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O.T.: Five Books that Will Drive You to Think

By Ctein

Introduction: Mike's recommendation of some philosophy books a few weeks back caught me by amused surprise. This seems to be yet another case of great minds lying in the same gutter, because while he was writing that column I was laying out this one.

I don't read anywhere as much as I'd like. I still buy a few more books each year than I find time to read. There are close to 600 unread books on my shelves, 400 of which fall into the "I really must read this" category. Consequently, I almost never go back and reread a book.

Mostly I read for entertainment, occasionally for factual education. On very, very rare occasions, a book comes along that actually makes me think. They are few and far between, and I'm recommending five to you. It happens that three were written by friends of mine. I won't tell you which ones. Don't ask. It doesn't really matter. I have hundreds of books written by friends on my shelves; I'm not recommending most of them.

If you read all of these, at least one of them will make you think very, very hard about stuff you thought you already knew. Probably, all of them will.

It's almost impossible for a thought-provoking book to be anything but controversial. We don't want to engage those controversies here. Were I to recommend a book on economics, that would not be a call to debate capitalism vs. communism. Not that Mike would allow it, but let's make his life easier and keep the conversation meta, okay? So, without further ado:

1

Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, by Bruce Schneier

Bruce is such a well-known security/computer security expert that XKCD makes jokes about him in its rollovers. The book's subtitle, "Thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world," sums it up. It's a straightforward and common-sense discussion of real world matters, things that affect us every day. More important, it's a tutorial on how to think about security. That's its major value.

For example, there is threat vs. risk, concepts that people conflate. Threat is what might happen to you, risk is how likely it is to happen. Your security usually involves reducing risk to manageable levels, not necessarily eliminating threats. That's on page 20 of nearly 300. It just gets better and better.

2

God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion, by Bro. Guy Consolmagno, S.J.

Brother Guy is an MIT-trained astronomer who got the calling in midlife, became a Jesuit brother, and now works for the Vatican (his specialty is meteors and and other subplanetary bodies). He's a consummate techie who is also profoundly religious. This isn't as fringey as you might imagine; a substantial percentage of scientists and engineers are religious. He got curious about how other techies deal with their religious beliefs, so he studied them.

The first third of the book presents historical background on science and religion. He shows how good/bad theology has lead to good/bad science and vice versa. Did you know that Kepler came up with his famous laws of planetary motion because he believed that the Godhead physically resided in the Sun and so the Sun must be at the center of the motion of all stellar bodies? Great science but lousy theology. He also elegantly explains why trying to use science to validate theology is a terrible strategy.

The second third is a field study; Guy talked to about two dozen techies, questioning them on exactly how and why they were involved with religion and wrote up their case histories for our benefit. Fascinating stuff, and the truly original part of this book.

The last third homes in on Guy's relationship, as a techie, to Christianity and the Church. Roman Catholicism has less-than-zero appeal to me (yes, I am religious; no, it's none of your business) but when I was done reading this section I had a genuine appreciation and empathy for how it does work for Guy.

3

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano

I'm not sure how to convince most of you to read this book: a collection of essays of radical feminist political theory by a trans woman. Very much my cup of tea, not most of yours. So, why do I imagine most of you would get anything out of this book? Because this book presents a brilliantly integrated and extensive model of gender and sexuality. It was recommended to me by a respected friend, Marlene Hoeber, and to steal some of her words, this is the unified field theory of sex and gender. Marlene wrote, "Serano is a scientist in her primary career and it shows in this work. Her suggested structure fits the available evidence without stretching or omitting data. It is a workable operational model that is not worried about unknown causes."

As such, it doesn't demand redefining who you are, as too much hortatory political theory does. Think of it like this: Newtonian physics works perfectly well for a lot of everyday things. But when you're stuck with puzzles and seeming paradoxes (the constancy of the speed of light, the ultraviolet catastrophe, etc.) then you bring in quantum mechanics and general relativity. An understanding of those gives you a comprehensive and practical insight into the world.

Similarly, Juliana replaces the simplistic one- and two-dimensional models of human gender with something that's much more complete and actually makes sense in light of the way humans act, instead of prescribing how they should act.

I thought I had a really good understanding of gender before I read this book. Boy, did it ever prove me wrong.

4

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex, by Olivia Judson

Now we turn to the lighter side of gender, namely sex! Humorous and entertaining, yet fact-filled, this book is cast in the form of an advice column to the lovelorn, viz.:

Dear Dr. Tatiana, we're sea hares. We've been having a fabulous orgy—being both male and female we all get to play both roles at once. [...] It's such a great system, so much better than being male or female, that we're mystified why everyone hasn't followed our lead. Why aren't all living things hermaphrodites?—(signed) Group Sexists in Santa Catalina

It's fun, it's funny, it's damned educational. Judson is an evolutionary biologist, a breed that has justifiably gotten a bit of a bad reputation. Too many of them took their marching orders from the Social Darwinists, picking and choosing their data and their logic to justify the status quo. The results were as reliably laughably idiotic as they were intellectually dishonest. (My favorite example from the seventies was a claim, made in all seriousness, that women had large breasts because that body type had been selected for by men. A theory that manages to ignore the huge variation in standards of beauty across space and time, as well as the undeniable fact that there is a more-than-sufficient subset of the male population who are simply horndogs and will, as the song lyrics say, "love the one they're with.")

Olivia is not of that ilk. She manages to explode, discredit and disprove so many prevalent myths about sex and sexuality across the animal kingdom, using established scientific information. It's a real hoot.

5

The Fortunate Fall, by Raphael Carter

This one is science fiction, unfortunately out-of-print, but readily available used from Amazon. [UPDATE 6:00 p.m.: The clean and reasonably priced ones seem to be gone now, apparently due to attention from TOP (there were plenty this morning when I checked). Sorry about that. Perhaps check abebooks.com or your local library system? —Ed.]

It's vaguely on-topic (and I do mean vaguely); the protagonist is a living camera, a journalist of the future when everyone and everything is wired. And like all good journalists in novels, she stumbles upon a conspiracy and cover-up and starts to pursue the truth behind it. I don't want to tell you any more. It would spoil the fun.

For one thing, I couldn't figure out what this book was up to until I was well over 100 pages into it. I can usually divine an author's broad intentions within a chapter or so. Not the plot details of course, but the broad thematic skeleton the author will flesh out with story. In this case, I just couldn't figure out Raphael's skeleton. The book was in no way obscure; it was so rich with possibilities and directions in which it could go that I really didn't know which way she was going.

That's high praise. This books deserves it; it is one of the very best first novels I've ever read.

Let me tell you something else about this book. When I got to the end, I said to myself, "Huh." And I turned back to page one and started reading it all over again, for the pleasure of truly appreciating and understanding all the details in the book in their larger context.

I have never, ever done that with any other book, fiction or nonfiction. As I said at the beginning, I rarely read anything more than once, ever, let alone twice in a row.

The book is that good.

Ctein

Ctein's columns, one out of four of which are off-topic, appear on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Random Excellence: Erich Hartmann

Erich Hartmann, Maine, 1987

"Patterns on the Wall"—It's Slate's Magnum theme for today. (Produced by Kate Phillips. Too bad you can't see these full screen, unless I'm missing a tab somewhere.) Here, our title—"random"—really is apropos. I find it curious that Magnum photographs are now so often compiled into random sets, even in books, when one of the reasons for Magnum's founding was so the photographers could control the presentation of their pictures and make sure they were always presented in the proper context. Magnum photographs now most often seem to be seen out of the context of photojournalistic stories. And sometimes in the context of truly random groupings—such as pictures that include wallpaper.

I was pleased to see so many pictures in today's Slate set by my late friend Erich Hartmann, father of my good pal Nick. Erich, a past President of the agency and by that time an éminence grise, was the one who gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of Magnum New York, one of my better photographic memories.

There's a really very interesting book of Magnum photographs—a treasury, in the sense that it's full of treasures—called In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers. It's still available. I used to really love that book, and paged through it, lovingly, many times, but then I learned that Nick has a rather low opinion of it, to the point that I think he might have gotten rid of his copy. (Or maybe he was just considering it). I hope he'll chime in here and speak for himself, but as I recall he felt the book really wasn't true to the aspect of Magnum I mentioned above. I have a poor mind for recalling quotations verbatim, but he said something to the effect that Magnum photographs really weren't meant to be seen in compendiums—even, I suppose, "greatest hits" compendiums with running commentary such as In Our Time.

