Writing about Steve McCurry's new book The Unguarded Moment
the other day and thinking about how well it "goes with" his earlier book Looking East
reminded me that for some while now I've been meaning to write a post about books in pairs. I have a quirky tendency to shelve books next to other books that I sense they fit with. Sontag
sits next to Barthes
, Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word is shelved next to John Berger's Ways of Seeing
. Why? I guess sometimes the pairings are obvious; sometimes it's because the two books nurture or amplify each other, sometimes it's because I feel they balance each other out or contradict. I guess it has no real meaning...it's just a personal idiosyncrasy. I'm still not sure I'm ever going to inflict that particular essay on you.
But as I was thinking about it again I was poking around on Amazon seeing what's in print and what's not, and I came across David Pye's lovely little book The Nature and Art of Workmanship again. This rare little gem hasn't always been easy to get in the 41 years since it was published, so I thought I'd just throw out another recommendation for it for whatever it's worth. Pye was Professor of Furniture Design at The Royal College of Art in London from 1948 to 1974, and this book pertains mostly to furniture...on the surface. The book is really about the philosophy of craftsmanship, however. Read it with a flexible and open mind, and you can apply many of his ideas to many other fields, to many arts and most crafts. It can be easily seen as pertaining to the "crafting" of photographs (fine art prints, at the very least) and in some ways, I think, even cameras(!). I know that ever since I first read it I've found it helpful to think of his concepts of "the workmanship of risk" and "the workmanship of certainty" with regard to photographing—in a way it's what Garry Winogrand was talking about in that marvelous and thought-provoking little video we linked to a while back.
Right now, here, today, I'm not going to jump into the deep sea of talking about photography's relationship to craft, either historically or the way it's been changing again lately. It's a big subject. In any event, this is not a book that's directly about photography. But it's one of those rare books in which someone who's been thinking for a lifetime about a subject he knows deeply makes an attempt to share his hard-gained wisdom with others. In that way it's the opposite of much of the cookie-cutter, research-and-regurgitate, processed, pasteurized book product that passes for being publishable all too often these days. I certainly enjoyed it when I read it, and I treasure it on my shelves now, and I recommend it to you with feeling if it sounds like it might appeal.
ADDENDUM: Well for Pete's sake, I forgot the U.K. link. And Prof. Pye was a Londoner, too. Sorry.
Featured Comment by Dale: "Just for perspective, I keep my copy of Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse of History next to my Gary Larson collection."
Featured Comment by Calvin Amari: "Sontag next to Barthes, eh? Something tells me this is a charged statement.
"Might it be that when you see statements, for example, like this in Sontag's On Photography: 'For politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common than [a frontal view]: a gaze that soars rather than confronts, suggesting instead of the relation to the viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation to the future.'
"...and this from Barthes' 'Photography and Electoral Appeal' written decades earlier: 'A three-quarter face photograph, which is more common than [a frontal view], suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost in the future, it does not confront, it soars and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined.'
"...placing one volume in close physical proximity to the other is your symbolic editorial correction for the fact that Sontag didn't have the courtesy of even crediting the original with a footnote in this and similar examples? Just wondering."
Mike replies: Ah, that ill-defined line between "influence" and plagiarism. (Which brings to mind the question, how does one reproduce a Sherrie Levine in a book?) Your comparison of these quotes raises one ugly specter: that I might have found Barthes so difficult merely because his language (in translation) is less clear....
Anyway, there's that, and that they seemed to have had such a mutual admiration society going, and that their writings and all the related fuss were roughly contemporaneous, and that the books are roughly the same size and thickness...regarding that last, I'm not proud—I didn't say this habit of mine strictly made any sense.
Featured Comment by Glenn Gordon: "Here's a bad PDF of a piece I wrote in 1996 for Woodwork magazine on David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship. It was good to see your mention of the book—it was seminal for many craftsman that I know.
Download "The Workmanship of Risk" by Glenn Gordon
"Speaking of pairing books, I’ve always shelved Pye's next to Soetsu Yanagi's The Unknown Craftsman
(or at least I did until some unknown borrower failed to return the Yanagi; it’s one of those books I keep having to replace, lending it too often to people who disappear.)"
On a more basic level, I was in a small Kennebunk (ME) bookshop recently and the owner kept his cookbooks and his diet books in the same case.
dale
Posted by: dale | Monday, 29 June 2009 at 08:18 PM
Another non-photographic book on craft that has much to offer photographers is Stephen King's On Writing: a memoir of the craft. Regardless of how you feel about King's potboiler oeuvre, his approach to the writing craft is bracing. His great commandment: "read a lot; write a lot." He delves at great length into the nuts 'n bolts details of self-discipline, learning from other authors, commitment to the work, and getting steadily better in the process of refining it. But King's 'commandment' is the key. For photographers the obvious equivalent is to study the best images you can find, and to create your own body of work by shooting. A lot. Then learn from the results, and shoot some more. Dealing with 'writer's block', creative doldrums, trying to nurture the occasional and unexpected flash of potential in your work; it's all in there. Good stuff all around.
