Over the last year I’ve talked about a few inspirational photography books on my bookshelf. This time, I thought I’d make my discovery of the photographic masters a little more interactive. Would it not be more interesting to read the book at the same time as others? Similar to a book club, but with less Oprah and more photographs. I thought we could start with a book I’ve just ordered for Christmas The Americans by Robert Frank. So if you’re interested please beg, borrow or buy a copy and then I’d love to hear your comments. Exciting stuff.

Along with the Annie Leibovitz retrospective from my parents, I got two other photography books for my birthday from Seiko, South Southeast and In the Shadow of Mountains both by Steve McCurry. South Southeast is a big book in both physical size (39cm by 29cm) and scope (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma). It is “a portfolio of the best of Steve McCurry’s photography” and it is simply fantastic. As a coffee table book it will draw oohs and aahs from visitors to you home. For photographers, however,  it is a master class in travel imagery that will make you think more about the shots you take and the places you want to explore. In the Shadow of Mountains is a collection of images taken by Steve over the last three decades in Afghanistan. (Yes it does contain the image of the Afghan girl that appeared on the cover of National Geographic.) I actually prefer that this book focuses on just one country giving me a better feel for the place. Wonderful …

I ordered the book Celebrity and Performance from Amazon months ago but due to delays (or the popularity of Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller) the book only just arrived. It is another interesting tome in “The World’s Top Photographer’s Workshops” series by RotoVision. The ten photographers chosen each capture celebrities in a different way, from the “airport paparazzo” to the “Hollywood A-lister”. Many of my favorite images were black and whites shot by Andy Gotts using a Mamiya RB67 and Kodak Tri-X 400. Amazing.

In an earlier blog I talked about buying a compendium of Annie Leibovitz photographs only to realize that many of the iconic images I was expecting were in the earlier collection of her work. Last month, for my birthday, I got just what I wanted when I was given the book Annie Leibovitz Photographs 1970-1990. The book is out of print but there are plenty of used copies available on Amazon. There are the famous images of John and Yoko, fantastic shots of the Rolling Stones (they seemed to spend quite a lot of time unconscious) along with images of a young Schwarzenegger, Christopher Walken and self portraits. What is really fascinating is that the books together become greater than the sum of their parts. As images of Jagger, Richards, Schwarzenegger, Walken and Leibovitz appear in both books, you also have a study of aging.  Some have managed to hide the years, while the weathered faces of others reveal a lifetime of hard living that took place between one photograph and the next.

I didn’t study photography at school or university. To be honest, if you showed me a selection of famous photographs and told me to name the photographer I would probably only get a couple right. ( an Ansel Adams shot of Yosemite and the Afghan girl by Steve McCurry) I am however trying to broaden my knowledge of great photographers. Not knowing where else to begin I thought I’d start reading about one of the most famous – Annie Leibovitz. I surfed over to Amazon.com and ordered a big compendium of her work: A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 by Annie Leibovitz The book is a mix of commercial portraits, and far more personal  images from her own life. Shots of her family, and pictures from her various travels around the world are woven between photographs of  Nelson Mandela, Carl Lewis, Bill Clinton, Michael Jordan, Brad Pitt. and R2-D2. There is a brief introduction and simple captions. I would have liked to have read the story behind each image, but the focus is kept (and perhaps rightly so) on …

The Turin Shroud: How da Vinci Fooled History was lent to me on my last photo trip so I had something to read on the train. The book is the research about how Picknett and Prince came to the conclusion that the Turin Shroud was not just a forgery ( as previously shown by carbon dating ) but that it was a primitive photograph created by Leonardo da Vinci.  Most of the book is not particularly well written and was a bit of a struggle to get through. They go into detail about the history of the shroud, and the various different theories regarding its creation. The book did become interesting in the penultimate chapter when they describe how they tried to create a similar shroud image using techniques da Vinci (in their opinion a skilled chemist, artist, physician, physicist, and heretic) may have used. Their process involved producing a simple camera obscura with a primitive lens to project an image onto a piece of white linen. The authors thought da Vinci even used a model …