Photography books
I just went through my Amazon Wishlist and removed all the things from it that I’ve picked up in the past couple of months, which was really satisfying. Of course, I want more stuff than I’ll probably ever actually have, but it was great getting to scratch a couple of things off.
There is not a photographic document out there that is more prescient to the current political era than Robert Polidori’s “After the Flood”. I don’t want to harp on that point too much, but this painstaking record of post-Katrina New Orleans resonates far beyond the reporting the destruction reaped on poor, black neighborhoods. Each photograph, of which there are hundreds, is meticulously rendered, yielding a serene, quite portrait of something horrible that can’t and won’t be forgiven.
Of all the people out there who aren’t photographers, Ed Ruscha is probably my favorite. He’s been in a couple of different shows I’ve seen with my Mother while visiting her in Houston last year, and so she gave his book, “Photographer” for my birthday. “I take pictures to do a job, which is to make a book,” Ruscha famously said in the 1960s when he was busy doing projects like Tweny-Six Gasoline Stations, his series of parking lots, or Every Building on the Sunset Strip. They’re all in this book, which is came out alongside his retrospective at the Whitney last year. What a guy.
I bought Alec Soth’s second book “Niagra” in a panic last week after I learned that his first, “Sleeping by the Mississippi” has gone out of print and is impossible to find for less than $350. Soth is one of the contemporary photographers I am most interested in, and I was horrified by the prospect of going without his books. Snatch up “Niagra” while you can If you don’t already have it, I’m sure it will be unavailable soon.
I was in Second Story Books last night, which is a great used bookstore here in DC, poking through the photography section. I go in there from time to time looking for cheap monographs, and I was so excited to see Stephen Shore’s “American Surfaces” sitting there on the shelf that I knocked a whole bunch of stuff down frantically trying to grab it. There was no need for this. There was no one else around.
I have one professor in particular who loves to assign reading from this, and I’ve read various photo-copied chunks of it in the past few years. I bought it used the other day, and one of these days, I’ll get around to reading it front to back. Who doesn’t love and respect Susan Sontag? Nobody. I feel having her books around makes me smarter by proxy, though it’s tempered by the fact that I can’t really stand Annie Leibovitz. But I guess that goes without saying.
I also just got Eggleston’s new book “5×7,” though it’s still sitting here in shrink wrap! I guess I want to open it kind of ceremoniously and then relish every single page.
March 8th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
i love all these books. good picks man.