Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment is the most recent (last?) volume in Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, and was published in 2015, shortly before Mark’s death. As with other volumes in the series, it’s full of wisdom, acquired through decades of professional photographic practice, and for under $30, probably about as close as I’m …
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Larry Fink on Composition and Improviation is the second (I think) volume in Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series,* the second one I acquired, and didn’t initially find much it in to apply to my own practice. But after spending a few months with it, I find some of his ways of looking keep popping into my head …
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In 1974, Stephen Shore, always ready to explore new photographic tools and techniques, acquired a Stereo Realist camera and began exploring “the puzzle of how to most effectively translate the real world into a successful “3-D” image given the particulars of the technology. ‘I was interested in seeking out situations in which the camera was doing …
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For Memory City, Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb took five trips to Rochester, NY over the year following Kodak’s bankruptcy, when Kodak, and, indeed film photography in toto, seemed almost certainly on its last legs. Thankfully, by the time Webb and Norris Webb finished their trips, and certainly by the time Memory City came out, Kodak …
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Slant Rhymes (La Fabrica, 2017) is a collection of photographs from Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb that explores the relationships between their work. After reading/flipping through their excellent Aperture Workshop book on Street Photography and the Poetic Image, I needed more Rebecca Norris Webb photographs in my life, and quickly ordered this book and Memory City (review …
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My affair with Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series of books started with Todd Hido’s incredible on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude. Later on, I picked up Larry Fink’s on Composition and Improvisation, thanks to a recommendation I saw on Twitter (review forthcoming), and before I knew it, I hunted down and picked up copies of the other two …
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Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) is an incredible collection of Muholi’s self portraits, rendered huge, capturing and taking control of the colonial imaginings of black female bodies, as domestic workers, enslaved peoples, witches and soothsayers, making them all her own and forcing viewers to confront her power, her strength, her gaze, on her …
