own. As often as not, the books I purchase come from Amazon, Powell's, or somewhere else halfway or more across the country. Not so easy to return. So I have a 'special' shelf (soon to be shelves) for duplicates. They do make excellent gifts. And in some cases, inadvertently shrewd investments.

"But I digress....

"The practical solution to your 'erection' problem was already suggested by Jakub. They get piled up on their sides and make good bookends!

"And by the way, I think I have probably read each and every one of the 27 books you have authored. Who knew you collected photo books? Very cool to run into you here."

Sam Abell's fine, generous, and personal new book The Life of a Photograph has been available for a couple of weeks now. It's a book about process: he shows other frames taken "around" some of his favorite pictures; pairs of picture taken over time; sequences; even failures. Along the way he gives the reader a genuine glimpse inside his sensibility, and visual, not theoretical, indications of what it is that makes his pictures his. The effect is of a gentle, pleasant guided tour of what it's like behind one famous photographer's eyes.

There's not much text, and what there is is elliptical and personal. Much of the information here is visual as opposed to verbal, which could leave more literal, less visual readers feeling shortchanged. The Life of a Photograph requires contemplation. You'll have to purposely slow down the frantic and hasty intake of information that many of us are encouraged to indulge in by modern technological tools and the pace of life today; this book is more of a meditation. Taken on its own terms it has plenty of depth, but it's poetic, condensed, direct.

Ironically it's also very easy—superficial readers could get a lot out of it in one quick pass, too.

In any event it's certainly an enjoyable experience, and I think an insightful and rewarding one. I've been through it (slowly) three times now, and have enjoyed it more each time. It's this week's "recommended by M.J."

_____________________

Mike

P.S. There's a nice interview with Sam about the book on Doug Plummer's blog. (Thanks to Mike C. for the tip.)

Introduction: Many readers have asked me how to tell the difference between the first and second printings of Saul Leiter: Early Color. Others have asked if the first printing will be more valuable than the second. To help clarify these issues, I asked my old friend Andy Moursund if he would write a short piece about editions and printings. Andy was for many years the proprietor of Georgetown Bookshop, first in Georgetown, D.C. and later, for many years, located in Bethesda, Maryland. He is also a tremendously erudite photo book collector who owns a superb collection carefully put together over many years. Andy taught me a lot of what I know about books. —MJ

By Andy Moursund

A first edition, first printing is the first run of a book off the press. This, and this alone, is what collectors mean when they say "first edition." The operative words in "first edition, second printing" are "second printing," not "first edition."

When a second press run is made of the first edition, without any changes, it is either referred to as a "first edition, second printing," or simply as a "second printing." Both terms are often used, depending on the whims of the publisher, but the meaning—and what it means to a collector—is identical.

A "second edition" can mean one of two things. Usually it means that the text has been modified in any way:  revisions, additions, condensations, etc. This is the common understanding of the term. And the time that may have lapsed between the two editions is irrelevant.

But…sometimes it means that after a certain amount of time, the publisher (or sometimes a different publisher) decides to reprint the first edition without any changes at all. This is almost always labeled a "second edition," although it's really not the same thing. Here the reason for the label is simply to acknowledge the time lapse.

But often the dust jacket is completely different, so in that sense it is a true second edition.

There is usually a premium placed on "real" first editions, meaning "first edition, first printing." But when copies of the first several printings are equally scarce, sometimes the difference in price can almost disappear, especially when a dealer offering a second printing knows that "true" first editions aren't likely to come on the marketplace anytime soon.

One example of this from the photo world would be The Americans. The "true" first edition is the 1958 French edition, while the 1959 "first American edition" is strictly speaking not a first edition at all. But since both books are so scarce, there is little price distinction any more between the two. What price variation there is has far more to do with the condition of a particular copy (the binding on both versions is terrible) or with the pricing policy of a particular dealer, than anything else.

But of course under no circumstances would the 1969 Grossman version (which could be—and is—called the second American edition, since it adds text) be worth nearly as much as the Grove Press or French originals. Though by this time even the Grossman version runs from $350 all the way up to $2,500(!).

