What's your favorite book on...

[Mark Sawyer]

And BTW, while I agree with Tim about the value of looking at other photographers' work, I sometimes think we're like poets who only listen to other poets and read only poetry, talking to ourselves, which is why so much photography (especially large format) today seems so redundant. At least be aware of this.

[Christian Marquess]

One book that I found particularly helpful is Michael Freeman's "Image: Designing Effective Pictures." He delves deeply into the principles of graphic design and has a great section on color theory. This book is out of print but available on the used market at fairly hefty prices....check Amazon.com.

[David R Munson]

I am currently reading John Daido Loori's The Zen of Creativity for a second time and am finding it even more engaging than the first time. While obviously a book of more interest to those also interested in Zen Buddhism, I think a lot of different people could get something out of it. Loori is himself an accomplished photographer, and he speaks to a good extent of his relationship with Minor White.



I've found, personally, that the texts that have had the greatest impact on my photography are the ones that have the greatest impact on my life in general. Photography is a huge part of my life, and so anything that changes the core values or processes of my life has an immediate and visible effect on my photography. To that end, books like Pirsig's ZAMM and Lila, Bernard McGrane's The Un-TV and the 10mph Car, and countless books on Zen practice have had a major impact on my work. Books that deal with visual theory and cognition as well as books on the theory and value of the arts have also done a lot for me.



I think what I'm getting at is that one shouldn't necessarily limit the breadth of one's search in this case to books directly dealing with composition alone. There's a lot more out there than just that.

[Bobby Sandstrom]

Thanks all for your help!

Bob

[Edward (Halifax,NS)]

Go to art galleries as well. You can get alot out of looking at other artists' works whether they are paintings, photographs or sculptures. I went yesterday to a Rodin exhibit and took away a great deal.

Mark, I saw one of Alfred Stieglitz's photos yesterday. It was a portrait of Auguste Rodin.

[tim atherton]

The problem I find with many of the books on colour theory (and perception and so on) is that they are just that - theories. They come in an out of fashion (try reading some of the old colour theroy rules fromn the 18th and 19th centruay academies for example). And while I often find something of value to draw from in each of them, it can be all to easy to fall into turing them into a set of rules to work and compose by.

"And BTW, while I agree with Tim about the value of looking at other photographers' work, I sometimes think we're like poets who only listen to other poets and read only poetry, talking to ourselves, which is why so much photography (especially large format) today seems so redundant. At least be aware of this."

Exactly Mark - which is why I suggested looking at other forms of visual at - I'd add watch good films (maybe bad ones too) - Kurasawa, Eisentstein, Kieslowski, right through to Coppola (Father and daughter) and beyond etc.

Read good books - novels and poetry (I wish I could photogorpah like Murakami and W.G. Sebald write), read the collected letters of Van Gogh, study some architecture and so on

Getting a bit closer back to the question the gist of the question -Try Paul Klee's Diaries or his "Pedagogical Sketchbook" or Corbusiers "Journey to the East" (I think it's called, offhand) or Kandisnky's "Point & Line to Plane" and "Concerning the Spiritual in Art"

[Mark Sawyer]

Thinking about it, I'm tempted to say study the composition of what is already there without your photograph. Nature has her own rules of composition, especially apparant in biology of all sorts. Study the composition in the lines of trees, the curves of a body, the winding strata of a canyon. Walk through an urban landscape and you see a completely different set of rules in play, less complex and varied, but probably equally challenging to interpret.

Then again, what do you want from your photographic works? Do you hope your images to echo the subject, add something more, make a comment about it, reduce it to an essence, use it as a metaphor for something else entirely? Steiglitz found Japanism in his early views of New York, modern art in the Steerage, at other times moody nocturns, harbor scenes that recalled romantic English landscape paintings, skyscraper landscapes discovering a new human condition... and his compositions were harmonious to each image's substance.

The worst thing a photographer can do is find a subject that truly speaks to him and, as he sets up his tripod, think "hmmm, I'll put the horizon here for the rule of thirds, put this shadow in that zone, and stick that kid in for scale..." No better than a "poet" who writes thinking " ten syllables in this line, eight in the next, be sure to rhyme at the end, and maybe some clever alliteration. Yup, that's art!"

I think Minor White was on to something when he spoke of the "zen system."

[Kirk Gittings]

"There were men, women and children on the lower level of the steerage.…The scene fascinated me: A round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle. I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one another—a picture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vision that held me…"
- Alfred Stieglitz, 25 or so years after making "The Steerage"

In the 1970's I took a class with Beaumont Newhall, the distinguished photo historian, who knew Steigltiz intimately. While he considered Steiglitz a profoundly important photographer, he considered this statement about "The Steerage" a "post-exposure rational".

[Mark Sawyer]

A "post-exposure rational(e)"??? Good heavens! Would any photographer really do such a thing? ; )

I'm sure Stieglitz made quite a few statements for dramatic effect; I'd expect no less from someone who ran around the New York streets at night in a long flowing black cape. But he published "the Steerage" not long after it was made, and thought of it as an important work (which it was) early on.

I remember stories of photographers making the holy pilgramage with their portfolios to his New York galleries, showing their work to the master, hoping for some positive word, some turning back in fear in the hallway outside... (Stieglitz was notoriously brutal in his criticism of work he did not like, which was most of what he saw.) The Ansel wrote wonderfully of his trepidation upon presenting his work to Stieglitz for the first time.

Too bad there is no equivalent "great pilgramage" to some photographic master today...

[Ellis Vener]

The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore.