Re: favorite photography books

[Thom Mitchell <tjmitch@ix.netcom.com>]

That's a great little book.
Here's a list of 6 (but not all) of my absolute favorites that aren't 
mentioned below.

The Photographic Essay - William Albert Allard
Deeds of War and Inferno - James Nachtwey
Under a Grudging Sun - Alex Webb
Stock Photographs - Garry Winogrand
On Being a Photographer - David Hurn and Bill Jay
Telex Iran - Gilles Peress

Christina, once you finish you're list I'd like to see the final edit. 
Thanks, Thom



Christina Z. Anderson wrote:
> 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