Signed and limited
Usually newer photo books don't have too much of a premium as first editions, unless they're deliberately printed in small print runs, the way some of the specialty publishers do. (Example: the book on lynching postcards, Without Sanctuary.) Or unless, of course, they're signed limited editions, in which case all bets are off, since, there, the secondary market price is purely a factor of supply and demand.

One thing worth mentioning about that last type of book is the way that the publishers have in recent years anticipated the future demand for the signed limited edition, and begun pricing them through the roof.  Looking at the difference between prices of trade editions and signed limited editions today, compared to what the difference was in the '60s and '70s, is like comparing CEO salaries to workers' salaries in the same two periods.

I remember when the second (Horizon, 1981) edition of A Way of Seeing was being sold in a 250 copy signed limited edition for a list price of only $45.  I should have snapped them all up at wholesale, but at the time I didn't have either a credit card or a checking account, and the opportunity passed me by. It now lists at $1,500 to $2,500. But I learned my lesson about Levitt, and bought multiple signed trade editions of all of her recent books at list price, just before she stopped signing. And that signed limited Horizon book, were it to be issued today in the print run of 250 that it was, would likely be priced a lot closer to $1,000 than to $45. Both the publishers and the photographer have long since wised up to the game.

The case at hand
As for how you'd tell the second printing in the case of Saul Leiter: Early Color, the only thing I can imagine (not having the two printings in front of me) would be that the indicated month of printing might be different, since the link at Steidl says that this second printing was in September 2008 [I can't find any indication of the month of printing, and my copy, which I believe is the second printing, says "First Edition 2006." —MJ]. Unless of course it actually states "second printing" either in the book or on the dust jacket flap; but that doesn't seem to be the case. So I'd look for the month in each of them, and compare.

But apart from that, if there's no visible difference, then I don't see how anyone would be able to tell the difference, and no, in that case I can't see how they'd differ in price on the resale market.

_____________________

Andy

I hafta say, I love this book. I love primers*, and as one reviewer put it, this book provides "a great breadth of information in modest depth." In other words, it's a primer.

It's called Legal Handbook for Photographers: The Rights and Liabilities of Making Images, and it's by Bert Krages. You should know that name. Bert is the guy who's responsible for the famous and widely used leaflet "The Photographer's Right." (The latter is free, and if you don't already have it, I recommend that you go download it now.)

Bert Krages' book is not the only legal guide for photographers: I've also recommended Photographer's Legal Guide by Carolyn E. Wright, who runs Photo Attorney, a great blog on legal topics of interest to photographers. And Bert's book isn't the place to go for lawyers and others who are deeply immersed in legal topics. Rather, it's the book to have for photographers whose grasp of rights and legal issues is sketchy at best and who need the basics set forth for them plainly and with a minimum of muss and fuss.

The book is straightforwardly aimed at practicing photographers. All of the chapters are good, but my favorites are Chapter 5, "Confrontations and Remedies," a subject on which the author is particularly good; and Chapter 8, "Formulating Your Ethics," because it's so commonsense and practical...and because it puts the responsibility for ethics so squarely where it belongs, on each one of us.

It's this week's "Recommended by M.J."

______________________

Mike

*The word, by the bye, is properly pronounced "primmer," not "prime-er."

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UPDATE #2: Eighty-nine of our readers were able to snag one of these before they were pulled last night, which is doin' good, I think. My orders were fulfilled, along with the orders of 50 of the aforementioned 89; presumably the rest will be shipped today.

The cheapest copy listed on Amazon today is $225. Don't despair, though; there are likely more batches of the second printing to come. I'll keep an eye out, but you do so, too, if you want one.

I'll try to let you know about cases like this in the future, although I don't expect that most photo books will be anywhere close to this volatile in their availability.

UPDATE: Unbelievably, as of 7 a.m. Central time Tuesday morning, the book is listed as sold out on Amazon.com already. (And I just wrote this post late Monday night.) Amazon U.S. might simply have sold out of its first shipment. I'll try to keep you apprised of changes, or you can keep checking through the link below, or you can look for copies from other sources. Barnes and Noble and Photo-Eye are two to check online.

