Orange - Orhan Pamuk

 A collection of night photos taken on his walks through Istanbul.  Interesting idea and some of the photos are good, but this is a book that would never have been published if it were someone less well-known.  The idea is interesting, the light and the street scenes have potential, but there is not enough variety in the material to justify such a large collection of images.  

Worth a look, but not a book to cherish.

Seeking Stillness - Olivier du Tré

A collection of stark nature photographs in black and white.  Interesting compositions.  Beautiful black and white tones.   Working in the monumental style of Ansel Adams, though some of the images have a more immediate, less daunting presence. 
Worth looking at for successes, and for details I would alter.

American Witness: Art and Life of Robert Frank - R. J. Smith

Interesting book about Frank.  A very unique character.  Seemingly no interest in fame or success, or money for most of his life.  A strange combination of visionary (maybe) and crank.  A body of work in photography that attempts to explore the inner world through images of the external world - a way to record interactions, reactions, feelings?
Hard also to know if he is focused solely on his art, or if he is just incredibly self-involved and self-centred when you read about his family life, interactions with others.  Common problem or question for a while now with many big name artists.
Still, the book offers some interesting insights into how he works, the arc of his body of work.  He does say and purse some things that I would agree with:  It's just a photograph.  I am not interested in beautiful.  How to minimize control in taking a picture - photos as a form of discovery.  Not wanting to repeat what he has already done.

Brassai: Paris Nocturne

Beautiful reproductions.  Some nice night work, especially the cityscapes.  There are also some good ones of people, but many of them lack something - turns out many of his night shots with people portraying aspects of Paris "nightlife" were actually posed and paid for.  Ara Güler's Istanbul street work is grittier and more authentic.

Digital Black and White Landscape Photography - Gary Wagner

A nicely done, technical but clear guide to working with RAW images and supporting software to create b & w images.  Built around examples of finished photos, with the various steps and software manipulations itemized.  Finished style worth learning for starters.

Other books to find again:

Camera Raw 101 - Jon Canfield  - thorough but software references may be a bit outdated

Compete Digital Photography - Ben Long

Camera Raw 101 - Jon Canfield

A focused guide to working with RAW images and the software you use.  Thorough but a bit dated. (2009)

Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes - Lee Friedlander Photographs

Finally found this book by one of my favourite photographers.
Very nice book - large images, beautifully printed.

Unlike most of his work that I know, you can see his use of different lenses and filters to play with effects and perspective.  Most of his other work seems to be fairly straightforward from this point of view.

What I like about his photographs is that they are not easy.  As you look, you can think about the structure he was trying to work with, about the trigger for that particular point of view, about his diffused, hidden focus within the picture, about the seeming surface chaos and lack of structure.  A metaphor for life...

Interesting to think about the parallels visually, structurally and intentionally between this body of work and the collection of store window photos - refraction of focus, layers hidden behind layers, a surface of chaos over deeper structures.

Find again.

About Looking - John Berger

A collection of essays reflecting on photography, painting and the act of looking.

The first few essays are about photography. "Why Look at Animals" is a reflection on the objectification of animals in the modern world, and the disappearance of the look of recognition between living beings across the species barrier.  It relates to the Winogrand book of photos about animals I read recently.  p. 13 "This reduction of the animal, which has a theoretical as well as economic history, is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units... The mechanical view of the animal's work capacity was later applied to that of workers..."

The other really dynamite essay is "Uses of Photography", reflections on Susan Sontag's book.
p. 58 " During the second half of the 20th century the judgement of history has been abandoned by all except the underprivileged and dispossessed.  The industrialized, 'developed' world, terrified of the past, blind to the future, lives within an opportunism which has emptied the principle of justice of all credibility.  Such opportunism turns everything - nature, history, suffering, other people, catastrophes, sport, sex, politics - into spectacle.  And the implement used to do this - until the act becomes so habitual that the conditioned imagination may do it alone - is the camera.

- from Sontag: "Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions.  The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggest that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing..."

There is another interesting essay, "Francis Bacon and Walt Disney."  He argues for a basic similarity both in underlying style and ethos  between the two - similar distortions of the human body, violence, colour ranges.  Both explore alienation - Disney makes it funny, Bacon makes it banal, the subject of art.  No moral judgement in either.  Interesting idea.

Didn't get through all the essays.  Some interesting ones on seminal figures in art in the first half of the 20th century.  Need to have another look.

