Tag: Book review

Review: Photography and the Art of Seeing by Freeman Patterson

The art of Seeing

Being a Canadian, Freeman Patterson is perhaps not so well known in Europe or the US as many other leading photographers. But if you look at his resume with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the North American Nature Photography Association and the Miller Brittan Award for Excellence in visual arts, then you start to understand the magnitude and importance of Patterson’s work.

Freeman Patterson: Photography and the art of seeing

Who is it for?

If you are new to photography and want to learn the basics, then this book is not for you. I would recommend that you instead look towards the books from Bryan F. Peterson or Joel Sartore.  The Art of Seeing is much more about the photography process and how you can widen your creativity.

What is it?

The book is organized around 3 main themes:

  • Learning to observe
  • Learning to imagine and
  • Learning to express.

Especially the last part, where Patterson talks about visual design, was a an eye opener for me. I have the same feeling when reading the book The Art of War by Lao Tzu, that even though I do not yet understand every sentence or every paragraph in the book, I have a very distinct feeling that it is a super condensed text that presents the essence of years and years of experience. I have read the book once, but want to read it several times to make sure I get all the points.

Can I recommend it?

Yes is the short answer. I have read many books about photography as this blog documents, and this is probably one of the best. The book has been developed to support a series of workshops that Patterson held way back when, but you can still make use of the exercises described in the book of you want to have the full benefit of the book. Even if you don’t do all the exercises or if you only want to read the theory, I find that this is an excellent book about the photography process and it comes with my highest recommendation.

Shopping link

Freeman Patterson, Photography and the Art of seeing

Video link

Related reading

Saul Leiter In My Room, Edited by Margit Erb and Robert Benton

Henri Cartier-Bresson Here and Now, by Clément Chéroux

 

 

 

Review: Photo Icons, 50 landmark photographs and their stories, by Hans-Michael Koetzle

400+ pages of iconic images

The title of the book as per the headline is a very precise description of what this book is all about. It “puts some of the most important photographic landmarks under the microscope” as it says on the cover. And very much so.

Photo icons, 50 landmark photographs and their stories, by Hans-Michael Koetzle.

The 50 images are presented and analyzed over the 400+ pages of the book, giving an average of 4 pages per iconic photograph. Enough to cover the basics and tell the story around each picture.

The table of content has an excellent overview with each picture in icon size and annotated with the relevant year and page to look up. The 50 images range from year 1827 to 2001. So you can quickly dive into the images of interest (I doubt you will read the book from front to back unless you are equally interested in each image).

Photographer Peter Leibings picture “Leap to Freedom” from 1961, just after the wall between East and West Berlin was in effect.

As I “cherry picked” the images of most interest, I have not read every single page in the book, but many of them, and I really enjoyed the “behind the scenes” view that you get to each image: What was the story, the photographer, what was going on in the world at the time the shot was taken, was it staged or candid, etc. Hans-Michael Koetzle really packs a lot of information into very few pages for each picture – it is a condensed read, but certainly worth the while.

So as a photographer it is not a book that will make you wiser in terms of photo technique (f/11 vs f/5.6), but it really documents how a photograph – even with all the videos and movies available today – can be powerful and influence what we remember and how we see history. And as such it for me adds a layer to my motivation to shoot the best pictures I possibly can.

Related reading

Understanding a photograph by John Berger

Review: WILD! What you love you will protect, by Helle and Uri Løvevild Golman

Book review

The two Danish photographers Helle and Uri have captured images of wildlife that are nothing short of astonishing. This 200+ page coffee table book is filled with one wonderful image after another. Their passion for wildlife and nature shines from every single image, carefully selected from numerous journeys into the wild: South America, Greenland, New Guinea, Antarctica -the list goes on and on.

It is seldom that I am blown away by even a single image, but in this case I was blown away by almost every single image in this giant of a book. Their work is truly impressive. It is the combination of their love for nature that shines from each page and the technically impeccable images that lifts this book to a level that I have seldom seen. There are a few introduction pages and forewords, but other than that the book is filled with one wonderful image after another.

I can only recommend this book wholeheartedly, even if you are not a nature lover, you will be impressed by the sheer quality of the images presented.

Related reading

Wild and Fearless by Uri Løvevild Golman

Link to their homepage: weareprojectwild.com