Larry Fink on Composition and Improvisation: The Photography Workshop Series


Larry Fink - 2014
    Its goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, Larry Fink--well-known for his layered pictures in social settings--explores composing photographs and improvising within a scene to create images with both feeling and meaning. Through words and photographs, he reveals insight into his own practice and discusses a wide range of creative issues, from connecting with the subject in front of the lens to shaping a vision that is authentic. Photographer Lisa Kereszi, a student of Larry Fink, provides the introduction.Larry Fink (born 1941) has been a professor at Yale University School of Art; Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture; Parsons the New School for Design; and Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Currently, he is a tenured professor of photography at Bard College. His work has been widely exhibited in the United States, including solo exhibitions at Light Gallery, New York; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Lisa Kereszi is a photographer and educator. She is now the director of undergraduate studies at the Yale University School of Art, where she has taught since 2004. She has published five books, including "Fun and Games" and "Joe's Junk Yard." Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Brooklyn Museum, and has appeared in the "New Yorker," "Harper's" and the "New York Times Magazine."

Garry Winogrand


Garry Winogrand - 2013
    But Winogrand was also an avid traveler and roamed extensively around the United States, bringing exquisite work out of nearly every region of the country.This landmark retrospective catalogue looks at the full sweep of Winogrand’s exceptional career. Drawing from his enormous output, which at the time of his death included thousands of rolls of undeveloped film and unpublished contact sheets, the book will serve as the most substantial compendium of Winogrand’s work to date. Lavishly illustrated with both iconic images and photographs that have never been seen before now, and featuring essays by leading scholars of American photography, Garry Winogrand presents a vivid portrait of an artist who unflinchingly captured America’s swings between optimism and upheaval in the postwar era.

Joel Meyerowitz: How I Make Photographs


Joel Meyerowitz - 2001
    Each volume is dedicated to the work of one key photographer who, through a series of bite-sized lessons and ideas, tells you everything you always wanted to know about their approach to taking photographs. From their influences, ideas and experiences, to tech tips and best shots. The series begins with Joel Meyerowitz, who will teach you, among other essentials: How to use a camera to reclaim the streets as your own, why you need to watch the world always with a sense of possibility, how to set your subjects at ease, and the importance of being playful and of finding a lens that suits your personality.

The Moment It Clicks: Photography Secrets from One of the World's Top Shooters


Joe McNally - 2008
    These on-location workshops are usually reserved for a handful of photographers each year, but now you can learn the same techniques that Joe shares in his seminars and lectures in a book that brings Joe's sessions to life.What makes the book so unique is the "triangle of learning" where (1) Joe distills the concept down to one brief sentence. It usually starts with something like, "An editor at National Geographic once told me..." and then he shares one of those hard-earned tricks of the trade that you only get from spending a lifetime behind the lens. Then, (2) on the facing page is one of Joe's brilliant images that perfectly illustrates the technique (you'll recognize many of his photos from magazine covers). And (3) you get the inside story of how that shot was taken, including which equipment he used (lens, f/stop, lighting, accessories, etc.), along with the challenges that type of project brings, and how to set up a shot like that of your own.This book also gives you something more. It inspires. It challenges. It informs. But perhaps most importantly, it will help you understand photography and the art of making great photos at a level you never thought possible. This book is packed with those "Ah ha!" moments--those clever insights that make it all come together for you. It brings you that wonderful moment when it suddenly all makes sense--that "moment it clicks."

Elliott Erwitt: Snaps


Murray Sayle - 2001
    A member of the prestigious Magnum agency since 1954, he has photographed all over the world and his images have been the subject of many books and exhibitions.Containing over 500 pictures, over half of which have never been published before, Elliott Erwitt Snaps is a unique and comprehensive survey of his work. From famous images such as Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon arguing in Moscow in 1959 and Marilyn Monroe with the cast of the movie The Misfits, to his many more personal images of places, things, people and animals, Erwitt's unmistakable, often witty, style gives us a snapshot of the famous and the ordinary, the strange and the mundane over a period of more than half a century, through the lens of one of the period's finest image-makers.The book is arranged in nine chapters, each with a one-word title: Look, Move, Play, Read, Rest, Touch, Tell, Point, Stand. For Erwitt, whose photography is a study and celebration of life, these are the basic actions of life - the things people do. The photographs are not intended to illustrate the words, but the words act as a means of grouping and organizing, making broad connections and also playing with pun and ambiguity, in keeping with the visual games Erwitt plays.

On Street Photography and the Poetic Image


Alex Webb - 2014
    In this new and innovative series, Aperture works with the worlds top photographers, many of whom also teach, to publish their core thinking on photography making their experience, insight, and knowledge accessible to a wider audience, including students. Each title in the series will provide an essential primer on the photographers area of expertise and creative process. The key points of their practice are presented in the photographers own words, and will answer the questions they are asked most frequently. The commentary will accompany a selection of fifty photographs, iconic images by each featured photographer, as well as key images by others that have influenced their thinking and work.

Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude: The Photography Workshop Series


Todd Hido - 2014
    Its goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each book features the creative process and core thinking of a photographer told in their own words and through pictures of their choosing, and is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, Todd Hido explores the genres of landscape, interior and nude photography, with emphasis on creating images from a personal perspective and with a sense of intimacy. Through words and photographs, he also offers insight into his own practice and discusses a wide range of creative issues, including mining one's own memory and experience as inspiration; using light, texture and detail for greater impact; exploring the narrative potential activated when sequencing images; and creating powerful stories with emotional weight and beauty.Todd Hido (born 1968) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist. He is well known for his photography of urban and suburban housing across the United States, and for his use of detail and luminous color. His previous books include House Hunting (2001), Outskirts (2002), Roaming (2004) and Between the Two (2007). He is a recipient of a Eureka Fellowship and a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Visual Arts Award, and is represented by Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. He is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts.Gregory Halpern received a BA in history and literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. His third book of photographs, entitled A, is a photographic ramble through the streets of the American Rust Belt. His other books include Omaha Sketchbook and Harvard Works Because We Do. He currently teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is the coeditor of The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture 2013).

American Surfaces


Stephen Shore - 1999
    It features unpublished photographs from Shore's influential work that has been widely exhibited in the US but never captured in a book for the general public.

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography


Roland Barthes - 1980
    Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.

A World History of Photography


Naomi Rosenblum - 1984
    The text investigates all aspects of photography - aesthetic, documentary, commercial and technical - while placing it in historical context. It includes three technical sections with detailed information about equipment and processes. This edition also updates important new international work from the 1980s and 1990s.

The Camera


Ansel Adams - 1980
    It covers everything from "seeing" the finished photo in advance, to lens choices. It is illustrated with many of Ansel Adams most famous images.

Street Photographer


Vivian Maier - 2011
    It is hard enough to find thesequalities in trained photographers with the benefit of schooling and mentors and a community of fellow artists and aficionados supporting and rewarding their efforts. It is incredibly rare to find it in someone with no formal training and no network of peers.Yet Vivian Maier is all of these things, a professional nanny, who from the 1950s until the 1990s took over 100,000 photographs worldwide—from France to New York City to Chicago and dozens of other countries—and yet showed the results to no one. The photos are amazing both for the breadth of the work and for the high quality of the humorous, moving, beautiful, and raw images of all facets of city life in America’s post-war golden age.It wasn’t until local historian John Maloof purchased a box of Maier’s negatives from a Chicago auction house and began collecting and championing her marvelous work just a few years ago that any of it saw the light of day. Presented here for the first time in print, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer collects the best of her incredible, unseen body of work.

The Photographer's Playbook: 307 Assignments and Ideas


Jason Fulford - 2014
    The Photographer's Playbook features photography assignments, as well as ideas, stories and anecdotes from many of the world's most talented photographers and photography professionals. Whether you're looking for exercises to improve your craft--alone or in a group--or you're interested in learning more about the medium, this playful collection will inspire fresh ways of engaging with photographic process. Inside you will find advice for better shooting and editing, creative ways to start new projects, games and activities and insight into the practices of those responsible for our most iconic photographs--John Baldessari, Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jim Goldberg, Miranda July, Susan Meiselas, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Tim Walker and many more. The book also features a Polaroid alphabet by Mike Slack, which divides each chapter, and a handy subject guide. Edited by acclaimed photographers Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern, the assignments and project ideas in this book are indispensable for teachers and students, and great fun for everyone fascinated by taking pictures.Jason Fulford is a photographer and cofounder of the non-profit publisher J&L Books. He has lectured at more than a dozen art schools and universities and is a contributing editor to Blind Spot magazine. Fulford's photographs have been featured in Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, Time, Blind Spot, Aperture, and on book jackets for Don DeLillo, John Updike, Bertrand Russell, Jorge Luis Borges, Terry Eagleton, Ernest Hemingway and Richard Ford. His published books include Sunbird (2000), Crushed (2003), Raising Frogs for $$$ (2006), The Mushroom Collector (2010) and Hotel Oracle (2013).Gregory Halpern received a BA in history and literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. His third book of photographs, entitled A, is a photographic ramble through the streets of the American Rust Belt. His other books include Omaha Sketchbook and Harvard Works Because We Do. He currently teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The Ongoing Moment


Geoff Dyer - 2005
    With characteristic perversity - and trademark originality - THE ONGOING MOMENT is Dyer's unique and idiosyncratic history of photography. Seeking to identify their signature styles Dyer looks at the ways that canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same scenes and objects (benches, hats, hands, roads). In doing so Dyer constructs a narrative in which those photographers - many of whom never met in their lives - constantly come into contact with each other. Great photographs change the way we see the world; THE ONGOING MOMENT changes the way we look at both. It is the most ambitious example to date of a form of writing that Dyer has made his own: the non-fiction work of art.

Composition


David Präkel - 2006
    Whatever other technical skill is involved, if the formal organization of an image is lacking, there is little to hold the interest of the viewer. But what makes a winning composition? Is it about following the rules-or about breaking them?Basics Photography: Composition is divided into six core chapters that cover everything the beginner needs to know to improve their composition, including the basics of composition, exploring the formal elements, how to organize space and time, learning the real world 'rules' and, beyond that, how to use the ideas presented in the book to create original, compelling images. The book is illustrated throughout with photography to inform the mind and inspire the eyes.Includes work by:Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, James Nachtwey, Martin Parr, Marc Riboud, David Hockney, Duane Michals, Harry Callahan and John Darwell, and many more.Includes the following subjects:The basic rules of composition, including viewpoint, perspective and scale; the formal elements, such as point, line, shape, form, texture, pattern, tone and color; how to organize space using frames, balance and space; capturing the passing of time and specific moments, the decisive moment and sequences; applications of composition, featuring landscape, still life, portraiture, documentary, the figure, action and sports, fine art and advertising; finally, finding your own view and the specific considerations of digital imaging.