The Animals - Gary Winogrand

An early collection of photos by Winogrand - self-published.  Apparently, quite a flop when it came out in 1969.
Especially for that time, a disturbing collection of photos - nothing romantic or ennobling in his representation of the animals in the New York City Zoo.  As photos, you can see his style of flirting with chaos within the frame, however, in many of the photos I don't see the one element that brings a focus to the photo, or else the element is not strong enough, or doesn't carry enough meaning or emotion or surprise to support the weight of the rest of the chaotic frame.  There are some good moments, however.

A good accompaniment is to read John Berber's essay, "Why Look at Animals?" at the same time.

Maybe what you see in these animal photos is the same alienation, the same sense of loss and hopelessness that can be found in some writers of the 50's and 60's - for example Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn MacEwen.

Winogrand: Figments from the Real World - commentary Szarkowski

A well put together overview of Winogrand's work over his working life, from his early years to the less well known later period.  (Amazing that he died with 3000 rolls of undeveloped film!)
Some interesting points in the commentary:
- his acknowledged debt to certain aspects of Frank's work in The Americans
- his comment that he photographs things he finds interesting to see what they look like in photographs
- the discussion of his use of leaning lines (ie. non-vertical and non-horizontal to the frame) in composition - it strikes me that this is the solution to the problem I have struggled with in regard to shooting in cities and other man-made environments where everything is too geometrical - two things bring the kind of hidden order beneath chaos that is easier to find in wild environments:  1) the lean and 2) use of wide-angle lens, which Winogrand talks about
- his comments on wide-angle lenses and how they allow him to include more things, more information in the frame, while at the same time maintaining the presence of the subject - the wide angle introduces more information, which then becomes the overlay of chaos that masks, but not quite, the compositional order in the photo - this tension between chaos and order  p. 21 "He had a special affection for those of his pictures that were almost out of control, the pictures in which the triumph of form over chaos was precarious.  He believed that a successful photograph must be more interesting than the thing photographed..."
- p. 29 "As Winogrand grew older and his ambition grew more demanding, the role of luck in his work grew larger. As his motifs became more complex, and more unpredictable in their development, the chances of success in a given frame became smaller."

Ways of Seeing - John Berger

A reread from quite a while ago.

An interesting discussion of the nature and permutations of images in the west.
Some interesting points about how text changes the perception of the image - how language turns the image into an illustration of the words, nailing down a meaning instead of being a more open extra-lingual (?) experience.

He also points out the frequent cultural referencing of classic paintings in modern advertisements.  The classical images have a reference, a weight, a story, a value, that advertisers want to carry into their advert., associate with the product.  As if this almost unconscious collection of classical images is a language in itself.

An interesting chapter exploring the nude in western art - inherently voyeuristic.  This comes out of a larger tradition in western art, possibly because of its emphasis on realism.  The painting as a metaphor of ownership, and thereby of social status.  This implies an inherent awareness of the viewer, almost as if the painting is a way of speaking to the viewer.  There are some interesting indian illustrations of sexual activity as a contrast.  The indian images simply show - the subjects in the images show no awareness of the viewer.  This is in sharp contrast to many of the classic nudes, where the subject is looking out directly at the viewer, or presented as if offered to the viewer.  This is possibly a mirror of the awareness of self as individual that is so strong in western tradition since at least the Renaissance.

Is there a way to create images, and yet stay outside that tradition that has been so co-opted by the advertising industry.  I still feel we have too many images loaded with subliminal fantasy messages.

Valencia 1952 - Robert Frank

An interesting collection of work from 1952.  Preceded his work for The Americans by three years.  You can already see his approach to photography, his sense of image, quite well-developed in this book.  Definitely a precursor to his more famous collection.  The Americans is more complex, but then the society and country were bigger and more complex too.

Photography After Frank - Philip Gefter

Didn't read the essays, just looked at the pictures.  What I found interesting is how the photographers in this collection generally seem to have focused on one aspect of the innovations that Frank brought to photography.  Some work with his more formal aspects relating to composition, placing of subjects, tonalities.  Some focus on his people as subjects, the slightly off-centre collection of people with an edge of the grotesque.  Some work with his landscape sense, the everyday, the small, the anti-monumental of people's lives and the landscape of americana.  Some focus on the slightly mysterious candid shot of people going about some private social activity, the candid moment, again slightly grotesque.  It isn't until I see all these different threads spread out amongst different photographers and their work that I realize how complex Frank's book, The Americans, really is.