I had an interesting experience. I bought and read
An English Eye, the Photographs of James Ravilious, and then went over to
http://www.beaford-arts.org.uk/archive/ and refreshed the page until I think I finally have seen all 1700 photos in the slide show there.
Warmed up by that, I read
Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour
These two books put me in a sort of warm and fuzzy mode; the first because of the subject matter and how respectfully Ravilious treated it, the second in appreciation of the personality of Ritts, who appears to have been a man who really loved both life and all the people around him, sometimes regardless of who they were.
Then I went for Art Shay's
Album for an Age and was rudely shocked out of my bliss by a guy who just seemed to be constantly angry and cynically manipulative of everyone around him.
It was a weird trip, and a shock to my mood, too. After seeing how well the first two photographers functioned, I wonder why some people just can't seem to get through life without being constantly negative. It seems like such a waste of a life to turn it into a constant flow of negativity. Shay would argue, I'm sure, that he was just exposing a reality that the first two ignored, and in that he would be right, but it's also obvious how much he let that negativity become his own, liked to live in it, and how it became part of him, turning him from quite a different person from the first two. An acquaintance of mine once commented how dangerous it can be that you might become the people you associate with. . .
Anyway, now I'm looking for a book so I can recover from Shay.