U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: favorite photography books

Re: favorite photography books



Well I own just a few alt books and my absolute fave is James. This is not only because of the quality of the text, but the diversity of the images.

Fave photographic books non alt are:

Man Ray, Taschen (the big hardback not the small softcover which doesn't have as many images)
Imogen Cunningham, Taschen (ditto^) Text by Lorenz
Minor White, The Eye That Shapes
Camera Work, a Pictorial Guide
Art and Fear, Bayles and Orland (ok, not really a photography book but...)
Diane Arbus, Revelations

John

www.johnbrewerphotography.com

----- Original Message ----- From: "Christina Z. Anderson" <zphoto@montana.net>
To: "Alt, List" <alt-photo-process-L@usask.ca>
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 1:46 PM
Subject: favorite photography books


Dear all,
I have a book I have been working through called Building a Photographic Library, which has in it 138 photographers (etc.) responding with their favorite 6 books. It is really an instructive book, ending with 500 books in all mentioned, and the top 11 books mentioned the most (surprising to me) were:

Szarkowski's Looking at Photographs, and Atget
Weston's Daybooks
Frank's The Americans
Barthes Camera Lucida
Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment
Adams The Negative
Aperture's Diane Arbus
Evans American Photographs
Koudelka's Exiles: Photographs
Kenna's 20 Year Retrospective

This book was done in 2001.

What I am working on is this: I got our librarian to put all of our TR section books into an excel spreadsheet (we have about 3000 books at MSU so I can do this; at the U of Minn and other places, this would be astronomical.....) and I am weeding the list down to a sort of top 100 (or top 500!--I only have it down to 2000 right now!) photography books. It's easy to do this with alt because the number of alt books is not quite high in general (I think I own most of them--Post Factory, Barnier, James, Farber, Scopick, Arentz, Arnow, Blacklow, Sward, Van Keuren, Crawford, Nadeau, Reed, Busselle, Frederick, Lewis, Laughter, Livick, blah blah blah), so that is why I am asking if anyone has any photographic absolute FAVORITE....let's say, 6, that they'd want to share? Especially any from 2000-2007? OR photographers if you don't know titles?

I think it would provide lively instruction to have this conversation on this list, even though not pertaining strictly to alt, because we ARE photographers. It also may encourage those who never post on alt to post on something that I would think ALL of us have opinions on. Once done I could make it available on my website for downloading because I know I can't send attachments through the list and it might be too lengthy to cut and paste into an email.
Chris







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