I'm not the first person to point out the applicability of "On Writing" to photography; I just can't recall where I read it before. I'd be rather embarrassed if Mike Johnston was the source.
Posted by: Geoff Wittig | Monday, 29 June 2009 at 09:14 PM
I had chance to mention in a comment on the darkroom/woodshop thread that I spent years working professionally in wood/furniture crafts. I read David Pye's book many years ago and it is truly a seminal work. This book is as much about crafting a life as it is about crafting objects.
Posted by: John Sartin | Monday, 29 June 2009 at 10:11 PM
Mike,
Thanks for the post about this.
Glenn Gordon, nice piece, about Pye and Krenov. I'm unaware of Pye, but Krenov has been both inspiration, and support for a life of art and craft.
Posted by: Bron Janulis | Monday, 29 June 2009 at 10:19 PM
"Regardless of how you feel about King's potboiler oeuvre, his approach to the writing craft is bracing. His great commandment: 'read a lot; write a lot.'" --Geoff Wittig
This goes back to the discussion we were having about the efficacy of "One Leica, one lens, one year." I argued then that I thought it would be much better to get a digital camera and shoot as much as you could, whenever you could, chimping after every shot. I don't doubt that you could learn something with the "one" theory, especially if you were sort of a mid-career art photographer who'd lost his way -- but for everybody else, I think there's nothing better than looking at a lot of pictures, and shooting all the time. The sheer quantity of work has an effect all of its own, and I think it's there that you find your real vision, if you have one.
I once had a karate teacher who said that the American disease is to ask too many questions, and think and argue too much; he said there was great benefit in just doing it. Just do it, and imitate the best people around you, and when you've done it long enough, you'll be good. I think the same applies to photography and writing -- to all of the arts, really -- though I'm not sure that everybody quite understands that "doing" it might involve 60 hours a week.
Posted by: John Camp | Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 01:44 AM
[King's] great commandment: "read a lot; write a lot." He delves at great length into the nuts 'n bolts details of self-discipline
Eh. Pity he didn't always follow his own prescriptions. King is a terrific storyteller, but there was a period when he suffered* from the (usual?) I'm-a-big-name-writer, don't-touch-my-prose syndrome -- the writer's equivalent of dumping all of your photos, successful and unsuccessful alike, on unsuspecting public. The best example was when he published Green Mile, which very obviously greatly benefited from the size limits the serialisation imposed upon it.
* I mostly stopped reading his books when he turned towards more mundane matters instead of supernatural horror. You can say he borrowed elements from various writers but their juxtaposition was fresh and interesting.
Posted by: erlik | Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 01:47 AM
I laughed when I read this - I thought I was the only one! I also keep certain books next to each other, for example Nietzsche's 'Genealogy of Morality' lives next to 'Crime and Punishment'.
I agree that reading books not specifically relevant can be enlightening; I found this with Aristotle's writings on the necessity of balancing influences and elements when creating art of any form.
Posted by: Karin | Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 02:37 AM
I remember you saying you always loathed that book, The Painted Word by Wolfe.....but it takes up space on your shelf..? Now that I think about it, I've got books I'm too lazy to take to the used book store also, and they seem to have a sort of inertia in their spot..
best wishes
Posted by: Greg Smith | Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 09:53 AM
re: Pye- Mike, please write something about the workmanship of risk vs. the workmanship of certainty wrt. photography....it sounds like the basis of a great essay.
Posted by: robert | Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 10:11 AM
The Unknown Craftsman "...(it’s one of those books I keep having to replace, lending it too often to people who disappear.)"
Might those "people" not be the "Crafty Unknown"?
Posted by: michael martin morgan | Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 12:00 PM
In pondering your recommendation of the workmanship book it brought to mind another non-photography book that goes to the same point of "different subject-equal relevance". That book would be "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig, which as we know has little to do with maintaining a vehicle and a world of thought on quality and value and even ethics. All very applicable in our pursuits photographically.
Posted by: Steve Braun | Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 01:16 PM
> that I might have found Barthes so difficult merely because his language (in translation) is less clear...
Don't worry : the translation seems a quite good one, then. The guy is not always easy to follow...
See eg http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9miotique [fr]
Posted by: Nicolas | Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 04:39 PM
I enjoyed reading the "The Workmanship of Risk" by Glenn Gordon via the PDF he supplied. It's a nice, very readable primer that has catalysed some thoughts on photographic printing.
Posted by: Rod S. | Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 08:08 PM