Close the book
I have been collecting photo books since before I knew I was a photographer. As a kid in school I struggled to read a single page without getting lost or confused, let alone pass a reading comprehension test. Photo books were an easy way to make it feel like I was reading with my classmates without the constant struggle of re-reading the same page a dozen times.
I fell into the stories photographers told with images and followed the echos of visual themes from one book to the next. I learned how to capture emotion. I learned how to escort a viewer through narrative frameworks in the same way that others learned from words. I learned how omitting context or detail in a photograph can be as valuable for the imagination as describing scenes at length in a novel. After years of absorbing the lessons of some of the greatest photographic minds to ever publish work, there is one lesson that stands out:
The best photographs are the ones that you remember when you close the book.
A photograph is made in one second, and only truly great photographs demand more than one second of your attention. The books that I have in my library now, and that I will share below, all contain an image that has been permanently burned into my consciousness.
These following books are all by male photographers.
I will write another journal about my favorite female photographers soon.
Ralph Gibson has a half-century’s worth of lessons on lithography bound in the books he’s published. The space between the photographs is just as important as the images themselves.
Fan Ho was the first street photographer that no one knew about. His eye for light has still yet to be met by any other photographer I’ve come across.
Herb Ritts has a series of nudes that is more informative than a bio textbook and simultaneously more beautiful than the sculptural wing at the Louvre.
Joel Meyerowitz needs a PhD in color. He has unlocked something beyond what we’re seeing and is communicating with feeling.
Sebastião Salgado and Ragnar Axelsson have written (and rewritten) the playbooks for texture, emotion, and substance with long-form projects.