Here are 100 books that Photography Changes Everything fans have personally recommended if you like
Photography Changes Everything.
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Growing up in the 1970s, I loved my family’s cheap plastic Polaroid OneStep camera and the magic pictures that developed right before my eyes. Thirty years later, I was incredibly lucky to be the first researcher to get access to the Polaroid archive just as the company was going bust. For me, the key to Polaroid photography is that it is fun, and all the books on my list are, in one way or another, about the lighter, playful side of photography. I hope that they take you off the beaten track of the history of popular photography and into some quirky and interesting corners.
I wish I’d written this book. I’ve always been fascinated by instructional guides for amateur photographers and the rules they set out to get a ‘good picture.’ I’ve followed many of these rules myself over the years, but what this great book shows is that the rules are constantly changing.
What made a good picture in 1930 is not the same as in 1950 or 1970. This book tells this story in fifty short and punchy chapters, and it has great pictures on virtually every page.
A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital.
We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a "good picture"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly-and happily-outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles.…
Growing up in the 1970s, I loved my family’s cheap plastic Polaroid OneStep camera and the magic pictures that developed right before my eyes. Thirty years later, I was incredibly lucky to be the first researcher to get access to the Polaroid archive just as the company was going bust. For me, the key to Polaroid photography is that it is fun, and all the books on my list are, in one way or another, about the lighter, playful side of photography. I hope that they take you off the beaten track of the history of popular photography and into some quirky and interesting corners.
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.
Growing up in the 1970s, I loved my family’s cheap plastic Polaroid OneStep camera and the magic pictures that developed right before my eyes. Thirty years later, I was incredibly lucky to be the first researcher to get access to the Polaroid archive just as the company was going bust. For me, the key to Polaroid photography is that it is fun, and all the books on my list are, in one way or another, about the lighter, playful side of photography. I hope that they take you off the beaten track of the history of popular photography and into some quirky and interesting corners.
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.
The first complete English translation of Nadar's intelligent and witty memoir, a series of vignettes that capture his experiences in the early days of photography.
Celebrated nineteenth-century photographer—and writer, actor, caricaturist, inventor, and balloonist—Félix Nadar published this memoir of his photographic life in 1900 at the age of eighty. Composed as a series of vignettes (we might view them as a series of “written photographs”), this intelligent and witty book offers stories of Nadar's experiences in the early years of photography, memorable character sketches, and meditations on history. It is a classic work, cited by writers from Walter Benjamin to…
Growing up in the 1970s, I loved my family’s cheap plastic Polaroid OneStep camera and the magic pictures that developed right before my eyes. Thirty years later, I was incredibly lucky to be the first researcher to get access to the Polaroid archive just as the company was going bust. For me, the key to Polaroid photography is that it is fun, and all the books on my list are, in one way or another, about the lighter, playful side of photography. I hope that they take you off the beaten track of the history of popular photography and into some quirky and interesting corners.
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.
The advertising campaigns launched by Kodak in the early years of snapshot photography stand at the centre of a shift in American domestic life that goes deeper than technological innovations in cameras and film. Before the advent of Kodak advertising in 1888, writes Nancy Martha West, Americans were much more willing to allow sorrow into the space of the domestic photograph, as evidenced by the popularity of postmortem photography in the mid-19th century. Through the taking of snapshots, Kodak taught Americans to see their experiences as objects of nostalgia, to arrange their lives in such a way that painful or…
I'm currently an Honorary Fellow in Social Theory at the University of York, U.K. For more than five decades I've been working to promote more reflexive perspectives in philosophy, sociology, social theory, and sociological research. I've written and edited many books in the field of social theory with particular emphasis upon questions of culture and critical research in the expanding field of visual culture. Recent projects include Interpreting Visual Culture(with Ian Heywood), The Handbook of Visual Culture, and an edited multi-volume textbook to be published by Bloomsbury,The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture. The passion to understand the thought and visual culture of both the ancient and modern world continues to inform my work.
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.
This personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume--and the last book Barthes published--finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography. To this end, several black-and-white photos (by the likes of Avedon, Clifford, Hine, Mapplethorpe, Nadar, Van Der Zee, and so forth) are reprinted throughout the text.