Here's the U.K. link so you can check there. If it says "Available from these sellers," that's the link to other sellers and used copies; if the new one is available it will have a price in bold red numerals and say "In stock / Ships from and sold by Amazon.com."

When we wrote our recent series of "Great Photo Books You Can Buy New" posts, I promised you I'd alert you to any "strong buy" recommendations when they came along.

Because of shortfalls in our special effects budget, will you please just imagine red lights flashing and sirens going off, maybe confetti falling from the ceiling like someone's just won the grand prize on a game show?

The first edition of Steidl's Saul Leiter: Early Color sold out in a New York minute, and prices for used copies quickly soared: even now there's a "collectible" copy of the first printing linked at Amazon for $997.50! I'm happy to say that Steidl has just issued a second printing, and it showed up at Amazon U.S. tonight—I can tell you that because I've literally been checking for it morning, noon and night ever since I heard it was coming.

Leiter (he's still alive) was a mid-century painter who created a major body of color photography that was really only discovered and appreciated recently. His pictures are quick, fragmented, impressionistic, but coloristically very lovely. And very fashionable right now.

And the book is in the "jump on it" category. Steidl books can go out of print abruptly. The first edition of this book was highly prized. If you want it, you shouldn't hesitate. If you're not sure, buy it anyway and keep it in pristine condition, because its value will not go down. I'm going to be watching how fast this printing sells out; should be interesting to see.

____________________

Mike

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Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "I had a somewhat puzzled/negative reaction when I first viewed Saul Leiter's color work. In my case, my first exposure was seeing two original prints that my home museum was considering purchasing. But his work eventually sucked me in. To a great degree you have to first forget that these are photographs. Forget what you think you can do with a camera. Look at them as paintings. The shapes and the colors in the compositions are what drew me into the work. But the richness of tonality in the prints are what kept me coming back.

"Many, maybe most, camera owners lean towards literalism in their art tastes. They demand that photographs look like faithful, technically perfect transcriptions of what their eyes see. If your tastes lean this direction then this book will certainly not be to your liking. Saul Leiter's work (particularly in this book) uses the camera as an expressionist brush. (He actually was primarily a painter at a time in the 20th century when the art world was exploding with productive experimentation.) To that end he's using the very new, and very unpredictable, color film medium to 'paint' vignettes of the New York that he saw. Documentation and transcription were not his objective. He used lens focus in the same way a painter might change brushes or change stroke angle or pressure.

"So I suggest that if you're a person who, at this time of life, is fixated on sharp photos and doesn't care for 'modern art' you should probably just skip this book altogether. But, still, don't skip Saul Leiter altogether. Revisit his work. You may find yourself drawn into it, as I was. In fact I was so drawn in that it inspired me to undertake a somewhat kindred project myself."

Featured Comment by Sean: "'I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.' Saul Leiter."

George Silk, High Above Forbes Field, 1960, from LIFE: The Classic Collection

This is an unusual bookmaking idea, although it might not appeal to everyone. Interspersed through LIFE: The Classic Collection (U.K. link) are pages that have tipped-in versions of 25 of these undoubtedly classic pictures. The tipped-in (i.e., loose) reproductions are held in place by four slit "corners" cut into the pages and protected by a tissue interleaving sheet; behind each one, the same picture is reproduced again, so that if you remove the "suitable for framing" one, your book will still be viewable with nothing missing.

As advertised, the collection does contain many of the truly great and famous shots from the magazine's long and storied history, presented as art, with generous margins and fine reproduction quality—much like a well-restored classic movie or a remastered classic record. If you've been looking at photographs for a while, there aren't likely to be too many surprises here, but most of the great hits are present and accounted for, and it's nice to have them all in one place, burnished and gleaming.

A common fate of great literature from the past is that everybody's heard of it but few people have actually read it. (Anybody read The Anatomy of Melancholy or Gargantua and Pantagruel recently?) If the same is true of anything in photography, it's probably true of the pictures from Camera Work, Alfred Stieglitz's seminal and hugely influential journal of pictorialism.

