The Pillar is a sort of follow up, sort of, to Stephen Gill’s Night Procession, if only that 1) it came, as it has, two years or so after the previous volume; 2) that it likewise employed a motion-activated camera and little (active) authorial input; and 3) that the format of the book (jacket design) and text (from Karl Ove Knausgård) are very similar. You can also find it in a bundle with Night Procession direct from Gill’s imprint Nobody Books.

But that’s where similarities end…

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Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities is the fifth book in Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, and it’s a worthy entry to the collection. I’ve learned a few things from the other books in the series—Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude, Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image, Larry Fink on Composition and Improvisation, and Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment—and while I’m not a portrait photographer, not much anyway, I’ve gleaned some good insights from Bey through this book.

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Patrick Demarchelier: Fashion Photography is the second, or other book in the two volume series of American Photographer’s Master Series of workshop-type books from 1989, the other being William Albert Allard: The Photographic Essay. Like its litter mate, Fashion Photography reads like very long puff profile piece from a mass market hobby magazine.

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