Your favorite, number 1, best, street photography/journalism book?

[timothyd]

I'm starting to form my little collection of photo books. I have credit at Dashwood Books (http://www.dashwoodbooks.com/) and went in the other day to get a few new books. But I found myself unable to decide which ones. I did get the Koudelka Retrospective, which is great. The photographs are mostly his more famous ones, but I really liked the text/interviews.

So what are your favorite street photography/journalism books? Or looking at the dashwood site, what would you buy?

Thanks.

[Al Kaplan]

Buy a text book on cultural anthropology. Learn about people, the different ways they've developed to interact with one another. You need to understand your subjects most of all. Looking at photography books can be inspiring but the last thing you want to do is copy somebody's style.

[35mmdelux]

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Photographer.

Add: Sebastiao Salgado, Workers. Elliott Erwitt, Snaps.

[elude]

Voyages by Raymond Depardon (unfortunately can't find it on your website)

[PMCC]

One of my favorite Depardons. A visual diary of his travels.

[blackwave]

Sebastio Salgado, Africa. It's just incredible, really.

[pesphoto]

By the way Tim...excellent photography on your website. And I LIKE the graininess!

Look at anything by Andre Kertesz if you want to learn about composition.

[Nh3]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Robert Frank's The Americans.

[petronius]

Andre Kertesz, Robert Frank, Inge Morath, Jerome Liebling, George Rodger

[sonofdanang]

Buy a text book on cultural anthropology. Learn about people, the different ways they've developed to interact with one another. You need to understand your subjects most of all. Looking at photography books can be inspiring but the last thing you want to do is copy somebody's style.

I'm with Al on this one, too. Failing a good textbook, have a look through National Geographic. Read the articles. While you must assess your work against good work, the best work, you need to be able to organize the visual information presented to you within a context whether deliberate or intuitive. That is a non-discursive mental process which, back before we knew better, might have been referred to as 'right-brain' work. That involves more awareness than just the visual.
A music prof of mine once said, "Look to what inspired those that inspire you. To only look at the previous rendition is to merely add your signature at the bottom of a very long list. Don't go to the roots, dig into the soil."
Buy art books and see how painters worked with light. Caravaggio was a huge inspiration for me. Forget photographers - all of the good ones studied light, form, perspective. Take a life drawing class. Draw a lot. Paint. Play with crayons. Seriously. Good eye training.

Life periodically puts out excellent little retrospectives and collections. You can find them on magazine racks in drugstores and airports. Cheap. Read the Wikipedia entries for the events and the times and draw some correlation to the photos of the time. It will rarely be linear but it will be contextual. And the times definitely informed the photography.

[sonofdanang]

Andre Kertesz, Robert Frank, Inge Morath, Jerome Liebling, George Rodger

What Petronius said.

This photo by Morath http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Im_misfits.jpg is worth a semester of school in any subject.

[martin s]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Robert Frank's The Americans.

Agreed, I bought the french version (Les Americains) though since all I could get in Germany was a 160 Euro original of The Americans.

[sonofdanang]

Okay, okay. I'll be good.

Anything by Winogrand - but don't look at it until you've studied form and composition on a technical level, not to hew to it, but to understand its presence. Winogrand said something to the effect that there is no 'proper' way to compose but it has to 'work'. Google the golden ratio - here's a good place to start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio You don't need to delve into the maths that deeply, just have a look at how the forms arise. Then go look at how Winogrand organizes things visually. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking it's 'spray and pray'. Then go look at Lee Friedlander. Visual organization.

A lot of the "masters" were documentarists in an early age of the form. For that reason there is a lot of interest in those early practitioners that trancends the notion of 'content' or 'form'.

Then go and find a book on Picasso that contains as much of his work as you can find (it's a lot - he produced over 30,000 works in his lifetime). You can usually get them cheap at your local big-box book store. Twenty bucks is about the norm. I say Picasso because he was a master of form. You can see his transformation from a young painter to his later work which can be confused with no-one else's.

Okay. That's enough. I'm going back to bed. The sun wont be up here for another two hours....

