If Only Four Books....

[Kirk Gittings]

The thread on inspiration got me thinking....always dangerous.

I have a huge collection of photography books, but I always return to just a few. If your house was on fire and you could grab only four LF books to save, what would you choose? Mine I think would be:

"Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs" by Ansel Adams,

"Time in New England" by Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall,

"Edward Weston" by Ben Maddow,

and last but certainly not least

"From the Missouri West" by Robert Adams (but I would have a real hard time giving up "Beauty in Photography").

[Michael Graves]

I have two Aperture editions; Minor White and Wynn Bullock that would be the first ones on the stack. They would be followed by Manzanar by A.A. and IT! by Stephen King.

Oh, you said photography books? Then it would be Wright Morris, Photographs and Words.

[Duane Polcou]

"A Personal Selection" Brett Weston.

"The Place No One Knew - Glen Canyon" Eliot Porter

"Slickrock - Endangered Canyons of the Southwest" Philip Hyde

"Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau" Jack Dykinga

[Michael Jones]

Beauty in Photography, The Daybooks (is that one or two?), My Camera on Point Lobos and Hill & Adamson Photographs.

[Matthew Jackson]

I actually only have four LF books that I can think of but even if I had more I'd certainly grab Scotland's Coast and First Light by Joe Cornish.

[Paul Metcalf]

I probably wouldn't be grabbing my photography books because they're all replaceable. But I do have one autographed copy of John Sexton's Places of Power that I might grab. I think I'd concentrate on my "mostly" irreplaceable Conley field cameras.

[paulr]

robert frank, the americans (taught me how to think about editing and sequencing and crafting a body of work ... still teaching me. and it helps me to be a good patriot)

paul strand, national gallery of art retrospective, edited by sarah greenough and printed by richard benson (humbling. and taught me how to print)

stephen shore, uncommon places (kicked my ass when i discovered it a couple of years ago ... decades after it was first printed. got me thinking about color in new ways. and got me thinking about what i'd been doing in new ways).

john szarkowski, looking at photographs (still amazes me ... so many different kinds of work, so many different visions, so many different ways of looking at everything, always with the goal of seeing more, and seeing more clearly)

ask me in a year and the answers might be different ...

[John Kasaian]

For inspiration:
Summit (Vittorio Sella)
On High (Bradfors Washburn)
A Life in Pictures (Fr. Browne)
A really good issue of View Camera.

For Reference and technique, I"d have different lists with different books, so I'd better keep an empty asbestos cardboard box handy in case the library burns down!

Cheers!

[Jim collum]

Paul Caponigro, Masterworks from Forty Years

Richard Misrach, Chronologies.

Kenro Izu, Passage to Angkor

Michael Kenna, Twenty Year Retrospective Second Edition.

[darr]

my very short list:

Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Notes (Christian A. Peterson)
Sacred Legacy (Edward S. Curtis)
Certain Places (William Clift)
Botanical Dances (Huntington Witherill)