latest additions to your library

A book of the work of the controversial outsider artist photographer, Miroslav Tichy. He is the slightly crazy infamous/notorious voyeur/peeping Tom/recluse photographer; a Czech who dressed in rags and secretly took thousands of pics of women in his village using cameras he made from toys and other junk. His work is fairly recently discovered and obviously very "low-fi". Not everyone's cup, but for the curious the Fototorst book can be had fairly cheaply.

Miroslav Tichy (Fototorst) (Russian Edition)

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I received a gift from a pro photog friend of Many Are Called by Walker Evans. This has been truly an eye-opener for me. Must get some more Walker Evans...

BTW for those of you who have it on pre-order, Bruce Davidson's huge 800 page opus Outside Inside has been delayed yet again by the publisher Steidl. New publication date is March 2010.
 
I received a gift from a pro photog friend of Many Are Called by Walker Evans. This has been truly an eye-opener for me. Must get some more Walker Evans...

That's a good one. Pair it with Araki's 'Subway Love'.

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That's a good one. Pair it with Araki's 'Subway Love'.

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Anything by Evans is usually brilliant but I couldn't really relate to Araki's Subway Love because there are just too many so-so pictures. I guess it comes at it from a different angle, which is the experience of riding the subway but that's not something I 'love' at all!
 
Mark Steinmetz: Greater Atlanta.
Completes his fabulous trilogy (with South East and South Central) on my shelf.

Josef Hoflehner: Yemen
I do not care very much for his "milky water landscapes" in Kenna style, that dominate most of his other work. But his Yemen book is truly outstanding. Great travelphotography wit a Hasselblad.

Check it out: http://www.josefhoflehner.com/yemen.html
 
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Saw an ABC documentary on 3 famous Australian photographers. One of them was David Moore. The next day I was in Borders and saw his book "Face to Face" on special for $5. It's still avail if anyone wants me to grab a copy for them (just PM me).

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Anything by Evans is usually brilliant but I couldn't really relate to Araki's Subway Love because there are just too many so-so pictures. I guess it comes at it from a different angle, which is the experience of riding the subway but that's not something I 'love' at all!

yeah, the results couldn't seem to be more different. I've had both books for a while now, and when I look at them, I can't help but find similarities. To me Subway Love feels like an homage.

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I just think if Adams would move the sliders around in iPhoto he'd get more shadow detail. Same with Masahisa Fukase. I can't see feather detail on the crows when the blacks are all crushed. It just seems, well, less cheerful. The laziness/sloppiness in their post-processing just kinda ruins it for me.

But if someone wanted to get me a copy of either book, I guess that would be fine.

Yes! Some time in Photoshop layers would have cheered things up! In reality Adams should have used a flash and Fukase should have used a frickin' tripod (way too blurry)! :)

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Comparisons...How about Summer Nights and Henry Wessel's Night Walk? (Ray and Mike should know this one, being in the bay area).
Interesting that both of these photographers, often cited for their high-key, brilliantly sunlit images have done night projects. I like them both. Have 2 versions of the Wessel title as well (the original Grossmont College catalog and the Steidl 5 Books set), which are really different in terms of the printing.

Here is a little podcast of Wessel on the Night Walk series...
http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/297

Cheers,
Gary
 
how do the two differ? i have the steidl edition.

none of the shops around here have 'summer nights'. :(

The reproductions in the Steidl book are lighter, much more open, with a lot of shadow detail compared to the Grossmont book. A very different feel when you look at them side-by-side. I'm sure the Steidl version is more faithful to the originals.

You can order Summer Nights on-line, no?

Cheers,
Gary
 
New Topographics arrived. Nice, but I was surprised that I wasn't more excited about it when it finally came.

I've wanted a copy of the original exhibition catalog for, well, decades. But its original (1975) price of 7 dollars has grown to several hundred! (I've seen it sell for over a thousand, actually). The new book is well done with a new essay and includes a page-by-page reproduction of the original book at the end. I think the long anticipation combined with the fact that it contained no real surprises (the work being quite familiar through many other books and shows over the years) accounts for this amounting to, if not a let-down exactly, just not all I anticipated. Sort of like, OK, I can check that off my list, what's next.

FYI: The show will be in San Francisco this summer.

Cheers,
Gary
 
The reproductions in the Steidl book are lighter, much more open, with a lot of shadow detail compared to the Grossmont book. A very different feel when you look at them side-by-side. I'm sure the Steidl version is more faithful to the originals.

You can order Summer Nights on-line, no?

Cheers,
Gary

i could, but i'm running out of shelf space and need to be really picky about books now! :bang:

nice to know about the differences between the two editions of 'night walk'. i saw a couple of those prints at the huntington over a year ago, and the contrast was just like in the steidl edition. a print of the "ocean sands" wayfarer dude was also there. that one was really cool. :cool:
 
A couple of beauties from the VNSA book sale last weekend: The World of OM-Systems (1976) by Franz Pangerl for $2 and Stories on Paper and Glass: Pioneering Photography at National Geographic, for $7!
 
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These two arrived this week. Not very original picks, but definitely essentials.

Henri Cartier Bresson: Photographer.
Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans (expanded edition).

Both think, heavy books with beatiful, large prints. 'Lookin In' has the original photo's, as well as all-you-wanted-to-know-and-more background info, and all contact sheets. It's a venerable treasure trove!
 
I recently got the 'New Topographics' book by Salvesen but I'm still waiting for 'On Landscape' by Golke to get released in hardcover.

New Topographics is excellent, a fantastic essay at the start plus a good group of images.
 
"The Jazz Loft Project" by W. Eugene Smith, he chronicles via foto and tape recordings the loft buidling he lived in while living in this loft in the Flower District of NYC during the 50s and 60s. He obsessively wired the loft rooms where jazz musicians came to practice and jam, and recorded thousands of hours of musical recordings, recently discovered and being reviewed.

"Aperture": a great periodical (quarterly?) of a variety of fotogs and their styles, I havent bought one for awhile, but its almost like a short foto book (and the price of a book!! $15 bucks plus tax!). This is not the type of magazine you throw out after reading.
 
Thomas Zander, ed. Henry Wessel, Steidl 2007

Lovely open printing in this. The whole volume just breathes light. Despite the fact that so many of Wessel's images are made in bright western (California, Arizona, Nevada) light and are definitely brilliant, the shadows are open -- no deep wells of inky blackness here. I'm not that familiar with Wessel, but many of his (sub)urban images strike me as a gentler, less frenetic, more restrained Friedlander: a similar propensity to cut the image into sections or planes but less wild and an overall lightness of tone and gentleness of eye. And of course, he resonates with Robert Adams too at times.
 
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Finally picked up Robert Adams' Summer Nights, Walking. (The complete opposite of the Wessel volume you picked up, Kevin! :) )


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