I'd say more about the book but oddly, I can't find my copy. It doesn't seem to be on my shelves anywhere. I wonder if it's hiding in the house somewhere, or if I loaned it out. I don't think I'd be so influenced by Nick's opinion that I'd have gotten rid of my own copy—the book really is enjoyable, even if you consider its program suspicious.

At any rate, it was good to see a few of Erich's pictures on Slate this morning...even out of context.

Mike
(Thanks to Kent Phelan)

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Featured Comment by Nicholas Hartmann: "Mike, thanks for the shoutout to Dad. I just checked, and the In Our Time book is still on the shelf; it will probably stay there, despite my philosophical objections.

"Further to your first paragraph: Bear in mind that while in the heyday of the cooperative, many Magnum photographers did shoot stories—sequences of pictures that were intended to be seen in a print medium as a group and together with text—others, like Cartier-Bresson, explicitly went hunting for pictures, for individual images that would have power and meaning in isolation. Dad did both: in his industrial and commercial essays, almost always in color, he was very good at creating a coherent narrative that served a client's needs, with the result that he was much in demand and was able to make a living and send his kids to college. What shows up on the Magnum site in these often-silly daily compilations, however, is always a black-and-white picture of his. That body of work, generated with whatever little stealth camera he happened to be carrying with him along with a couple rolls of Tri-X, constituted his 'personal' pictures, a term of art I heard used by his Magnum colleagues as well. By that criterion, maybe all of HC-B's work could be considered 'personal'; his genius was such that he became rich and famous from that alone.

"Magnum is vigorously mining its archives these days, and putting up, I assume, sets of pictures that it thinks will attract attention and keep its name alive. That being the case, I guess I should be happy to see an occasional Erich Hartmann personal picture show up. But wallpaper?! Gimme a break...."

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "Mike, I'd like Nick to know that I had one very pleasant encounter with his father some 35 years ago. As it turned out he and I both were shooting assignments for IBM and their editor asked us both to come participate in a internal office seminar he put together for their publications editors. I, being all of about 28 years old, was quite in awe even being in the presence of a Magnum photographer, let alone on the same program.

"I needn't have worried. In person Erich was kind and gracious, a generous teacher willing to humor the young buck with the grandiose ideas. And his presentation was all about practical work, making images that worked for the client, that subtly yet effectively told their story. From such a famous photographer it was pleasure to see and learn that a real pro attends to business and needs—and leaves the ego at home. Thanks for this reminder from another day."

Mike replies: Erich was a gentleman. Nick takes after his father in that way.

Random Excellence: Seth Casteel

Photo by Seth Casteel/LittleFriendsPhoto.com

Well, I like dogs. Check out Seth Casteel's amazing photographs of dogs diving for balls underwater. There's going to be a book in the fall, too.

Mike
(Thanks to Debby Collings)

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Featured Comment by Grant: "Finally, pet pictures that I want to look at. Excellent!"

Open Mike: Moving Day

So...long story, but I have to get new carpet in the house.

Turns out a lot of carpet is made of really nasty stuff...the fibers, underlayment, and treatments can all emit VOCs, and carpet is the #1 cause of indoor air pollution.

My carpet is apparently worse than that. The guy who lived here before me was—let's not speak ill of the departed—frugal, and carpeted the whole house with very cheap, very poor-quality carpeting. This nasty cheap carpeting, it turns out, has been slowly disintegrating, and it's what makes our house so dusty (you find this out with an environmental test that involves setting out a patch of sticky plastic similar to a large piece of transparent tape for a prescribed amount of time, then sending it in to a lab to get whatever settled on it analyzed). Meanwhile, both my son and I have had chronic respiratory problems...which are very probably the fault of, but in any case are not helped by, all the tiny cheap-crap carpet fibers suspended in our indoor air that we've been breathing all these years.

So I have to get the carpet out of here. Starting with the biggest piece, in the living room.

This, however, is a considerably bigger job than you might think. I'm told I have to empty out the living room for the carpetlayers. And the living room in my 1000-square-foot house is almost a third of the entire area of the house. All the other rooms are smaller (some, like closets, much smaller) and have significant portions of their square footage already occupied by things like beds and furniture, and bathroom and kitchen fixtures. The bottom line is that there's not enough room in the rest of the house to accommodate all the stuff from the living room as we try to empty it.

The worst problem: about 750 books, a good portion of them oversized, in four large bookcases. You can't move the books in the bookcases, but the bookcases need to go out of the room.

So I'm in the process of laboriously boxing up all the books and putting them on 2x2 runners in the basement (the basement can get wet, and water and books do not get along). Then we'll move the furniture to the garage, while the car temporarily resides in the driveway.

Once the living room is empty, it seems like it should be painted before the new carpet goes in...that way if the painters get paint on the old carpet, nobody cares. And before I get it painted, I should probably replace the 55-year-old windows. But all that means I'll have to coordinate several sets of workmen unless I want to leave my house torn up for an indeterminate amount of time.

One task leads to another.

So anyway, on to the subject of this review: the Kindle.

I first wrote about my then-new Kindle in December 2010 (it says Part I, but I never got around to Part II*). Here's the executive summary: first I loved it, then I fell out of love with it and stopped using it much, and now I find myself using it more and more. I don't love it any more, but I do like it quite a lot. (End of executive summary.)

Three things make the experience of reading on a Kindle worthwhile: first, every book can be a large print book. You can adjust any book to the type size you prefer. Secondly, the Kindle Lighted Cover, which you can find on this page. The built-in LED light is much handier than you might think. I don't use it very often, but when I need it I really appreciate it. Finally, it's very satisfying to be reading a book review in a magazine in the middle of the night, open the Kindle, download the book, and be reading the book within minutes—without leaving your bed or chair.

I've gotten very used to reading on the Kindle, to the point that I've actually bought a few Kindle books that I already owned hardcopies of.

There are a few things I don't like about it: mainly, its inherent typographical inelegance, which deprives me of a pleasure I do get from real books, and second, the fact that it deprives me of visual orientation. There's no physical sense of where you are in a book as you read, and no distinctive physicality that makes one book different from another in size, feel, design, color, quality, and so forth. All books on the Kindle look alike...all books look like the Kindle. Flipping to and fro in a book isn't easy, and anyway you can't remember "about how far you were" when you found something you want to flip to.

Also, the Kindle store is a bit chaotic. Editorial quality control is a significant issue. For instance, the free version of Walden leaves out all the quotations (!). And you might not even know that unless you read the reviews. This criticism extends to the Kindle's interface, too—on mine, all I get is an alphabetical list of all the titles; there's no way to organize them any better than that. New ones might have been improved, I don't know.

The Kindle is really for what I've come to call "straight-through" books—books with just text that you read from start to finish, with no real need to skip around in them. And the more recent, the better—it means that the publisher will have been more likely to prepare the Kindle file with care. Just as I've bought Kindle books of titles I already owned in hardcopy, though, I've also bought hardcopies of books I only had on the Kindle. There's something reassuring about knowing what you have is in the fixed and immutable form approved by the author and the publisher.

But here's the niftiest thing about the Kindle, at least if you ask me today, after a hard day yesterday getting the great living room project started: I have 70 books on the Kindle, and I can lift them all literally with one finger. Seventy paper books fill about three boxes and make my back hurt. My seventy books on the Kindle weigh (with the case) exactly one pound (the newest one is lighter). And of course the Kindle can hold a lot more books than that without gaining a gram of weight.

Can potentially replace up to 50 heavy boxes full of paper books...
my aching back is jealous.

Of course, there are many types of books that are absolutely unsuited to the Kindle. Not only photography and art books and other illustrated books, but poetry, beautiful books of various kinds, antique books, signed books, books with personal meaning, heirlooms. And of course, as a quick glance at Amazon's Kindle page confirms, my Kindle is outdated now. My oldest paper book is outdated too...the lowercase F's look like S's, and the binding is shot. Of course, it was printed in Ireland in 1818, so some wear and tear is to be expected.

I don't know how many of my paper books I would be happy replacing with Kindle books, but a local bookshop has now taken more than 16 boxes of books from my house that became surplus to requirements in part because I now have the Kindle. Certainly, shabby old paperbacks of classics that are available on the Kindle for $0.00 up to a buck or two are no longer needed in physical form.