Best,

S

[mackigator]

I'll go with something more recent. Wonderland by Jason Eskenazi. "A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith."

[timothyd]

thanks so much for your replies. I actually already have The Americans.

Dashwood Books has the following by the photographers you guys suggested:

Friedlander-Photographs, Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes
Rat Hole
Kitaj
Self Portrait
Blind Spot (featuring friedlander, among others)
Nudes

Salgado-Portfolio

Erwitt-photographs and anti-photographs

Depardon-Hivers
Sites et Jeux
En Afrique
San Clemente
Our Farm
La solitude heureuse du voyageur notes

Freed-La Danse des Fideles

Kertesz-The Early Years
The New Vision (featuring Kertesz, among others. By the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Frank-Flamingo
Come Again
The Lines of My Hand
Me and My Brother
Flower is
Zero Mostel reads a book
Hold Still Keep Going
Paris
Thank You
Ideas/Aspesi

Morath-Saul Steinbergs Masken und andere fotobilder

Winogrand is all out of stock.

What do you think?

[sonofdanang]

I'll go with something more recent. Wonderland by Jason Eskenazi. "A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith."

Just toured his site. http://www.jasoneskenazi.com/ Fantastic. It sums up Al Kaplan's position perfectly. Very moving.

[elude]

The creator of this thread didn't ask for photo lessons !! ;)
Sounds like he was just looking for a good book "photojournalism style".

[sonofdanang]

:pAn' we ain't givin' 'im any!!!

We do hold forth, heheheheh...:angel::D

[nightfly]

William Klein- New York 1954-1955

Daido Moriyama- '71 New York

[Svitantti]

Erwitt's Snaps, Jonas Bendiksen - Satellites, Paolo Pellegrin - As I was dying, Luc Delahaye - Winterreise, Stanley Greene - Chechnya, an open wound (or something like that)... Those are some great ones.

[pelican]

Magnum Magnum by Brigitte Lardinois - 60th founding anniversary book of Magnum Photo Agency.

My second choice would be:

Magnum's First - by Achim Heine and Peter Koeln

My third choice would be:

I, Tokyo - by Jacob Aue Sobol

[Rik]

Rob Hornstra, 101 Billionaires, before it sells out...

[Florian1234]

@Martin: The Americans was newly published in Germany last year. For about 30 Euros, I think. Saw it in Berlin.

[Andrew Sowerby]

Don't know if it's my number 1, best book, but Saul Leiter's Early Color is really good. The recent Helen Levitt collection is fantastic too.

[drewbarb]

The book I can't stop looking at lately is Cartier Bresson's "Europeans". Robert Frank's "The Americans" is also a stunning volume, of course. For those who can get to Washington DC before the end of March, there is an incredible exhibition of "The Americans" up right now at the National Gallery of Art. Not only do they have prints of every image from the book (many of them Franks own vintage prints), but they have LOADS of supporting material, including lots of his original contact sheets, many prints that didn't make it into the book, and three rooms featuring lots of Frank's earlier work to provide some context before you get to the galleries with the "Americans" work. The exhibition is also exceptionally well curated. There is plenty of wonderful supporting material and written information which provides plenty of biographical details as well as context for and analysis of the work. There are also some wonderful handmade books on display that Frank made early in his career, including one he made for his first wife, as well as several others that were made as early portfolios. Also on display are several original copies of "The Americans", in different editions for various markets. Not only is the work incredible, but the curating and execution of this exhibition is some of the best I've ever seen. All in all, well worth seeing- even worth making a trip to Washington just for this.

[Merkin]

I would recommend two, one predominantly photographs, one predominantly text: "Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project," edited by Sam Stephenson, and "Slightly Out of Focus" by Robert Capa.

[tom_f77]

Bystander is a really fantastic overview of street photography from pre-Atget to post-Meyerowitz. My favourite monograph is Philip Perkis' "The Sadness of Men". Pure magic.

[Aziz]

I love Bruce Davidsons "Subway" book. It has a very raw feel to it (the feeling one gets, not the actual book:p)