On Photography
Susan Sontag
—Read more…Although photography generates works that can be called art — it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure — photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris.
Stadt Alphabet Wien
Martin Ulrich Kehrer
I always forget to add the various books that come my way that aren't actually books that I read, but most likely hold court on the coffeetable or a prominent location on a bookshelf. Melanie brought me this one from Austria, and it documents Vienna's incredible old signage, in alphabetical order of the business names. Most of these were designed by master signmakers who, as is often the case, weren't necessarily typographers. So the letterforms are pleasingly unique and with anachronistic combinations.
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Scrapbook
Henri Cartier-Bresson
In my attempts to make full use of the library, I often forget to hunt out the nice art books I'd buy if I had that much money to throw around and the strength to haul the hefty tomes around every time I move house. Cartier-Bresson is perhaps the photographer I am most likely to browse.
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The Complete Untitled Film Stills
Cindy Sherman
It's probably time that I returned these photo books I took out from the library months ago. (There were a few others, but I didn't spend too much time with them before I returned them.)
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The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers
Henri Cartier-Bresson
This compilation of writings by Cartier-Bresson is pretty random and obviously written over a long period of time. But its brevity makes up for the lack of flow. His opinions of photographic technique are interesting, sometimes useful and sometimes not. He was not a fan of color photography: As opposed to black, which has the most complex range, color, on the contrary, offers only a fragmentary range. Though that was largely because of the state of color film processing at the time of that writing, 1985.
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The Zone System for 35mm Photographers
Carson Graves
Since I started taking a black and white photography class, I've been going through the bibliography and browsing through the various texts recommended. This one initially gave me this feeling of being entirely amateur about my lack of process but in the end I just tried to extract the info that is helpful to me. We'll be covering the zone system in class, so I probably didn't need to start reading this so early.
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Camera Lucida
Roland Barthes
theories on photography by someone who is not a photographer. knowing little of the technical aspects of photography, Barthes attaches his own kind of technicality by applying his own terminologies to the observation of photos. the first section is much heavier, laying out his basic theory; though the second part, written at a later date and after the death of his mother, repeatedly references a photograph of her that is not printed in the book. a kind of frustrating work.
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