In fact, the Kindle seems to have created a shift in my buying habits: recently I seem to be buying fewer paper books, but better ones. My paper book collection has benefited, on the whole.

On balance, I like my Kindle, and I use it a fair amount. I would definitely get another one, especially at the modest price they fetch now.

Oh, and I now have half a dozen books on my phone, too, which I'll read happily for up to half a hour. It's really nice to have Huckleberry Finn with me when I find myself stuck in a doctor's waiting room...

...Like the doctor I'll have to go see about my back if I'm not careful about lifting all those boxes full of books.

Mike

*Unless you count this as Part II. Please?

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that appear on TOP on Sundays.

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Featured Comment by Ivan: "I own Kindle Touch and like almost all about it except for one major thing (as you put it): 'inherent typographical inelegance.' What makes the matter worse, there is absolutely no technical reason or limitation to provide richer typographical experience. Kindle could handle more fonts (as Nook does) and publishers could format ebooks much better. But it seems to me that nobody cares. Perhaps they are protecting paper books market by intentionally degrading ebook visual quality, similar to what the movie industry initially did by supporting VHS format."

Featured Comment by dwig: "I second Gill's recommendation of using calibre as a library management and conversion tool. I also suggest that anyone seriously interested in ebooks check out the forums at MobileRead. In addition to excellent forums, MR has its own user-contributed library of DRM free ebooks. These are generally very carefully formatted ebooks done by amateur craftsmen."

Featured Comment by Steve Rosenblum: "I am in complete agreement with your Kindle experience. I was an early adopter and went through the same sequence of initially really liking it, then nearly abandoning it, and now a modest resurgence in Kindle use. I agree with the general inelegance and disorientation of the reading experience. If you really love books as 'objects' onto themselves then Kindle will not scratch your itch. The other issue for me is that I frequently read a book and then hand it on to a family member or friend so that a single book may be read by many people. You can only do that in a limited way with Kindle by loading the book once to someone else with a Kindle. The access that Amazon Prime members have to free Kindle content on 'loan' has alleviated this somewhat.

"Where the Kindle really shines is if you travel quite a bit—you can take as many books or other content with you as you like and it weighs next to nothing. Kindles have been heavily adopted by road warriors. Also, the ability to acquire a book instantly is hard to resist. The convenience is starting to win me over."

Harold Feinstein Book Will Be a Reality

You might remember that back in October 2011 we called attention to a Kickstarter campaign to help Harold Feinstein publish his first monograph of his decades of work. Well, the Kickstarter campaign was a success, and Panopticon Gallery in Boston has announced that the project will come to fruition: Harold's A Retrospective will be published by Nazraeli Press in the fall. Thought you'd want to know. Panopticon will stage a concurrent exhibit beginning on September 14th.

And today is Harold's 81st birthday.

Also, if you haven't visited the page recently, you'll note that Carl's Kickstarter campaign has been a big success as well, with eight days to go.

Mike

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Labor

Those of you with regular salaried jobs, with benefits, working for big employers, should be feeling grateful right about now. You can be thankful you don't have to pay self-employment tax. And I pay every morsel of my own benefits with after-tax cash, too. I am my own welfare state. Guess that's why I work nights and weekends.

And speaking of labor, I've always liked Lewis Hine, the pre-eminent photographer of the workingman. Not necessarily because of a visceral attraction to his photographs; to me they're more meaningful than they are aesthetically pleasing (although some of them are that). Hine himself, who remains opaque to me except through the window of his work, was a bootstrapper, self-made, an upright man with a heightened sense of ethics as well as empathy, a man on a mission whose mission actually succeeded. (Of course now our capitalists have simply moved our bad labor practices to other countries, but never mind.) He virtually invented social documentary photography, or at least helped greatly to define it. It's not easy to be clear about what you're doing when no one's ever done it before.

Hineograph by Lewis Hine

At his most grandiloquent he called his photographs "Hineographs." Self-promotion, it must be admitted, was not his genius.

You'd say he was an American success story, except he was more or less the opposite: a self-made, hard-working, moral, inventive, creative, caring person who contributed immeasurably to society...but ended up forlorn and forgotten, begging for work. Nobody cared about him or supported his work in the later part of his life (Stryker turned him down for the FSA, in which he was desperate to be included), finally losing his house and being forced to apply for welfare in his old age (yeah, I know. Quiet, please). Even his archive went nomad, given the Dear John by MoMA before finding refuge at George Eastman House after a waystop at the Photo League.

It's a bit dangerous to recommend a BBC video to a worldwide audience, because sometimes they're not viewable everywhere. But here goes. Worked for me, in quiet backwater Wisconsin USA. Tasty, if you're able to see it.

Regarding that new book by GEH's Alison Nordström they talk about, it puts me in an increasingly familiar quandary: I'd love to have it, but I can't have everything, and I already have several books about Hine, including Passionate Journey which has already gotten rather pricey. But can I afford not to have the new one? It includes an entire facsimile of the justly famous Men at Work—which however you can buy in an inexpensive reprint. What to do, what to do. One thing's for sure...he who hesitates is lost, or, rather, he who hesitates will pay through the nose later. Note those prices for Passionate Journey.

At least I could write it off my taxes.

Mike
(Thanks to Christian Kurmann)

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Featured Comment by Paul Butzi: "Hine is of my photographic heroes, if only because he uttered the words 'If I could say it in words, I wouldn't need a camera'—eerily similar to Robert Frost's response when asked to explain a poem: 'You want me to say it worse?'

"It seems to me that Hine is to social documentary photography what Louis Armstrong is to jazz trumpet—if you're go to work in that field, you first discover that the very first thing you need to do is learn how to do everything they did. The second thing you discover is that they covered an awful lot of ground, so just catching up to them is not so easy as you might expect. Most social documentary photographers today fall far short of Hine's aspiration: 'There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that needed to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that needed to be appreciated.' His ability to do both at once has not often been matched. Salgado comes to mind, and then I start to have to work to come up with names."

Books of Interest: Lightroom and Laforet

Those of you interested in Lightroom 4—with the caveat that you need to be the kind of person who learns software well from books (not everyone does)—might want to check out Martin Evening's new Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers. Martin has a reputation for producing the most comprehensive and complete instructional books, the corollary being that they're not the most accessible (try Scott Kelby's The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book for Digital Photographers, due May 18th, for that). I'm not the least bit qualified to actually review this book, because I don't use Lightroom and I'm a bit of a nitwit with software anyway, but it's a magnificent book—hefty, thoroughly organized, and copiously illustrated. I suspect most people wouldn't read this per se but will use it like a one-volume encyclopedia, looking up whatever they need to know at the time.

It's dedicated to the late Bruce Fraser, originally the author of Real World Camera Raw and Real World Image Sharpening, two of the most important and influential technical books of the digital era.

Vincent Laforet
Here's another interesting-looking book that's gotten a bit lost in the shuffle. Following the phenomenal success of Joe McNally's The Moment It Clicks, which was a big bestseller in its category, another editorial/assignment photographer of equal stature has produced a visual tour of how he works. Vincent Laforet's Visual Stories gives a good selection of his work with explanatory text and a lot of practical advice and technical details along the way.

Just as knowing a subject and teaching it are not exactly the same skills, being very good at something and writing about it engagingly are not exactly the same skills either. Publishers churn out these books at a furious pace, and in many of them you "feel the churn." To put it perhaps a little more bluntly, Vincent's pictures are better than his book. The prose is a bit leaden, and the tone of the advice is of one who is, shall we say, not entirely accustomed to giving advice to adult photo enthusiasts (I don't know about you, but I don't need to be told to leave the lenscap in the camera bag and that the purpose of a UV filter is actually to protect the front element of the lens). But, throughout, you do get a very good sense of what it's like to be "out there," constantly faced with the challenge of coming up with something new, good, and different in the context of a specific assignment. There's plenty that's practical in the discussions, including some bones thrown to the gearheads.

