Following my tradition of slipping a random book into the blog, and the fact it is now Bank holiday Monday at 3pm and I have sod all chance to develop the weekends Film and print it by tonight, last week I bought “The Art of Photography” Life Library of Photography. I had banned myself from buying more photography books, but this was £4 so God will forgive me. Hidden on the bottom shelf of a National Trust, honesty box micro bookshop, I noticed it. A quick flip though looked promising; I returned after a short walk around the grounds to find a woman standing in front of it for all eternity. Being too polite to ask her to move, I ended up checking Amazon on my phone where it was also £4. You do not need the whole backstory other than to say, if a woman stands in front of a book you wanted, preventing you getting anywhere near it, it is a sure sign that book is going to be really good.
The Art of Photography made me realise I am not some pretentious prick, arty farty wanker wanting to talk about the reasons for making images, it is simply too many photographers we meet in photography clubs, socials and on forums want to ensure the dunce’ification of photography talk. Earlier books I read by Brooks Jensen paved the way to the reader to think about images and the reasons for making them, not photography techniques. The Art of Photography is just a book from a time in the 80s where that was normal, everybody understood that is what good photography was about. Somewhere in time, photography has been captured by a group who have no interest in such things, leaning towards shutting down such thinking in others.
When I think back, to a time only a decade or so ago, it was common to bump into someone going on a country walk with a Rolleicord and we’d start a conversation about landscape photography, what we thought of Ansel Adam’s and the kinds of photos they liked. Once at work, some hard Newcastle guy with no interest in taking up photography himself just pulled out his phone and said, “You got to see these images, Isabela Jedrzejczyk at the Northumberland Arms. The Jungle portraits. Just look that woman in this photo, imagine the life’s she’s had, such characters”. Fast forward today, in all the conversations from photographers, those supposedly passionate about it are mainly retarded in terms of the meanings behind images.
The Art of photography book starts off quite predictably with chapters on composition, colour, texture etc, then suddenly catapults you into the concept, what is your response to the subject? It had an interesting project where it asked photographers to respond to a mannequin, the city, and the concept of “love”. It was fascinating to see how varied the approaches where. They took images into much more radical directions than you will normally see on any online image sharing websites of today. It goes further asking you to consider such things like; if finished work needs to even be a flat print. I do wonder of Brooks Jensen read the Art of Photography but it’s similarities in breaking out of the photographer mindset are clear.
