I'm always buying photography books. Usually they're showcases of other photographers work that I find inspirational, however, sometimes, I buy 'how to' books to learn how other photographers are doing things.
The following are some books I recommend that cover both coffee table and educational.
For more than fifty years an international jury has met in Holland under the auspices of the World Press Photo Foundation to choose the world’s finest photographs. This is universally recognized as the definitive competition for photographic reporting, and photojournalists, newspapers, and magazines throughout the world submit thousands of images in the race to win. The World Press Photo Competition 2009 brings together some 200 images, chosen from 10,000 submissions.
The world is swimming in a sea of photographic images--on billboards, in magazines, glutting the Internet American Photography has been bravely diving into that sea for the last two decades, emerging with the most innovative images of the year. This year's jury--composed of Kathy Ryan, Photo Editor of The New York Times Magazine; Stephen Frailey of the School of Visual Arts Photography Department; David Harris, Design Director of Vanity Fair; Lesley A. Martin, Executive Editor of Aperture; Stephen Mayes of Image Source and World Press Photo; and Greg Pond, Photo Editor for Fortune magazine--has found a treasure trove of images by seasoned professionals and talented emerging photographers. With the near-ubiquity of digital cameras, photographers are testing very new equipment and challenging us with results that are continually pushing this medium further than it has gone before.
Evocative images of buildings and places, seen from the American road. Like many who grew up during the spread of sprawl--with its predictable landscape of housing developments, shopping malls, interstate highways, and big-box construction--acclaimed photographer Jeff Brouws is drawn to places that still embody the vernacular past as well as to those that starkly portray the soulless, franchised American landscape. What began as cultural geography of Main Streets became a visual critique of the myth of upward mobility that created this car-centered, paved-over universe. Some images look outward to the edges of suburbia where sprawl is encroaching upon nature. Others turn inward, documenting the devastated inner cities. All the stunning color photographs reflect the complex beauty and desolation of visual life in our time.
Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents a definitive collection of the original series, much of it never before published or exhibited. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated version of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore's images retain precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which the objects before his lens assume both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. In contrast to Shore's signature landscapes with which "Un-common Places" is often associated, this expanded survey reveals equally remarkable collections of interiors and portraits.
Accompanying the first major television history of this ever more influential artform, this landmark book explores the key events and the key images that have marked the development of photography. At the heart of the book is a quest to understand what makes a truly great photograph. What is it that makes a photograph by Nan Goldin or Henri Cartier Bresson stand out among the millions of others taken by all of us every single day? "The Genius of Photography" examines the evolution of photography in its wider context: social, political, economic, technological and artistic. It brings a critical perspective and a strong aesthetic sense to the subject, but above all it is primarily a narrative history.
Anton Corbijn initiated a new era in portrait photography for the rock and pop music scene with his atmospheric, often melancholy images. One of his unmistakable qualities is his ability to see directly through his subject's masquerades. Taken primarily in black & white, most of Corbijn’s photographs are shot in those quiet moments between performances.
The name of David Bailey is synonymous with photographs of beautiful women. Through his long and extraordinarily successful career, he has focused his camera on many of the most sublime faces of our time. Among Bailey's hundreds of magnificent color photographs is a special pantheon of "beauty" photographs. These are his amazing images of some of the world's most famous models presenting the face of the moment: the "look" that represents the apex of beauty for that particular time. Like the rainbow, this beauty comes and goes. It is fickle and ever changing. But Bailey has spent a lifetime chasing these rainbows and, more often than any other photographer over the years, he has succeeded in capturing the iconic faces of each era, the ones most admired by women and most desired by men.
In January 1962, still in his early twenties, photographer David Bailey fulfilled a dream that dated back to his years in Singapore, when he served in the Royal Air Force. Heading to the U.S., home to the jazz music he so admired, Bailey made his first foreign trip for Vogue, accompanied by his model and girlfriend, Jean Shrimpton.
The Definitive Book on Photography Today; Featuring 121 Artists from Over 30 Countries
The life of an artistic medium lies in the capricious nature of the contemporary art market. Even the heavy-hitters - painting, sculpture and drawing - have fallen victim to this ebb and flow; declared dead one moment, only to be resurrected the next. Now it is photography's turn to contemplate its fate atop this precarious fence. Does it fall backward and play into the taunts that call photography an "obsolete" medium, so stretched and manipulated by its collaborations with other practices that it is rendered indefinable? Or, inspired by globalization, does it jump forward into distinction, with practitioners resuscitating the traditional form of the documentary image?
Best known for his elaborately choreographed, large-scale photographs, Gregory Crewdson is one of the most exciting and important artists working today. The images that comprise Crewdson’s new series, “Beneath the Roses,” take place in the homes, streets, and forests of unnamed small towns. The photographs portray emotionally charged moments of seemingly ordinary individuals caught in ambiguous and often disquieting circumstances. Both epic in scale and intimate in scope, these visually breathtaking photographs blur the distinctions between cinema and photography, reality and fantasy, what has happened and what is to come.