The book comes with a DVD that has several dozen short QuickTime movies on it. As you know, I don't generally care for videos (it means I have to turn the music off). But I have to say that, as with the book, I found these (I only watched a few) to be a bit undercooked. For instance, the pictures are only shown at the beginning and the end, whereas the time you want to see the image is when he's talking about the specific elements of it. Most of each video is "talking head," except you also see his hands coming into and back out of the frame...so, I found myself distractedly watching his hands fly about as I listened to him say a bunch of stuff that's already in the book. I think it might have been better to do the opposite—begin and end with the talking head shot and show the picture as he talks about it. Also, I see absolutely no point in showing each image starting zoomed in and then slowly zooming out on it until you (briefly) see the whole thing—it's not appropriate when the entire still image is the point of the discussion. The technical information at the end of every video is of little interest and has the feel of filler (feel the churn, baby, feel the churn).

Vincent Laforet has a superb feel for B&W. This picture, taken for the front page beat that he covered for a full two years, had to include a recognizable New York City locale—here the planetarium at the American Museum of
Natural History on Central Park West.

As for the pictures, there are, as you might expect, some great ones, and then some really great ones. You certainly get a strong sense of the vast range required of an editorial photographer. Oddly enough, considering most of his work is in color, Vincent Laforet seems to have an uncommonly good feel for black-and-white—or maybe that's because only his very best B&W shots made the book. He's very fond of anti-tilt-shift, or whatever you call that style—using a tilt-shift to limit depth of field (diorama mode?). It's a technique I don't personally care for—although you might, and he's good at it. He's particularly good with aerial photography, so Visual Stories will be of special interest to anyone who likes aerial photography or wants to try it. (I've only done it once, but I really enjoyed it, and highly recommend the experience.) There are aerial photographs throughout the book.

All in all a reasonably informative albeit not terribly entertaining session spent looking over a top editorial photographer's shoulder.

There's also an eBook version of Visual Stories available from the publisher, but it costs more than Amazon's price for the printed one.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Bahi: "Opinion about Evening vs. Kelby for Lightroom books compares to opinion on the Mac vs. Windows for operating systems, though there are peacemakers in both areas.

"I've supplied dozens of these books to photographers while delivering Lightroom tuition and have two recommendations that come from the results of that ongoing, multi-year experiment using Kelby's and Evening's LR 2 and LR 3 books.

"First is that if you can afford it and if LR is your main image editing app, you should get both—they're different and offer complementary approaches. As you say, Mike, Evening is very thorough and a good reference.

"The second recommendation to any photographer is to not dismiss the Kelby as having too little information, based on the chatty writing style—Scott has the enviable ability to help you learn without your realising that you're learning. (A rare gift.) Even people who don't particularly like his writing style do find themselves learning quickly using his books. There are now other good LR books appearing, too, the Bampton in particular.

"For those who prefer video learning, Messrs. Reichmann and Schewe do a good turn. They're quite the Vic and Bob of workflow, those two."

Featured Comment by Eamon Hickey: "In case anyone is interested (and begging your pardon, Mike, for gauchely referring people to my own story on a different web site), I wrote a short article on Vincent Laforet's excellent aerials for Rob Galbraith's website a few years ago. It's got a lot of how-he-does-it info for folks interested in the nuts and bolts.

"It also leads off with what is still one of my favorite photographs, an aerial that Vincent shot over Central Park that is one of the most lovely and visually unexpected (yet simple when, after half a second, you grok it) images I've ever seen. For those who like pictures better than articles, you can see it at Vincent's website without my accompanying ramblings."

TOP Reader Needs Assistance

Here's the situation: A TOP reader from Down Under* has received a prestigious commission to shoot photographs for an upcoming book. He would like to arm himself for the meeting with the publishers with some books that have state-of-the-art black-and-white photographic reproduction, and he needs a few recommendations.

My problem is that I don't see a lot of current photo books unless I buy them, and almost all of the books I own that have standout reproduction quality are old and out of print. (For instance this one, which has really lovely quality. And might be my "desert island" monograph, if I had to pick only one.) I recommended Salgado's Africa to him, but beyond that (surprisingly!) I was at a bit of a loss.

Can anyone recommend a book or two? Again, it would have to be a book that has not just adequate, not just good, but really superb monochrome repro....

Thanks in advance....

Mike

*At least I think it's down under—New Zealand; that counts, doesn't it? Or is "down under" the exclusive property of you Aussies?

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Mastering the Fuji X100

That was fast! Michael Diechtierow's Mastering the Fuji X100 is due out in a matter of days, from Rocky Nook.

It must be frustrating these days for people who write aftermarket camera manuals. You have to work fast, because people want it yesterday and you're competing not only against anyone else who's working on a similar book, but against the internet, which is disorganized and unreliable, but matchless at instant gratification. And then your book better make its bones poste haste, because the life of the product might have a quick span. The arc of interest is steep and perilous.

It doesn't seem to be damping the public's desire for the books, though. Perhaps they're more needed now than ever, because the learning curves for the products are as long as the typical product's life is short. No sooner have you really mastered your last camera than it's time to buy your next.

Rocky Nook is becoming a favorite imprint of mine. They did European photo guru Harold Mante's Photography Unplugged, which is delightful if you like strongly graphic, brightly colorful pictures done well; TOP friend and advertiser Alain Briot's Marketing Fine Art Photography, which has earned many positive responses from photographers; the newly-released Second Edition of Torsten Andreas Hoffmann's The Art of Black and White Photography, which I have here for review (if you look for this one, be careful, as the Second Edition has the same cover as the 2008 First); our friend George Barr's Why Photographs Work: 52 Great Images, Who Made Them, What Makes Them Special and Why, in which George published Gordon Lewis's photograph from a TOP Print Offer; TOP reader and mountaineer Alexandre Buisse's Remote Exposure: A Guide to Hiking and Climbing Photography; and, for large-format film shooters, The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression by Bruce Barnbaum, who was a Contributing Editor to Photo Techniques when I was Editor there. That's a nice little mini-catalog right there. I haven't seen the new book on the X100 yet, but if Rocky Nook's track record is anything to go by it's likely to be a good bet.

Here are some quick links to the start pages of Amazon U.K., Amazon Germany, and Amazon Canada (you'll have to search for whichever of the above books might interest you). I'll ask Rocky Nook if they'll let me review the book.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Rod S.: "How timely! I'm a new and enthusiastic purchaser of the X100. After 35mm, two 6x7 systems since 1994, and 4x5 for architecture, the X100 is my first digital camera. I'm enjoying the large viewfinder that allows me to brace the camera against my forehead and the intuitive manual controls. And I like the autofocus! It did take a few days to work out some default settings to keep the technology from intruding, so I look forward to digesting this book. Thank you for the link, Mike."

Mike replies: Even though we've corresponded from time to time, Rod, I don't think I ever realized you didn't have a digital camera. You picked a nice one to begin with.

Featured Comment by Charles Mason: "Well I have to dissent from the Wonderful Camera thought. I had so hoped this would be a simple form digital camera, the Digital Hexar we all wanted. Instead the user interface is overly complicated. So I am not surprised it takes a full length book to explain this almost-ran (in my humble opinion) camera. I do hope they kept the new X-Pro1 simpler, more like the Leica it is going head-to-head with...one can hope anyway!"

'Believing Is Seeing' by Errol Morris: Book Review

By John Camp

Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography) by Errol Morris (Penguin Press*, 2011)
At Amazon U.K.
At The Book Depository

This is possibly the most astonishing photography book I’ve ever read, and in a number of different ways. If you are particularly interested in looking at good photos, however, this may not be the book for you, because it does not contain many good photos.

Most of the photos it does contain are reproduced as small images, and the reproduction quality is not high. Those few that are large have gutters running through them. Most of the originals are not very good, either. One, a Walker Evans, is arguably great—but what you are shown, large, is a severe crop...with a gutter running through it.

Nevertheless...

Regular readers of TOP are probably somewhat familiar with Morris, whose work has been discussed here before.

Inspired by two sentences in a Susan Sontag book, Morris set off to investigate whether or not the British photographer Roger Fenton staged a photograph he took during the Crimean War (1853–56.) His conclusion is complicated, and I won’t get too deeply into it here.

Suffice to say that in contemporary terms, Fenton most likely staged a photograph—but that neither he nor his contemporary audience would have thought so. He produced a photograph that reflected a particular situation, but he had to move a bunch of cannonballs to do that. He was so innocent of our contemporary attitude that he took two photos of the same scene, a few hours apart, one showing cannonballs and one not, and displayed and published both of them.

Our contemporary view is somewhat different, as a longtime, award-winning Sacramento Bee photographer found out a few days ago. He was fired because he manipulated a photograph of one bird trying to take a frog away from another bird.

