It’s been many days again since I’ve written here (though I have written a few short entries for PhotoPermit.Org), a good chunk of them consumed by reading. I feel like I’ve had some growth and change in the way I approach picture books. And that’s separate from doing a perhaps nutty thing with photo books: trying to view them through a camera viewfinder, to get a better grasp on what might have been seen by the original shooter (something worth doing once, but if it’s persistent, call a doctor).
No, but I think my new plateau comes from a similar leap of imagination, of having a stronger sense of what was in the maker’s mind for each image: where to stand with the camera, when to press the shutter; how to lay down the colors broadly and then to refine them with each successive stroke of the brush. The reading is slower but the enjoyment deeper.
Since Red Color News Soldier, which I’d written about earlier, I’ve managed to make it through these books:
Picture Books — most new, and a few old friends from the bookshelf:
| Flamingo | Robert Frank |
| Black and White Things | Robert Frank |
| New York to Nova Scotia | Robert Frank |
| U.S. Camera Annual 1958 | contained an insert of |
| proto-Americans Robert Frank | |
| Americans, We | Eugene Richards |
| Phaidon 55 | Eugene Richards |
| A Storybook Life | Philip Lorca-Dicorcia |
| A Kind of Rapture | Robert Bergman |
| Tete á Tete | Henri Cartier-Bresson |
| Portraits | Richard Avedon |
| 1964 | Garry Winogrand |
| Photographs 1934-1975 | W. Eugene Smith |
| Radiant Identities | Jock Sturges |
| People in the Environment | Jonathan Hilton |
| Revelations | Diane Arbus et al |
Not-so-many-pictures Books:
| Emotions Revealed | Paul Ekman |
| The Creative Habit | Twyla Tharp |
| Pictorial Composition and the |
|
| Critical Judgement of Pictures</cite> | Henry Rankin Poore |
| Between the Eyes | David Levi Strauss |
| The Five Love Languages | Gary Chapman |
| Avedon at Work in the American West | Laura Wilson |
| The Crisis of the Real | Andy Grundberg |
| Stepfamilies | Dr. James H. Bray & John Kelly |
| Ways of Seeing | John Berger |
And many others I’m trying to get traction on, reading a page here or there at a time:
| Stop Staring | Jason Osipa |
| Maya Character Animation | Jae-Jin Choi |
| Programming C# | ?? |
| Golive Classroom in a Book | Adobe |
| A Man with a Camera | Nestor Alemendros |
| Last half of the Journal | Eugene Delacroix |
…plus the usual array of photo magazines, computer rags, Game Developer, ornery web forum postings, travel to Las Vegas and Seattle, and a big batch of work to push forward at the office, including multiple tradeshows and an upcoming journey to Europe plus writing on the next book, GPU Gems 2, and most-recently a good number of hours spent judging a contest for DeviantArt. Oh yeah, and an election.