In recent years Angel has been concentrating on shooting the flora, fauna, and landscapes of China. 
What I’m Reading … is an abbreviated review – or just a mention – of book(s) that I’m reading and feel worthy of a mention and recommendation.
The Passionate Photographer: Ten Steps Toward Becoming Great, Steve Simon
From the Publisher’s Description:
This book will encourage you to determine what you want to say with your photography, then translate those thoughts and feelings into strong images. It is both a source of inspiration and a practical guide, as photographer Steve Simon distills 30 years of photographic obsession into the ten crucial steps every photographer needs to become great at their passion.
I am finding that this book does as good a job as any book I have seen at synthesizing and integrating practical advice and concrete instructions with a thoughtful and stimulating examination of how to develop a personal photographic vision and achieve it. The book is far-reaching. Chapter 2, for instance, discusses the development of a passion for photography but also in specific and clear detail the interaction of meter, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and light. Steve looks at the use of the histogram in detail and also explores the pros and cons of shooting automatic, manual or aperture-priority. (Like me, Simon shoots most of his images aperture-priority.)
Chapter 3 gets into what Simon calls “working the photograph.” Chapter 5 discusses how to get out of your comfort zone. Chapter 6 looks at shooting people and creating better portraits, both posed and candid. And there’s more.
This is a great book for both experienced photographers and serious novices. I recommend it. The Passionate Photographer: Ten Steps Toward Becoming Great, Steve Simon
["What I'm Reading" is a post consisting of less than a full review of a book but rather a more concise mention about something I'm currently reading and find interesting enough to write something about.]
I’ve been a fan of Patti Smith for ages. My respect and admiration for her grew even more after the publication year ago of her award-winning reminiscence of life in New York City with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids
Now, Patti Smith has published a volume of photographs, Patti Smith: Camera Solo (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art)
Smith documents places she has been and people she has loved, not with traditional travel pictures or portraits, but with something much simpler yet more full or personal meaning – Robert Mapplethorpe’s hands, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter, Susan Sontag’s grave, a wreath in a window of a Moscow store, Susan Sontag’s grave in Paris. Smith photographs things that carry a connection to poetry and literature important to her.
The photographs are accompanied by a very entertaining and illuminating, candid, interview with Patti Smith by Susan Lubowsky Talbott. But it is not merely because of this revealing interview that one gets the sense viewing these images that one is looking directly into Patti Smith’s soul. She photographs almost as an act of love.
The nature of the Polaroid camera imposes certain limitations, and it is in Patti Smith’s personality to approach her images so directly and personally. But I think all photography would benefit if the photographer approached her/his subjects with such directness and simplicity. Smith’s images are not “street photography” by any means, but I’m reminded of the work of one such as Henri Cartier-Bresson (Masters of Photography Series)
In Smith’s case, the meaning and significance of the images is even greater because, unlike with Cartier-Bresson and others, we know that the images are ones that hold personal significance to Smith.
A most interesting work, highly recommended. (Patti Smith, Camera Solo. 2011. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Yale University Press
["What I'm Reading" is a post consisting of less than a full review of a book but rather a more concise mention about something I'm currently reading and find interesting enough to write something about.]
Posted in "What I'm Reading", Photography, Reviews
Tagged books, Camera Solo, Patti Smith, Photography, polaroid, what I'm reading
I found At Home and Abroad by Cole Weston in Santa Monica at Hennessey + Ingalls Bookshop. Published by Aperture in 1998, both new and used copies are still available from many sources. Here’s an →Amazon link
Here is an enlarged version of the iconic cover image, shot on the wild Big Sur coast.
Cole Weston, "Surf and Headlands" California, 1958.
Although Edward Weston’s classic images are all in black and white, Cole Weston was an early adopter of Kodachrome and became a pioneer and leading exponent of color photography. The Weston clan is most closely associated with California, especially Carmel and the Big Sur coast. Cole especially is responsible for many great images close to home. But he also photographed widely across the US and abroad. At Home and Abroad, published just a few years before his death, includes a wide range of his best images from California and across the US and the world from France to New Zealand.
The vast majority of Cole Weston’s images here are landscapes, but they are very personal landscapes. I find some of the most remarkable images in At Home and Abroad to be the nudes incorporated into the environment.
From Paul Wolf’s Introduction:
[Cole’s landscapes … are] characterized by openness to inspiration. His work is fresh, spare, uncluttered… His photography works on purely emotional, dramatic, and aesthetic planes. The lasting value of the pictures is that the viewer, ten, twenty, or thirty years later, can still experience what the photographer felt when the shutter fired.
Wolf quotes a fellow Carmel resident of Weston’s:
Weston’s focus on the landscape may strike some as too traditional. But Webber stresses that “On the East Coast. they may think the straight landscape is dead, but on the West coast, we don’t buy that. You won’t hear it from people like Cole, who were raised next to places like Point Lobos.
Cole Weston, At Home and Abroad. Aperture, 1998.
["What I'm Reading" is a post consisting of less than a full review of a book but rather a more concise mention about something I'm currently reading and find interesting enough to write something about.]
Flower, Photography by Christopher Beane, Text by Anthony Janson. 2008, Artisan, New York
This book is astonishing. I discovered this book while bookstore browsing recently. It contains the most astounding flower photography I have ever seen and also some of the most lucid and perceptive written commentary about photography.
Architectural Digest described Christopher Beane as the “love child of Robert Mapplethorpe and Georgia O’Keeffe.” Bean’s flower images – and the progression of images and themes over time – must be seen to be believed. I find them, as a photographer interested in photographing flowers, deeply inspiring, though Beane sure sets a high standard! These flower images are wild, adventuresome, daring. They penetrate the depths of the flower’s existence and essence. They show us, in huge images with the most brilliant and vivid hues, flowers that are at once familiar and vibrantly, excitingly, new.
Why didn’t I discover this book until now? Absolutely incredible!
Flower, Photography by Christopher Beane, Text by Anthony Janson. 2008, Artisan, New York
["What I'm Reading" is a post consisting of less than a full review of a book but rather a more concise mention about something I'm currently reading and find interesting enough to write something about.]
Posted in "What I'm Reading"
Tagged Anthony Janson, books, Christopher Beane, flower images, flower photography, Flowers, Photography, vivid hues