I suspect Fenton would have been appalled. Accuracy, he might have argued, is one thing. “Truth” is something else.

So is human charity, which is pretty goddamn short in the newspaper business if you ask me.

As interesting as the Fenton investigation is, it was, for me, the least interesting of Morris’s investigative essays. And, I would add, his investigative technique, for a photo geek like myself, is nearly as interesting as the content of the essays. But not quite as interesting.

The four sections of this book are entitled “Crimean War Essay (Intentions of the Photographer),” “Abu Ghraib Essays (Photographs Reveal and Conceal),” “Photography and Reality (Captioning, Propaganda, and Fraud),” and “Civil War (Photography and Memory).”

Morris really likes parentheses.

Of the latter two essays, the first discusses whether or not Walker Evans manipulated the contents inside a sharecropper’s house to conform to his fairly developed sense of aesthetics; this was hard to decide, and the best we can come up with is, “He may have.”** This essay then meanders into the question of whether or not the FSA photos taken during the Depression functioned as documentation or propaganda, and winds up with an investigation of photos taken during the Israeli-Lebanese war, published by the Reuters news service.

The other essay is about a photograph found grasped in the hand of an unidentifiable dead soldier after the battle of Gettsyburg during the American Civil War. The photo was of three children, and may have been the last thing the dying soldier saw. The photo sparked a nationwide search for the soldier’s wife and children, based on a close investigation of the photo’s content by newspapers all over the country. The search was successful, and the wife and children were found. An interesting and astonishing story, given the media limitations of the time (the photo had to be described, rather than reprinted, in the newspapers.)

But the investigation that really blew my socks off was into the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse photos from the war in Iraq. The first section of this is entitled, “Will the Real Hooded Man Stand Up?”

In the West, the most famous symbol of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison was a photo of a man standing on a box with a pointed hood covering his head, and with electric wires running under a poncho-like garment that he was wearing.

The New York Times ran a front-page story about the hooded man, with a large photo of the man holding a photo of himself standing on the box, with the hood, etc. The headline said, “Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare.”

Well, guess what? It ain’t that man under there.

Though he even had the photo printed on his business card, the guy in the hood was somebody else. The proof? Right there in the hooded-man photo: his hand. The man The Times did the story about was in the prison, may have been tortured, but was known as “The Claw” for a mangled hand he suffered when an antique rifle exploded during a wedding party some years earlier. The hooded man’s hands, which were plainly visible, were not mangled.

In fact, to this day, nobody knows who the hooded man was, or if he’s still alive.

Even more interesting, though, was Morris’ investigation of a photo taken of a pretty blond American soldier, Sabrina Harman, who worked at the prison. In a photo that Morris says is much more famous in the Middle East, Harman is shown bending over a dead man, flashing a big smile at the camera and giving a “thumbs up.”

The photo absolutely convicts Harman of...what?

That’s what catches Morris’ interest. He investigates in depth, and among other things (not all of which he discovered himself), he finds that Harman was not amused or happy about the dead man, and that she deliberately took photos so that might have been used in evidence for a murder, when nobody else would do that. They were, he said, evidentiary photos, not photos taken for amusement.

He reproduces letters that Harman wrote to her “wife”—Harman is gay—in which she essentially condemns the Army and the way the prison was run. “We might be under investigation. I’m not sure, there’s talk about it. Yes, they do beat the prisoners up and I’ve written this to you before. I just don’t think it’s right and never have. That’s why I take the pictures—to prove the stories I tell people. No one would ever believe the shit that goes on. No one. The dead guy didn’t bother me, even took a picture with him doing the thumbs-up.” A bit later in the letter, “If I want to keep taking pictures of those events—I even have short films—I have to fake a smile every time.”

Of course, much of what Harman wrote could be seen as self-serving, produced by a woman who saw trouble on the horizon.

But, in Morris’ investigation (he always takes things to extremes) he contacted a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California who was an expert on facial expressions.

The psychologist, Paul Ekman, says Harman was showing a “Say cheese smile” which has nothing to do with pleasure or enjoyment. It is a very specific expression, which he says is well-known to experts. It’s essentially a forced smile, aimed specifically at cameras, and says nothing about the thoughts or feelings of the person behind it. In other words, whatever Harman felt, she wasn’t showing pleasure when the picture was snapped—a photo which led directly to a New York Post headline that said, “The ghoul next door was jail abuse fotog.”

And so on. You really have to read the essay to get the full impact of Morris’ investigation, but one thing is clear—the CIA or some similar black agency committed a murder in the prison, and got away with it, mostly by convicting a bunch of bottom-end soldiers (who were, indeed, guilty of abuse) and convincing the world that justice had been done.

If you believe Morris, it hadn’t been—not even close.

And I believe Morris.

What I’ve just written is a sample of a fascinating book (for those fascinated by such things, anyway.) Believing Is Seeing contains much more, including, somewhat to my pleasure, what I see as proof that Reuters knowingly distributes anti-Israeli propaganda photography.

And the book demonstrates clearly that much too often, “believing is seeing,” but shouldn’t be.

John

*I write books published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, which is owned by Penguin.

**In a conversation I had Thursday with the well-known photojournalist David Burnett, he quoted Arnold Newman as saying, “Five percent of photography is inspiration, 95 percent is moving furniture.” I thought I might steal this quote in discussing the Walker Evans essay (Evans may have moved furniture) but decided I wanted to get the exact wording of what Newman said. When I looked online, I found that not only was Newman cited, but so were several other photographers—and several photographers made the same quip in direct interviews, and were credited with it by the writers....

John Camp is a bestselling book author who writes thrillers under the nom de plume John Sandford. He was formerly a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter.

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Featured Comment by MM: "I appreciate this review and don't want to sidetrack talk about Morris's book, but (with regard to the Sacramento Bee incident) I'm curious how many photographs the reviewer thinks an experienced photojournalist should be allowed to doctor at the expense of his employer's credibility before he gets a pink slip. Two photos? Three? Would it be cynical for the newspaper to assume that the time the photographer was caught was not the only time he had ever submitted a doctored photo, or to assume that if he hadn't been caught he might have done it again?

"As Morris makes clear, notions of 'truth' in photography are elusive at best; that ambiguity is inherent in any representational medium. But let's be honest: most sentient adults are aware that every photo is at best only a representation of 'the thing itself'—in fact, even a small child knows that a photograph of an ice-cream cone is not the same as the ice-cream cone itself. From firsthand experience (their own snapshots) members of the general public know that photos are cropped, and are taken from only one of many possible angles, and that timing and lens choice and other decisions are all highly subjective. That knowledge is part of the public's 'photographic literacy,' the set of mental tools that citizens of the developed world rely on for reading photographs. They are tools every sighted member of the general public has honed from viewing literally millions of photographs (hundreds of photographs a day, in all kinds of contexts, for thousands of days).

"But those tools cannot be used by viewers to 'read' a photograph when a photograph that looks undoctored and is presented as undoctored is in fact doctored (and while the definition of 'undoctored' varies greatly, I've never heard one that allowed for this example). A deliberate attempt by a photojournalist to portray a scene that the camera did not record falls into a different category than 'general ambiguity of the medium,' it seems to me. The fact that every photograph can have multiple interpretations does not relieve news providers of their obligation to leave reportage photos undoctored so that readers might have a fighting chance of reasonably interpreting those photos.

"The Sacramento Bee's punishment (dismissal of the photographer) may seem harsh to those who have not worked in journalism, but every photojournalist knows the rules going in and is reminded of them constantly (John Camp tried his hand at photojournalism, didn't he?). Newspapers in the Internet age have no unique commodity to offer besides public trust, the loss of which would put them out of business entirely. That's why reader trust is a precious asset of which newspapers must be as protective as possible—charity be damned. Call me naive, but given a choice I'll read the newspapers that have a zero-tolerance policy on the doctoring of reportage photos, thank you very much."

Bon Bons

Although they're different for each of us, I would guess that everybody has those dreaded "photographers you're supposed to like." You know, famous photographers whom everybody admires but who for some reason just don't grab you. I can think of a few who are that way for me. No names, now—let's be polite: there's no point in slagging off someone by name whose work someone else might love.

But then we have the opposite: guilty pleasures. Stuff you just lap up happily whenever you come across it and that just hits the spot for you.

