Books that shaped your photographic vision

p.giannakis

p.giannakis

Pan Giannakis
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This post is mostly sparked by curiosity but i see it also as an opportunity for giving some recognition to the photographers who helped us shape the way we see and photograph the world. It is also a sort of continuation from my previous thread about the printed photographic press.

Are there any books that you (metaphorically speaking) carry with you since the beginning of you photographic journey. The sort of book that the pictures feel very familiar to you from the amount of time you spend going through it and studying them. Or a book that landed on your lap early on on your photographic journey and you aspired to match to?

I was lucky to have a copy of the book with pictures from a Greek photographer called Dimitris Harrisiadis.

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I don't remember exactly when I got it, it was early to mid-90s and I was straight away captured by the way he recorded Greece in the 50s and 60s.

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There are some pictures that feel so familiar to me - although I don't know where the following picture is taken, I spent my summers as a kid next to the sea with little taverns like this. This picture feels so familiar.

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What about you guys? Where would you start from? Any photographic books that really stood out for you and helped shape you as photographers?
 
I don't feel I have a vision per se, but early-on, Ansel Adam's trilogy: The Camera, The Negative, The Print influenced and motivated me - more gear than vision :).

Also, I would go to the library and look through photography picture books.
 
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Great topic. Books can be so pivotal in all aspects of life.

As a young small town middle school Catholic boy, I stumbled on a book on Indian philosophy that changed the trajectory of my life. It wasn't a photography book, but I think our aesthetic vision is the sum of who we are, and the ideas that book expressed rippled down through my years and continue to do so.

Among photography books, Andreas Feininger's writings were very influential early on. Later, the writings and pictures of Charles Harbutt, who taught that good pictures are all around us. No exotic lands or experiences required. His "Travelog" and "Departures and Arrivals" are still my favorites.

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Too many to mention. I was a voracious reader of all things photographic.. perhaps the early ones with the biggest impact were Elliott Erwitt, Paul Fusco and Will McBride, Duane Michals and Bert Stern (and some others) in the Masters of Contemporary Photography series (which I later regretted donating to a school library during a spring cleaning frenzy); and Ernst Haas's book The Creation. Erwitt was my favourite. But films were also influential: I watched all the Fellini, François Truffaut and other European art house movies I could get to.

Forgot to mention: Principles of Composition in Photography by Andreas Feininger. Sadly I lent my copy and it was never returned.
 
Lootens On Photographic Enlarging and Print Making
Fred Picker Zone VI Workshop
St. Ansel The Negative The Print
Duane Michals Photographs, Sequences, Texts
The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson
 
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Goodness! So many it boggles my mind. But I think the early books that influences me most today was one of the Aperture books on Henri Cartier-Bresson (sorry, I can't remember the title but it was just a small book of photos) and "The Americans" by Robert Frank (I think I now have four editions of Frank's book). Both books initially confused me because I had it ingrained in me from Day One how pictures were supposed to look and what elements made great photographs. I didn't understand those photographs and I had to really work at it to "get it". That's when I really began to love photography and got into it up to my ears. :)
 
About 1970 or so I discovered a book by Cartier-Bresson in the local library, "The Europeans", a book from the 1950s with a cover by Miro. I was particularly interested in the technical aspect and the composition of the photos, rather than the choice of subjects. That is still the case with Cartier-Bresson's photos. It wasn't until years later that I saw the book "The Americans" by Robert Frank. I also loved Koudelka.

Erik.
 
Two books early on that were given to me...
"The Family of Man" by Edward Steichen was a birthday present from my girlfriend's mom when I was 20 or so.
"Zone VI Workshop" by Fred Picker was given to me from a fellow classmate around the same age.

The Zone VI book explained why I was never really satisfied with most of my images back then...whites not white enough and blacks never deep enough...
The Weston Ranger 9 meter used in the book was something I always wanted...now I own two that I sent to Quality Light Metric to have calibrated and upgraded for modern batteries...
 
Erik van Straten said:
About 1970 or so I discovered a book by Cartier-Bresson in the local library, "The Europeans", a book from the 1950s with a cover by Miro. I was particularly interested in the technical aspect and the composition of the photos, rather than the choice of subjects. That is still the case with Cartier-Bresson's photos. It wasn't until years later that I saw the book "The Americans" by Robert Frank. I also loved Koudelka.

Erik.
Click to expand...
I discovered HCB much much later. In all honesty, I cannot recall coming across his name early on in my photographic journey when I was reading magazines. I discovered his work online after looking at the work of Lessing.
 
It appears that we have some common influences. My brother gave me the The Family of Man exhibition catalogue when I was probably 11 or 12 years old. By then I was also a reader of both Life and the National Geographic Magazine. When a senior in high school we moved into a new school that had a terrific darkroom, and I got involved in the technical side of photography. I still have a copy of Aaron Sussman's The Amateur Photographer's Handbook from around that time from which I learned much important, basic information about the science, if not the art, of photography. A latter influence was the series of books on nature photography by John Shaw.
 
As a teenager the Cartier-Bresson volume in the Aperture series. Second, a book I used to regularly borrow from the library, Elliott Erwitt in the Thames and Hudson Masters of Contemporary Photography series. Years later I found a new copy and bought it. I read it again in the last year. It has a technical section at the back giving details of the circumstances and technical equipment and even settings that made so many of those photographs stick in my mind. And a book by Jacob Deschin, 35mm Photography, I bought when I was 17, a similar mix of art and technique. Famous photographers’ work was given a half page with the other half Deschin’s analysis. Those three completely seminal for me.
 
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