Why it does not have to be in focus. Source: Amazon.com
I suppose this book’s subtitle should really be “Modern art using a camera as a tool”. I’m strangely fascinated by this book. I bought it some time ago and I find that I often pick it up and browse throught it. If you’re looking for a book on photographic technique then this book isn’t for you. It doesn’t talk about ISO, shutter speeds, f-stops, rule of thirds or any of the other things commonly found it photography “how to” books. Instead about 100 images are organized according to the following categories: portraits/smile; document/snap; still lifes/frieze; narrative/action; landscapes/look; and abstracts/dissolve. Each picture is from a different photographer and for each one the author: “Describes the artist’s approach, process and technique; Locates the image in its historic and artistic context;…provides additional incremental information; and lists examples of similar images by the same photographer. Quotations (both attributed and unattributed) are also scattered throughout the book.
To give a flavor of what the book’s about I’ll provide a few examples of the photographs provided:
Second Beauty Composite by Nancy Burson, 1982. A single face which is actually a composite of five famous female movie stars: Jane Fonda; Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brook Shields and Meryl Streep. As the book says “This face belongs to non one; it has never existed”.
Untitled [Cowboy] by Richard Price, 1989. Re-photographed ‘Marlborough Man’ photograph blown up to gallery size. Has become known as “appropriation art”. This was the first photograph to sell for more than $1 million.
Poll by John Demand, 2001. Looks like a real office, but is actually an elaborately constructed set made of card, which is then photographed subsequently destroyed.
Strip by Jemima Stehli, 1999. A series of pictures of a woman (the photographer I think) with her back to the camera. She takes off her clothing in front of a man (a different man in each picture) who sits on a chair holding a remote shutter release and who presumably decides when to take the picture.
99 Cent by Andreas Gursky, 1999. A huge 81 1/2 by 132 1/4 inch picture of the shelves in .99 store.
Damage/Drown/Canal, 168 hours, June 2003 by Catherine Yass, 2005. According to the book “Yass photographed the canal on her large-format(4×5 inch) camera. Returning to where she exposed the image, she tied a large print to the edge of the canal and floated it in water for one week”.
I think I like this book so much because it encourages you to break rules and explore boundaries – something which I find very hard to do, and probably the reason why my photographs are so conventional. It would never have occurred to me to even try to do any of these things. I guess I keep hoping that if I go back to the book often enough something will rub off. It hasn’t so far, but who knows…
This book certainly won’t teach you photographic technique, but it will hopefully give you lots of ideas.