I visited a bookstore far from home the other day and came across a new book that I just had to peruse, even though I ought to have been in browsing mode. The book has a lot of problems. It's called A Year in Photography: Magnum Archive.

A year? I assumed that meant they were surveying the best photography of a certain year. Which year? It doesn't say on the cover. Which bugged me. So I picked it up. And the first photograph I flipped to was dated 1978.

And the second one, 1954.

What the hell?

It actually took the small brain a while to figure out the concept the publishers were going for. The clue: there are 365 pictures in the book. Yeah—really—it's one of those calendar books, like the ones that give you an inspiring hokey fortune-cookie quotation to help you face every new morning, or a different cat cartoon to start each day off with a smile. (Who buys crap like that? Whoops, I said no slagging off.) Each picture is associated with a day of the year.

Pointless. It's just an excuse for publishing a stack of pictures.

Magnum, as in Champagne
But ahhh, what pictures. Magnum is the photographer's photo agency, started by photographers, for photographers. And named for the famous jumbo size of Champagne bottle. Yes, it was (and is) intended to make money, but its members had (and have) unprecedented freedom to follow their own stories and shoot the kinds of pictures they like, in the style that comes most naturally to them. Here, in somewhat plainspoken semi-matte one-picture-per-page reproduction that democratizes each picture relative to the others (and that I like quite a bit), are 365 great Magnum photographs. Many great masterpieces you will recognize, but many very fine pictures you will not. Verticals are not shortchanged, because the book is square; and there's not a single picture disfigured by being spilled across the gutter (good thing, too, because in a book this thick the gutter gets pretty prominent).

Oops splat! Three stars out of five. But the shortcomings are
the publisher's, not the fault of the pictures.

And here we come to the second conceptual shortcoming. Books of Magnum "greatest hits" really don't make a lot of sense, because one of the stated principles of Magnum from the beginning was to allow the photographers control of the context in which the pictures were presented; no more slash-and-burn by editors willing to cut out the visual heart of a picture story or disorder its flow, no more cropping ruthlessly and crippling a composition to fit a layout or a page. Not that Magnum was ever really able to insist on such lofty objectives consistently. But still...here we get pictures pulled completely out of their original contexts, presented without story or background. I happen to know the stories behind a lot of these pictures, and they're important. They amplify the meaning and the impact of the photographs. But they're just not here. It's not just that this isn't the best way to see photographs...it's that it's specifically contrary to the spirit of Magnum. You don't even get simple captions except in the back of the book.

So...these are just pictures. One after the other, without emphasis, with no context or rhyme or reason.

So the book shouldn't even be recommendable, let alone so entrancingly pleasing. Because, really, this is a fair sampling of simply the best that the medium of photography has to offer. Bon bons they may be, plucked thus out of context and divorced from explication. But if you simply like looking at photographs (which I very much do), then this book actually is what all such books claim or pretend to be: a treasury. I literally had to sit down and take three quarters of an hour to slowly look at every page.

"So okay," as David Vestal is wont to say: not recommended.

...And yet recommended, as a guilty pleasure, if your guilty pleasures bear any resemblance to mine.

Mike

P.S. This title goes into much the same category as Photographers A–Z or Photo:Box (the links are to our reviews)—educational rather than original—albeit with the above caveats about the absence of commentary.

P.S. Here's the U.K. link , and the one from The Book Depository. The U.S. link is above, in the third paragraph.

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Featured Comment by Roger Overall: "I'm currently working my way through this book. Every day, I study that day's photograph to see what I can learn from it. If the photographer is unknown to me, I research them. Gradually, in 15-minute blocks at bedtime, my knowledge of photography is growing.

"You've highlighted one of the things I dislike about the book. The photographs are presented without context. I think that diminishes them. In some cases, I struggle to see any merit in them at all. Sacrilege, I know, but a good few of the selected photographs are empty of story or artistic intent. As a book that makes forces you to learn by using your own initiative to find out more about the photographs and their creators, it works. It stimulates. As a standalone work that encapsulates all the reader needs between its covers, it fails."

Featured Comment by Stefan: "Speaking about Magnum photographs, I have been spending the last few evenings reading through Magnum Contact Sheets. Absolutely magnificent and surely a fitting complement to A Year in Photography: Magnum Archive.

TOP Photo Book of the Year 2011

The New York Times Magazine Photographs (U.K. link, Book Depository link)

Edited by Kathy Ryan, Director of Photography, New York Times Magazine

Preface by Gerald Marzorati, Editorial Director emeritus, New York Times Magazine

448 pages; 11.7 x 9.9 x 1.8 inches; $75, currently half off at Amazon U.S.

Published by Aperture

-

Reviewed for TOP by Geoff Wittig

Gerald Marzorati's preface to this book begins with this sentence: "There never really was a golden age of magazine photography." The Editor of the New York Times Magazine from 2003 to 2010, Marzorati points out that even in the heyday of LIFE and Look magazines, film, and subsequently television, had a much greater hold on popular imagination than print media. Yet the still image has its own unique power, from a capacity to freeze time for prolonged inspection to its own aesthetic beauty. Even as mass media outlets for photography dwindle, still images continue to have a hold on us that video clips don't seem to match.

The New York Times Magazine is essentially the "last man standing" among print media venues for "serious" photography in the United States. Other publications have either folded or (yes, Time and Newsweek, we're looking at you) have reduced their photographic content to a shriveled remnant. The Times Magazine has in contrast become more adventurous and lavish in its photography. As noted in the preface, in the mid-1990s the decision was made to greatly expand the magazine's photographic coverage and to make color available throughout. The relatively antiquated rotogravure process is used for the magazine's photoreproductions, because it cleverly compensates for the thin paper stock and provides rich darks unattainable with more conventional web offset printing. The magazine also has an editorial staff devoted to creatively employing photography to help tell stories, and access to a huge stable of photographers representing a vast range of styles.

The magazine's current photo editor, Kathy Ryan, uses the foreword to describe the process of brainstorming and developing photo essays, from the initial idea to selection of a photographer to interpret it. One of this publication's visual hooks has been "cross-assigning"—sending a landscape photographer to cover a hard news story, say, or a fashion photographer to take portraits of gang members. The editorial staff know that the magazine is competing for readers' time and attention, and thus the photos can't just tell a story; they have to grab us by the mental lapels via the unexpected, the shocking, or the strikingly beautiful.

The book itself is quite large and hefty, with a minimalist cover design. The photo reproductions are very good, varnished on heavy semi-matte stock. Unfortunately, quite a few are printed across the fold; in a few cases only about 20% of the image is on the opposite leaf, apparently an absurd triumph of hipster design over photographic integrity. Typography is good but not great; text is set in an old style digital Garamond lacking text (lining) numerals, but readability is fine.

The first section of the book addresses portaits. Each image is captioned with the date of publication and a note from the photographer. Some of the notes are terse, but many of the photographers discuss the interaction with their subject, or the interpretation they were aiming for, in ways that add further depth to the photographs. Many of the portraits have become iconic—the smoldering intensity of Miles Davis's gaze in Anthony Barboza's photo, the unexpected serenity of the severely burned survivor of a terrorist bombing (Kinneret Bussany) in Gillian Laub's picture. The photographers cover the gamut, from Nan Goldin to Nigel Parry, Dan Winters to Erwin Olaf to Chuck Close; a huge range of interpretive and visual styles. The next section covers documentary work, and serves to emphasize how unique the Times Magazine has become as a venue for photjournalism here in the States. From Susan Meiselas and Mary Ellen Mark to Eugene Richards and Sebstião Salgado, from James Natchwey and Gilles Peress to Antonin Kratochvil, the stylistic range, the visual impact, and the storytelling power of the photographs are remarkable. Again, many of the images have become icons, including Salgado's Dante-esque view of hundreds of laboring gold miners and Franco Zecchin and Letizia Battaglia's poetically shocking photo of a Cosa Nostra murder victim and grieving family.

Next comes photo-illustration, once again displaying a huge stylistic range from Joel-Peter Witkin's gothic grotesquery to David LaChapelle's neon confections to Stephen Wilkes' inventive visual Haiku. Some of the images are obviously a long way from traditional photography, but as visually arresting metaphors they serve to emphasize the accompanying text. You can't help but admire the wit behind some of the images.

