100 books like Good Pictures

When I was writing my book on Polaroid photography, people often asked me about Polaroid as an art form. I gave some examples but said there’s so much more to it than that. I’m interested in the ways that photography isn’t just something we look at but something that makes things happen, changing who we are, what we do, and where we go. 

This book shows us how much more there is to photography than art. I especially like how the book does this in short, stylish essays, introducing lots of different voices and perspectives, including photographers, curators, scientists, publishers, writers, and anthropologists.

These days, you take a picture and see it right away, but when I started taking snapshots, I’d shoot a roll of film, take it down to the photo developer, and wait a day or two to get my snaps back. They always came in a photo wallet, and opening it was a big part of the ritual of finding out how my pictures turned out.

I also used the wallet to store them and still have lots of them from the 1990s and early 2000s. Annebella Pollen’s great little book takes me back to that time and shows me the evolution of those wallets over almost a hundred years, and the care that went into designing them.

I’ve always loved the portraits the photographer Félix Nadar made of nineteenth-century Parisian celebrities such as Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.

I went to this book—Nadar’s memoir—to learn more about the making of those pictures. There is a little bit of that, but what really gripped me was the weird and wonderful shaggy dog stories Nadar tells about his adventures in ‘aerostatic photography’—taking pictures from balloons.

Spoiler alert: there is a lot of crashing.

This has been an incredibly important book for my thinking about photography. I always knew how instrumental Kodak advertising had been to popular ideas about amateur photography, but I learnt from this book how Kodak’s advertising changed over time.

In its early years, it emphasised the sheer pleasure of taking pictures, while only later did it start to promote photography as a tool of memory. It was those early years that interested me most because they pointed to another history of photography as playful and fun.

In contrast to John Berger’s Marxist aesthetic, Barthes’s approach to visual experience and photographic images draws upon the tradition of semiotics and, to a degree, postmodern theories of text and intertextuality. Barthes leads his reader into the codes and conventions of the image. How images signify is thus made a central topic that provokes self-reflection and reflexive challenges to conventional image analysis. Where Berger’s work is expository and analytic, Barthes's book is exploratory and novelistic (Barthes would have his reader approach the work as a kind of intertextual fiction). As the title of the work suggests, this is Barthes at his most personal and reflective. His fascination remains with the photographic image which is presented as one of the defining aesthetic objects of modernity. But the act of photography is now itself complex, mediated, and open to a range of concrete experiential impulses.

Here the viewer of the photograph is… show more.

Insta’s not the only platform that’s full of photos and videos. Facebook is, too – most of them taken on and posted from someone’s cell phone.

Photography’s role in our private, public, and political lives has dramatically changed thanks to the cell phone camera and social media. Jurgenson helped me think through the impact of what he calls “the social photo” on us and on our world in a super accessible way. 

A century after German scholars developed art history as a highly conservative meta-theory well suited to the study of the broader categories of “civilization” and “culture,” the Viennese psychoanalytic movement developed a highly radical meta-theory that posited civilization and culture as fictions meant to curb individual desires. 

Art historian Mary Bergstein illuminates photography's rich role in Freud’s thinking. Bergstein deftly reminds us that Freud’s interdisciplinary approach to the history of art and the new science of psychoanalysis was specifically meaningful to his time and place. During the brief period when Vienna would be recognized as the capital of European modernism, psychoanalysis developed as a meta-theory—a radical one—with the cult of individual desires and fears at its heart.

As the legendary curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski was instrumental in elevating photography’s stature to an equal among the fine arts. He is eloquent in his explanation about the meaning of photography and illuminating in his descriptions of each of the one hundred photographs published in this book from MoMA’s sterling collection of photographs. There is no better guide to an awakening of your own eye than Szarkowski.

Oliver Sack’s forward to this book, which was first published as The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, stopped me cold when I first read it. It was a revelation and started my mind turning. I read the piece dozens of times and then found the source materials Sacks quoted from and read those books, too.

I came of age during the era of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and it was a long unwinding to begin to consider that an institution, a state institution on the order of a large mental health hospital, could do good. But I’d grown up with a mentally ill parent who struggled to survive and bring me up safely. I saw firsthand the toll our life took on her. I began to tamper with my assumption that she’d been better off in the harrying world.

The photographs by Alexander Payne are haunting.… show more.

When the Hungarian-French photographer Brassai arrived in Paris in 1924, he taught himself French by reading Proust. As a photographer, he was fascinated by a similarity between his own impulse to make pictures and how the novelist used the photographic process as a metaphor for establishing or obscuring his character’s inner and outer worlds, as if both he and Proust were developing images in their respective darkrooms. Proust, Brassai saw, “used his own body as an ultra-sensitive plate, managing to capture and register thousands of impressions.” He was like a reporter with a camera—sometimes a portraitist, a landscapist, and, “sometimes Proust rivals the paparazzi.”