Books

Emphasis in portrait photography

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Over the past few weeks I have been reading “The Art Spirit”, a 1923 book [1] by American painter and teacher Robert Henri. Henri’s volume was recommended by Lenswork magazine editor Brooks Jensen in one of his podcasts about two months ago. Henri was a painter, and the book is, unsurprisingly, largely about painting. Yet there are many things in the book that mirror issues with photography, and Brooks strongly recommended reading it for that reason. And if a book is good enough for Brooks, who am I to argue? […]

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Bruce Barnbaum – The Art of Photography

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On a recommendation from Jim Blomfield I recently purchased a copy of Bruce Barnbaum‘s book, The Art of Photography, first published in 2010 and now – already – in its fourth printing. Jim was right; this is a great book, certainly ranking in the top five in my library. I purchased the book mostly because I have been a fan of Barnbaum’s black-and-white images for several years, and I wanted the book as a resource for helping me produce the finest gelatin silver black-and-white prints I possibly can. That detail

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The Master Photographer’s Toning Book

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Recently I purchased a copy of Tim Rudman’s The Master Photographer’s Toning Book [1] from Silverprint in the UK. Thanks to Silverprint, this “definitive guide” to toning gelatin silver and platinum prints is now in its second printing, and thank goodness it’s now in print once again. This book is really a superb resource. Here’s a brief synopsis from Tim Rudman’s website: Using a system of First Steps, Second Steps and Further Steps, the normal use of simple ‘off-the-shelf’ toning kits is explained and then developed further by exploring the

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Daring to Look

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Since I was ill for much of the summer months I decided to spend my spare time reading about photography if I couldn’t actually go out and shoot. Fortunately there are a number of new and excellent books on photography out this year, and Daring to Look [1] is one of them (I’ll write about others in future posts). In Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn presents and analyzes Dorothea Lange’s 1939 work for Roy Stryker and the US Farm Security Administration (FSA). Unlike other retrospectives I’ve seen of Lange’s

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Within the Frame

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My friend Jim Blomfield recommended David duChemin‘s book Within the Frame to me in November, and now I’m just getting around to reading it. In a nutshell, this book is a great read because duChemin writes about the whys of photography rather than the hows. The book is similar, in a way, to Freeman Patterson’s Photography and the Art of Seeing in that the craft of photography rarely enters the discourse – the concepts of aperture, exposure, depth of field and so on are tangential subjects. In both books, the

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Manufactured landscapes

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Last week I picked up a copy of Manufactured Landscapes [1] from Wordsworth Books in Waterloo. I’ve long been an admirer of Edward Burtynsky’s work, and was fortunate to hear him interviewed by Robert Enright at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute a few years ago, and view some of his prints on exhibition there. As I expected, the book is marvelous. Burtynsky’s images are about mankind’s affect on the landscape, on a massive scale. The reproductions of the prints in the book are excellent but what I found interesting is – having

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