The style chapter delves into fashion photography in the broadest sense, from clothing and design to architecture and food. Once again there are numerous images by well-known photographers from Lillian Bassman to Martin Parr. I'm about as ignorant of fashion as one can be, and I find in-you-face opulence tacky, but there's no denying how striking most of the photographs are.

The penultimate section covers a number of extended photographic projects, from Giles Peress's "A Vision of Iran" to Gregory Crewdson's "Dream House" to Nadav Kander's series of portraits of members of the Obama administration. It's difficult to imagine another mass media magazine publishing something like Crewdson's cinematic fantasy, or a composite portrait of what it's like to be 13 years old from the perspective of multiple different photographers.

The final chapter is a large selection of tearsheets from the magazine reproduced at reduced size. The intent is to put the photographs back into the context in which they were published—complete with text, headings, juxtaposed smaller images and overall page layout. The result is sort of like Errata Editions' facsimile series of photobooks; the reproductions aren't large enough to study the photographs per se, but it shows you the designer's intent.

It would be hard to imagine a better showcase in book form for where contemporary photography is today in the United States.

Geoff-

Amazon.com link

Amazon U.K. link

Book Depository link

For other links please go here

ADDENDUM: Here's a full alphabetical list of the photographers whose work appears in The New York Times Magazine Photographs: Lynsey Addario, Ruven Afanador, Peter van Agtmael, Christopher Anderson, Kenji Aoki, Marc Asnin, Josef Astor, Roger Ballen, Anthony Barboza, Richard Barnes, Lillian Bassman, Letizia Battaglia and Franco Zecchin, Andrew Bettles, Jodi Bieber, Ellen Binder, Olaf Blecker, Richard Burbridge, James Casebere, Barron Claiborne, Chuck Close, Fred Conrad, Gregory Crewdson, Carlton Davis, Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Jillian Edelstein, Mitch Epstein, Donna Ferrato, Larry Fink, Lendon Flanagan, Leonard Freed, Lee Friedlander, Sally Gall, Tierney Gearon, Ashley Gilbertson, Nan Goldin, Katy Grannan, Stanley Greene, Lauren Greenfield, Thomas Hannich, Charles Harbutt, Lyle Ashton Harris, Alexei Hay, Todd Heisler, Lizzie Himmel, David Hockney, Reinhard Hunger and Sarah Illenberger, Nadav Kander, Edward Keating, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Hendrik Kerstens, Martin Klimas, Jeff Koons, Mikako Koyama, Antonin Kratochvil, Karen Kuehn, David LaChapelle, Brigitte Lacombe, Joachim Ladefoged, Jean-Pierre Laffont, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Gillian Laub, Annie Leibovitz, Laura Letinsky, Ettore Malanca, Kurt Markus, Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark, Matuschka, Robert Maxwell, Gareth McConnell, Ryan McGinley, Hellen van Meene, Raymond Meier, Susan Meiselas, Jeff Mermelstein, Sheila Metzner, David Montgomery, Sarah Moon, Abelardo Morell, Vik Muniz, James Nachtwey, Dewey Nicks, Simon Norfolk, Erwin Olaf, Michael O'Neill, Martin Parr, Nigel Parry, Paolo Pellegrin, Gilles Peress, Mark Peterson, Jack Pierson, Matthew Pillsbury, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Platon, Reza, Eugene Richards, Jeff Riedel, Matthew Rolston, Paolo Roversi, Sebastião Salgado, Horacio Salinas, Tom Schierlitz, Gary Schneider, Collier Schorr, Zachary Scott, Stéphane Sednaoui, David Seidner, Alfred Seiland, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Malick Sidibé, Laurie Simmons, Taryn Simon, Stephanie Sinclair, Rodney Smith, Sage Sohier, Mike and Doug Starn, Laurent van der Stockt, Thomas Struth, Sam Taylor-Wood, Joyce Tenneson, Scott Thode, Larry Towell, Lars Tunbjörk, Deborah Turbeville, Paolo Ventura, Massimo Vitali, Bruce Weber, Stephen Wilkes, Damon Winter, Dan Winters, Joel-Peter Witkin, Katherine Wolkoff, and Harf Zimmerman.

Edward Weston: One Hundred Twenty-Five Photographs

I can't recommend this per se, because it looks like I'm not going to actually see it—so I can't evaluate it as an example of bookmaking nor appraise its reproduction quality. I've been in discussions with Ammo Books about it, and it looks like they're short of review copies because the book is a limited edition. I could buy it, but I already have several deluxe, slipcased collections of Edward Weston's work, including California Landscapes and the large-format edition of the Maddow biography.

A picture of Ansel by Edward that I've never seen before?! Hard to
believe. But there it was.

However, that front-and-center caveat aside, Edward Weston: One Hundred Twenty-Five Photographs (here's the U.K. link , and here's the link from The Book Depository) looks like a superb prospect for anyone whose library is lacking in the work of this most seminal and influential of American art photographers. It covers his entire career from the early pictorialist work through the last, almost abstract pictures from Point Lobos. It has many of the greatest hits—the Westons nobody should be without—but also seems to give special consideration to us photographers, seeing as it includes some of his portraits of photographer friends as well as personal pictures of his great love Charis and his sons as young men, at his elemental California home (it was almost a shack), Wildcat Hill.

I'd be eager to hear from anyone who owns this, or has seen it, as to what you think of its quality as a book. I'd hate to be in a position of seeming to recommend something that people are going to be disappointed with in any way.

The book comes in a slipcase and a cardboard outer box and is limited worldwide to only 2,000 copies.

Mike

ADDENDUM: The title of Edward's picture is Ansel Adams (After He Got a Contax Camera), 1936. Below is perhaps Andreas Feininger's most famous photograph, taken for LIFE magazine.

Andreas Feininger, The Photojournalist [Dennis Stock], 1951

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Featured Comment by Jason in Hawaii: "The book is amazing! I hate to say it, but it's almost too nice, to the point where you don't even want to remove it from the box for fear of damaging it. Note that I said almost. This book is meant to be studied for hours. It's big, the reproductions are the best I've seen of his work (although I must admit I've never had the privilege of seeing his prints in person), and each photo is accompanied by an appropriate quote from the man himself. I haven't read the introductory essay yet, but I intend to spend several hours consuming this one! It succeeds as a piece of art, and as an investment, although it would be a shame to stash this one away. It was meant to be enjoyed for its content, and on this level, it's a resounding success!"

Featured [partial] Comment by tom frost: "I received a copy and the photos are excellent. However, from my quick scan, it looks like they were all reproduced with the same ink set, despite reproducing early platinum work to late glossy silver prints. I've seen a bunch of the originals at CCP, and his print color varied more than the book exhibits."

Ben Lowy on 'The Daily Show'

A photographer on a talk show? You coulda knocked me down with a feather.

(Longtime readers know that one of my pet peeves is that 90% of the guests on talk shows are actors, because the same people that own the movie studios own the television stations, yadda yadda yadda shuddup Mike.)

Ben Lowy on the second-best fake news show on television*. (There's a short commercial first.) He was there because he got an assignment from Rolling Stone to cover the Daily Show for an article, and they were impressed with him when they got to know him.

(UPDATE: Here's a link with no commercial that works outside of the U.S. Thanks to Carsten S. for this.) (UPDATE on the UPDATE: Unfortunately I can't check where the links work and where they don't. I've been hearing from various people who can't get to it, for which I apologize.  —Mike)

Jon talked about Ben's new book, Iraq Perspectives, which, among other things, was selected by William Eggleston as the winner of the The Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

Here's Ben's website. And congratulations to him for demonstrating on the air that not all photographers are necessarily princess-killing, predatory pederast terrorists.

Mike

*I'm not going to say what the #1 fake news show is, but it rhymes with a snoozing ox.

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Featured Comment by Dave Levingston: "Well, it's not a first. I remember when my childhood hero, David Douglas Duncan, was on 'The Tonight Show.' The big shocks were his amazingly high-pitched voice...certainly not what I had imagined it would sound like...and the way Johnny casually tossed his prints around, dropping one if I remember right. But that one pales beside Imogen Cunningham's appearance on the same show. I don't know how old she was, but she must have been close to 90. She looked about four feet tall and wore a Mao hat with a red star. She took control of the show and wouldn't let Johnny go to commercial. He was way too wise to battle with this little fireball of a woman and just laughed and let her have her way. It was wonderful to watch. Of course, photographers were viewed differently back in those good old days."