Now you can own an extensive selection of the contents of Camera Work in this Taschen "brick," a small (less than 6x8") but very thick book (U.K. link). (It's this week's "Recommended by M.J.") The reproductions won't fool you into believing you're looking at originals, but they're really quite good considering that this is 552 pages and nearly three pounds of pictures! Considering the sheer number of excellent reproductions, this book is so cheap they might as well be giving it away—you could pass them out as party favors. (I'd like to go to a party like that, now that I've mentioned it.) The best collection ever offered at anywhere near this price, this is a good addition for a basic library of photo history.

A sample spread from Taschen's Camera Work

And if you're fascinated by pictorialism and don't know much about it, TruthBeauty [sic]: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845–1945, (Canadian link—not available in the U.K.), the catalog of an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, is an excellent place to start. The selection of illustrations isn't copious, but it does strike me as astutely judged and tastefully chosen. The pictures are generously sized and good to look at. Plus, this book offers a perspective that we find in precious few photography books of its type, in that it includes essays and pictures from "the Czech lands," Japan, and Australia as well as America and Western Europe, so it does more than just imply international scope. Published by Canada's Douglas & McIntyre, it includes essays by Alison Nordström, J. Luca Ackerman, Ryuichi Kaneko, Gael Newton, and David Wooters. A fine and attractive new book. I would have liked to have seen the show.

________________________

Mike

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Featured Comment by Ian: "The Vancouver Art Gallery did a great job with this show! It presented some wonderful examples of pictorialism. I was struck by the beauty of this genre.

"What I found very fascinating was how the Gallery showed different samples of the same image and how the photographer would print in different ways to evoke different emotions. The printing process was quite elaborate, so I can imagine the many hours spent in the darkroom.

"I highly recommend this book if you are interested in both the history and perhaps exploring pictorialism in your own work."

Recommended this week: Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Digital Photography, by Ferrell McCollough. (Here's a U.K. link.)

Perhaps the most controversial processing technique in digital is "HDR" or high dynamic range photography, whereby two exposures of the same subject are merged using a software program to create an image with rich detail in both the shadows and the highlights.

The problem with it seems to be that some (most?) people who practice it overdo it, creating images with an instantly identifiable "look," one that is often bizarrely surreal. This tends to polarize opinions: some love it, others hate it.

But a tool is just a tool, and doubtless some photographers use the technique with subtlety, or to rectify specific problems.

I'm not an expert in HDR, but this book seems to provide a serviceable introduction to the technique, at about the right level for otherwise capable photographers desirous of learning something new to them.

And, it's cheap. ;-)

___________________

Mike

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Ferrell McCollough's book is a good, practical introduction to HDR imaging, and will get you up and running quickly. There are four other books I'm aware of. Christian Bloch's very in-depth HDRI Handbook reviews a lot of the underlying principles and available software, and it's probably the best resource for folks who want to 'go deep' into the topic. I found it fascinating, but it's probably a bit much for the casually curious. Michael Freeman's Mastering HDR Photography has just a bit more depth than Ferrell McCollough's book. Chris Weston's book I haven't looked at. There's also a new book by Jack Howard that is similarly approachable.

"I think a lot of the 'overcooked' appearance of many HDR images has to do with the available software. Photoshop CS3 has a very clumsy HDR implementation that is best ignored. Photomatix is the default industry standard HDR software, and it's endlessly flexible, but what initially appears attractive on screen tends toward a certain artificial look that has become a kind of cliché. Used with more restraint, it's a very effective program. Another option is FDR Tools, a deceptively powerful scripting editor with a simple graphical interface. This handles moving objects like clouds or waves more elegantly than Photomatix and it defaults toward a more 'photographic' and less 'illustrated' appearance, but it's a bit more challenging to use. There are a number of other HDR programs with numerous powerful options, but these tend toward the arcane and require serious study. For the more casual amateur Photomatix and FDR Tools are the first place to look."