The Most Interesting Photographers Pt. 2

I want to thank everybody who came up with nominations for “most interesting photographer.” There was little concordance, though—and most of the names that were mentioned, I could relate to as being genuinely interesting in some way.

I'm not going to say I could ever do this, because I know I have a history of too much ambitiousness and too little follow through. But I’ve always thought it would be a great idea to write a book along the lines of “Lives of the great photographers.”

Compilations of short biographies have a long an honorable history. Suetonius with his The Twelve Caesars and Plutarch with what I have always known as The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, and what I learned just this morning is really called Parallel Lives. (The book pairs short bios of a Roman personage and an earlier Greek counterpart, heightening their similarities. Rome was once the new kid on the block, hoping to associate itself with the older civilization.) There’s Vasari and his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in the 1500s, and John Aubrey’s Brief Lives in the closing decades of the 1700s, which wasn’t really a book per se but rather a chaotic collection of notes and half finished pieces that had to be whipped into shape by later editors. In more modern times, I once read a collection of short bios of great composers, and Penguin commissioned a series of short biographies from a variety of writers that were published as separate little books. I owned and read many of them, and found the quality was highly variable. My favorite was the bio of Lincoln by Thomas Keneally, the Australian writer who wrote Schindler’s List.

I think the problem writing about photographers would be knowing where to stop. For days now I’ve been thinking of names, or thinking about names you suggested, and invariably I end up at “how could that one be left out?”

I guess photographers just lead interesting lives, that’s all.

Mike

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[Stephen Woolford]

Cecil Beaton and Gail Buckland had a go at what you are considering in The Magic Image published in the late 1970s. It would be interesting to see who might get into a similar book today. The rather chunky and more up to date Oxford Companion to the Photograph edited by Robin Lenman also contains useful biographies of photographers alongside many other interesting photography related entries.

[Frank Gorga]

See "Masters of Photography" by Beaumont & Nancy Newhall, Copyright 1958.

Long overdue for an update. ;-)

[David Aiken]

I think we like to think that we can learn more from the greatest practitioners of an art or technique but a friend of mine, now retired, who used to lecture in the history of music at my local Conservatorium of Music once told me that he had once thought of writing a book about some "second rate" composers, the composers who taught and influenced the great composers.

There's an old gag line which says "those who can do do, those who can't do teach". It seems like a put down but "doing" and "teaching" are different skills and not all "great doers" are "great teachers". I think the people who influenced and taught the greats are worth more attention than they often receive and that the rest of us may have as much to learn from the lives and experience of those people as we have to learn from the lives and experience of the greats.

Perhaps your problem isn't so much one of selection as one of organisation. How many of those interesting names you are contemplating had the same teachers? Perhaps thinking in terms of influence and producing a list of those who taught and influenced your "interesting" photographers could produce a smaller and more useful group to consider writing about while still allowing you to attend to those "interesting" photographers as well.

[John Camp]

And..."Profiles in Courage" by John F. Kennedy.

James Nachtwey would be my nomination for most interesting photographer.

[M. Hartt]

Thames and Hudson has published (2015) a book similar to what you describe: Lives of — The Great Photographers, by Juliet Hacking. https://thamesandhudson.com/lives-of-the-great-photographers-9780500544440

It features about 40 of the usual suspects, with each given about four pages of mostly biographical text, plus their portrait or self-portrait, and one or two examples of their work. It's a nicely produced, high quality book, but to be honest, I personally did not find it to be a particularly notable effort. The entries were just too short to present much more than a very superficial version of each bio, from which the author often extrapolated to offer speculation about the motivations behind the photographer's work. There may have been adequate research behind her thinking, but in most cases there wasn't enough depth presented and her conclusions often seemed simplistic.

For me, the problem with this format was that nearly all the subjects led lives of enough complexity and nuance to make abbreviated bios seem incomplete and lacking. I would have much preferred to have half as many photographers featured, with at least twice the information about each. But I guess that would be a different book.

M. Hartt

[J. Paul Thomas]

There is one additional name which I would like to add to the list of “Most Interesting Photographers”: George Masa. A bit of personal background. When I was a student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville I spent a great deal of time hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains. While browsing in the University Bookstore I came across “Our Southern Highlanders”: by Horace Kephert. Kephert loved the Smokies and eventually teamed up with the Japanese photographer George Masa who was living in Asheville, NC. The two of them became an integral and influential part of the drive to make The Great Smoky Mountains a National Park. A book on George Masa: “George Masa - A life Reimagined” was recently published. Masa has been described as the Ansel Adams of the Smokies.

[V.I. Voltz]

Thomas Keneally wrote Schindler’s Ark. The screenplay for Schindler’s List was written by Steven Zaillian, an American of Armenian descent. Thomas Keneally was a friend of my godfather, the poet Peter Porter, and I met him once at Wordsmith’s, the writer’s cafe at The University of Queensland.

Voltz

[Mark Sampson]

I'll suggest "Dialogue with Photography", interviews with many of the 20th-century's best-known photographers.
Done in the 1970's, all of the interviewees have passed now- which does not diminish the book's value in the slightest. The interviewers/authors are Paul Hill and Thomas Joshua Cooper, if you want to search out a copy.

[Roger Bradbury]

Writing a whole book about great photographers would be a huge project, but a post or posts with brief descriptions of them plus a photo or two would work well on TOP. You could put in links or directions to where more of each photographer's work and more about their lives can be found.

That wouldn't be too hard if you contacted the readers who made suggestions; you could certainly contact me and I could give you info on the two I suggested.