'The Leica Compendium' by Erwin Puts

Speaking of Leica, I'm afraid that one rare photography book I should have alerted you to has come and gone. It is Leica Compendium: The Company, the Camera, the Lenses, by Erwin Puts of Tao of Leica.

The 602-page tome is simply one of the most astonishing books on cameras I have ever encountered. Erwin is one of the most knowledgable and dedicated Leica scholars in the world. I use the word "tome" advisedly: it is not only 602 pages long (I have the original edition), but the book is large (8.5x12"), and the pages are dense with small type and plenitudinous illustrations. It contains a lifetime of information, experimentation, and investigation on Erwin's part.

The sections include a history of the company, which I found particularly detailed and valuable; "Construction and manufacture of precision cameras"; "The Leica Cameras"; "The quest for image quality"; "Optical aberrations and engineering"; "Image evaluation"; and—the crowning glory—"Leica lens reports." The lens report section is 221 pages long and includes, by rough count, detailed profiles of 150 lenses, modern and historical, with many more covered adequately but in groupings (such as "Early Zoom Lenses").

I cannot claim to have "read" this vast book (although readable and engaging, it's a reference work). It did strike me that several of the sections I did read could stand on their own as books by themselves.

Impressively, Erwin not only self-published but also set the book himself, on a MacBook Pro using InDesign. Yet the result doesn't look homemade—it's professional in appearance. Leica Camera AG did not sponsor the publication.

Unfortunately, two limited editions have so far come and gone, and I don't know whether Erwin is planning a third. You might still be able to find copies on eBay.

Altogether a most impressive and beautiful achievement, sure to be prized and greatly valued among Leica fans of all sorts for many years. It takes its place alongside things like Jim Lager's trilogy and Gunter Osterloh's practical guide as one of the great books about this legendary camera marque.

Mike

UPDATE: Stop presses! Erwin informs me that the first edition (labeled "Limited Edition" on the cover, the one I have) which was published in April 2011, was limited to 1250 copies, and sold out in three weeks. The demand was such that Erwin published a second edition of an additional 1000 copies in August 2011, which again sold out in a few weeks. A third and apparently final edition of another 700 copies has just been published! So there's one more chance for Leica fans.

UPDATE #2 (Tuesday morning): Erwin is now sold out of the third edition; he has been swamped with orders. The sellers who might have some unspoken for are Camerabooks in the U.S., Riceball in Singapore, and LFI-Online and Lindemanns Buchhandlung in Germany. (I haven't been able to find a website for Riceball and I didn't find the book at LFI-Online; they might be sold out—although I should stop making assumptions.)

Erwin tells me he has stuck to small editions because he has to pay for the printing himself, and also because his space for storage is limited. I wonder why an enterprising publisher doesn't pick this up and make a commercial reprint of it. The work is already done, and there's certainly a market for it.

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Vivian Maier Book Is Published

I'll have more to say about it in due course, but I just thought you'd want to know that I received Vivian Maier: Street Photographer yesterday. (It's available for pre-order in the U.K. and it's not in stock at The Book Depository yet.)

As you probably already know, Vivian was a Franco-American nanny who photographed obsessively on the street in complete obscurity for many years. Her work was abandoned in a storage locker as she lay dying, only to be rescued by several adventitious purchasers, one of whom was a young man named John Maloof. John soon realized the significance of his acquisition and has been working to stabilize, publicize and disseminate the archive ever since.

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer is the first full-scale publication of her work apart from a show catalog. A special book, in many ways. More anon.

Mike

P.S. Incidentally, my book came well packed and well protected, attached with shrink-wrap to a piece of cardboard inside the shipping box.

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Featured Comment by Sherwood McLernon: "I received my copy yesterday as well and have to say it exceeded my expectations. I think of it as the book that I had hoped The Americans by Robert Frank would have been, but wasn't. I thought the reproductions were excellent and a lot of the subject matter fascinating. All in all a very satisfying book."

Huge Photobook Sale in Chelsea, NYC

When: Friday September 30th, Saturday October 1st, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day and Sunday October 2nd from 12 to 5 p.m.

Where: 526 West 26th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea, Manhattan. Studio/Room 507 on the 5th floor.

5B4 is parting with hundreds of photography and art books that are priced to sell. Many are rare and out of print, some signed or inscribed by the artists. Have been collecting for 25 years and now parting with a selection of my library.

Here's the link.

If I get in the car right now I could make it....

Mike
(Thanks to James Erlandson)

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What Do You Love?

Every time I read a story like that of Frank Driggs, who died a week ago, I'm reminded that a love of photography alone usually isn't enough—it's usually better if it's connected to some larger, deeper love, whether it be nature, family, people, political convictions, architecture, a place, or any one of the thousand and one other possibilities that drive people to want to look at, preserve, and record things that are important to them.

It applies equally to people who take or collect photographs. (Both are collectors, really.) None have written more succinctly or eloquently about this than Bill Jay and David Hurn in their little manual On Being a Photographer. If you've never read it, you must. The conventionally published version is out of print, but it's still available as a print-on-demand (PoD) book or as an eBook from LensWork Publishing.

Mike

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Bestsellers Up to the Minute

 
Matt Weber, NYC 1991, from The Urban Prisoner

What our readers are buying so far this quarter. Just counting Amazon and Amazon U.K., shipped books only (pending orders not counted):

Andre Kertesz (Editions Hazan) (U.K. link), 173 copies

The Urban Prisoner: Photographs by Matt Weber (not available in the U.K.), 32 copies

Ernst Haas: Color Correction (U.K. link), 145 copies

Koudelka: Gypsies (U.K. link), 198 copies. British publisher Thames & Hudson isn't shipping to the U.K. yet, so that's U.S. only. Aperture is the publisher here. (Incredibly, I couldn't get Aperture to email me a few public relations JPEGs for our article—even though they told me they have them prepared and ready to go. I even made a toll call to their PR Department to request them. Web publications get no respect, I tells ya, no respect at all.)

The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes, (U.K. link), 31 copies.

A spread from Ernst Haas: Color Correction, which makes a great
companion piece to Saul Leiter's Early Color

For links for others countries and to The Book Depository, see here.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Jeffrey Goggin: "Geez...I'm five for five! I have to slow down on buying books...one of these days."

How to 'Temper' a New Photobook

Just thought I'd mention this.

As you might know, photobook bindings can actually be quite fragile things.

The first thing I do when I get a new book is to open it gently from the front. Depending on how stiff the binding is you might not want to open it all the way. Then I go through the entire book taking a bunch of pages at at time—five, ten, or 20 depending on the size of the book and the feel of the binding. I open the book at each point and gently press open the binding—not hard enough to stress or crack it and often not as wide as you will eventually want to open it when reading or looking at the book, but enough to flex it and get it to start to relax. This helps keep the binding from "cracking" at some later point.

When taking the pages in bunches, it's preferable to open them in between signatures rather than at signature breaks (the book tends to want to fall open at signature breaks so just part the pages where they seem to want to stay together).

Then I turn the book upside-down and go through it again from the back, doing the same thing again. This helps keep the binding square and prevents it from getting cocked.

A cocked or "slant" binding is when the spine doesn't want to
stay square with the boards.

When you go through only part of a photobook, you might want to open it in a few places in the part of the text block you didn't go through. The binding will naturally get progressively looser with use, and it helps keep the book sound if this process is evened out throughout the volume.

If you notice a spine starting to become cocked, turn the book upside down and page through it from the back, smoothing the fold or break down as you go.

Careful handling of the binding at all times is important to keep the binding from becoming shaken, but the habit of going through the book front-to-back and then back-to-front a few pages at a time when it's brand new does a lot to help keep the binding healthy for the rest of the book's life.

A shaken binding or spine is when the text block becomes quite loose and unstable in the binding case but hasn't fully detached.

Note that the terms "cocked" and "shaken" are technical bookseller's terms, not just random descriptive words. Traditionally, most of the terms booksellers use to describe condition have been carefully worked out by tradition and common agreement.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Tom Passin: "As a former hand bookbinder, I applaud your care. The only change I'd suggest is to alternate bunches from front and back, working your way to the middle, as Phil Cook mentioned in the Comments Section. Also, with a fragile book, you might want to not open it all the way for each batch the first time through, but go through it twice before really flattening the pages."