Hello everyone. My name is Emily, and I’m an addict. It has been nearly three days since I bought my last photobook. Every day I face further temptation, and I almost bought three more yesterday. It’s affecting my whole life, I don’t talk to anyone anymore, I just sit and read them.
Thinking back so long ago, I can remember where my obsession started. I had just discovered street photography, my Leica still had fragments of packing peanuts dusting the hard-to-clean spot behind the shutter dial and I’d read only one photo book in my life, which was more to do with archeology than photography. While traveling for work, I wandered into a thrift store and found a cheap, tiny paperback of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photos. By this point I had heard of other photographers, and my information-vacuuming of the internet had shown me a few of Josef Koudelka’s photographs, I’d come across Vivian Maier. Taking a night class in Darkroom techniques, I could even name half the photographers on the ‘wall of fame’ in the study hall, based solely on their work.
While I liked Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, I was keenly aware that he is a cliché choice for a role model among modern subscribers of the genre. This pushed me to investigate other artists, probably the single most important act that any novice can take and in an extremist rejection of the Cartier-Bresson philosophy, I found myself with a small pocketbook of Moriyama Daido’s work. For those who aren’t familiar, Cartier-Bresson sought beautiful geometry and carefully posed his shots, often waiting hours for the right subject to enter his masterpieces. By contrast, Moriyama creates the ultimate expression of carelessness, never framing, relying on autofocus and hyperfocal distances. It’s from Moriyama I got my habit of never throwing away half-fogged frames from the leader of my films, in their own way they can be beautiful. Moriyama shots are rarely in perfect focus or composition, but are beautiful in their sheer dynamism.
Having identified the extremes; I began to fill in the gap. In a way, it’s a lot like trying to fill a very wide rectangle with only thin vertical lines; each artist represents a very thin sliver of the range between Cartier-Bresson and Moriyama. I began with an easy option, the Magnum Contact Sheets. One of my favorite photo books, and one of the few I own that are not a monograph, this book is literally what it says on the spine; a selection of Magnum photographers’ contact sheets, reprinted with annotation. While the quality of these images was not high; it gave me a broad spread of photographers to learn from. It remains a lovely reference to the classic street photographers, but the poor resolution and haphazard selection did encourage me toward the monographs that make up the bulk of my collection.
From there, I started searching for female photographers, picking up books of Taro, Franck and Maier. As well as the obvious interest I have in their work, they are all quite different from some of the more well known male photographers and I was keen to investigate this ‘female eye’ that so many people have reported. My attempt to consider other genres of photography was fairly unsuccessful meanwhile. While the travel photography in ‘Long Way Round’ is gorgeous, it didn’t prove desperately useful to my education, and the book of classic art nudes turned out to be rather closer to hardcore Victorian pornography. Fascinating, but once again unhelpful. I’ve also continued the magpie like approach to photobooks that started me off, frequently checking thrift stores and discovering several interesting books, including one by McCurry. Perhaps the most treasured of my collection is the worn, but signed copy of ‘The Heart of the Country’ by James Ravilious, edited by his wife Robin. Ravilious spent decades documenting the inner lives of a small English farming community, and his composition and the aesthetics of his exposure and printing have been some of the most inspiration to me of any artist.
My more recent purchases have been based around the stories of the projects; rather than familiarity with the work or the artist. My copy of Minamata by W. Eugene Smith was made after a chance discovery while looking up Japanese street photography. It’s a haunting but beautiful work. Similarly intimate, while of a dramatically different context is Relationship by Drucker and Ernst; a portrait of the lives of two transgender photographers in love, who released an edited selection of their personal photographs, covering the period of their relationship, and of the transitions they each made, starting and ending the opposite sex from each other. My latest book is God Cried, by Catherine Leroy; a war photographer who discovered after she was mentioned in a couple of articles I read recently. While it’s not a subject I even expect to be photographing, the close relationship it has with the other branches of documentary photography and photojournalism makes war photography an important area of study for me.
These books provide a wide range of insights and perspectives; from professional journalists such as Koudelka, Smith and Leroy; through to very personal approaches, like Maier and Drucker/Ernst. They show dramatic differences in aesthetic, from the sharp and high contrast images of Bresson to the soft tonality of Ravilious and through to the blurred photocopy of Moriyama. Each one teaches me more about ways to shoot, ways to see and ways to think. Do I recommend this approach to other photographers? Daily. The cost of a used digital Leica would buy my entire collection five to ten times over. Lovely as such a camera may be, it adds nothing to a person’s artistry or skill and can sometimes distract from the important components of taking a good photograph. Even in the film world, the temptation for wider or faster or more creative lenses is strong, as well as experimentation with different formats and films that again add little to nothing to the photographer. I continue to hold to the view that education and practice are the sole components of any skill, and the quality or prestige of the tools one uses are never a contributor, nor rarely a limiting factor.
Naturally not everyone has the space or funding for their own library of photography, but many libraries have surprisingly good selections and getting on friendly terms with your librarian is an excellent way to aid this further or rectify it if it is not the case. An hour spent curled up with a Ravilious book is far better spent than a year of reading product reviews on the web, and at least as educational as a whole day of shooting, developing and printing. I’ll never give up my addiction, because I find it healthy and wise to indulge in. For those who haven’t discovered this joy yet I have a simple piece of advice.
Buy books, not megapixels.
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