Four Important Photography Books

[johnastovall]

It is my firm belief that one learns what makes a good photograph by looking at good photographs. Here are four books which anyone interested in learning about great photography should study.

Lisette Model by Lisette Model (Photographer), Berenice Abbott (Preface), Aperture, 2007.

This is the only collection of Model's work printed. She is important for her direct and uncompromising vision of her subjects. She also taught for many years. Diana Arbus was her student and you can see the correspondences between her work and Arbus's early street work.

Walker Evans American Photographs by Walker Evans (photographs) and Lincoln Kirstein (essay), The Museum of Modern Art, 1988.

This is the 50th Anniversary edition of the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of Evans first ten years of work. It has become the benchmark for American photographic monographs. A broad slice of America's faces and places are found here. Evan's Documentary Style can be see here clearly and it has impacted thousands phototgraphers who came afterwards.

The Americans by Robert Frank (photographs) and Jack Kerouac (introduction) Pantheon, 1986

If Evans defined one American style, Frank created a new and different way to look at the American landscape and its people. John Szarkowski said of Frank, "Robert Frank established a new iconography for contemporary America, comprised of bits of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces. This iconography has become a common coin, [and] here the original acuity of Frank's own sensibility is alive and relevant." Frank lays the foundations which photographers such as Arbus, Winogrand and others would build on for the rest of the century.

Written in the West by Wim Wenders, TeNeues, 2000

You may know Wim Wenders more as a film director. He has done many major films such as Wings of Desire, Buena Vista Social Club, The American Friend and Paris, Texas. But Wenders is an accomplished still photographer and artist. In 1983, he traveled for three months in the Southwest searching for filming locations to use in "Paris, Texas." While shooting locational shoots with his Leica and slide film, he shot personal work with a medium format Makina-Plaubel with color negative film. This body of personal work became the basis for a show at the Pompidou and this book.

As important as the images is the interview of Wenders by Alain Bergala. Wenders discusses his ideas about photography, film, color, the American West, other photographers influances and much more.

This is an important book for it shows us a new vision of the American West.

[Anthony Martinez]

I was just thinking of things I could stand to pass the time with while waiting for this deployment to end, and you've just provided me with four examples. Thanks!