My own experience on Facebook piqued my interest in digital photography and social media. My emotional response to what I saw there ran the gamut from super anxious or angry to happy and even optimistic. As a scholar of religion with some expertise in traditional media and photography, I wanted to know why and how so I could respond better. I turned to experts in these new technologies – particularly those who write good books aimed at curious people, not just their peers! – for help. I learned a lot from these books and I’m confident you will, too!
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.
With the rise of the smart phone and social media, cameras have become ubiquitous, infiltrating nearly every aspect of social life. The glowing camera screen is the lens by which many of us apprehend and communicate our experience. But our thinking about photography has been slow to catch-up; this major fixture of everyday life is still often treated in the terms of art or journalism.
In The Social Photo, social theorist Nathan Jurgenson develops bold new ways of understanding the transformations wrought by these image-making and sharing technologies and the cultural objects they have ushered in: the selfie, the faux-vintage…
I am an Oxford local historian, and the only Oxford guide endorsed by the Lewis Carroll Society. I have helped shape Oxford’s annual Alice’s Day since the first one in 2007, and have participated in French, Dutch, Canadian, Brazilian and British TV and radio documentaries, most notably for BBC 2 and BBC Radio 4. My interest is mainly the many Oxford realities which are hidden away within the apparent fantasy of the ‘Alice’ books, an angle which has enabled me to lecture on this internationally famous topic as far away as Assam in India. Subsequently, my appreciation of Carroll’s versatility as a mathematician, photographer, inventor, diarist, and letter writer has grown steadily over the years.
Mention the name ‘Lewis Carroll’ and most people will immediately think of the two Alice books. Very few would equate the name to Charles Dodgson, the photographer. This, however, is the aspect of the multi-talented Oxford don which Gernsheim, a professional photographer himself, appraised in his 1949 first edition for the very first time, concluding that Dodgson was ‘the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century. Many of the black and white plates substantiate this claim, but equally, Dodgson’s mastery of this new invention enabled him to meet and photograph (sometimes uniquely) numerous famous writers and artists, as well as many Oxford contemporaries. As an aside, Edward Wakeling’s 2015 Catalogue Raisonné is a comprehensive listing of every one of Dodgson’s hundreds of known photographs.
I love playing with my kids. When my eldest was eight and we were sitting on the porch together he said, “On my last day of being playful, I want to play with you the whole day. I sure hope it’s on a Saturday.” My kids know that I turn most things into a game, that I’ll screech and stop for a tarantula on the road because it’s educational, that I'll get them to sing their quiz answers, and that I’ll sculpt a cake into almost anything for a school project. I believe learning should be fun, so we would drink lemonade out of measuring cups, guess how many hops from the bed to the closet, and have Whipped Cream Spray Wars every summer (outside, thank you). I also think families would spend more time together if they had a great collection of cool—and easy—stuff to do together. As a writer I’m creative, and never run out of fun ideas. Why not share them with the world?
Traveling is a time when you often need to entertain a bored child on a train, plane, or in a car. This book has tons of great games, puzzles, stickers, and even cultural information that will educate your child. Lots of photography and illustrations to entertain, as well. A good mix of education and fun.
Make car and plane trips a blast with these fun, educational travel activities for kids. The interactive games and travel journal will keep kids busy during vacations and school holidays.
Doodles to draw, puzzles to solve, games to play, and stickers to find--children will be entertained whether the family is traveling by car, plane, or even just hanging poolside. The Travel Activity Book includes a unique blend of illustrations and photography for lots of visual fun. The book also highlight facts and information about real destinations and monuments, so children can discover life and culture around the world. Learns about…
I first read Swann’s Way when I was seventeen. Throughout the following five decades, In Search of Lost Time has always remained within reach, a parallel universe more enriching than words can express. As a painter, I’m drawn to Proust’s subtle use of paintings to reveal and mystify the relationship between what we see and what we know. I’ve spoken on Proust at Berkeley, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Houston, and was invited to give the annual Proust lecture at the Center for Fiction in New York as well as the Amon Carter Lecture on the Arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin.
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.”
One of the most original and memorable photographers of the 20th century, Brassai was also a journalist, sculptor and writer. He took great pride in his writing, and he loved literature and language - French most of all. When he arrived in Paris in 1924, Brassai began teaching himself French by reading Proust. Captured by the sensuality and visual strategies of Proust's writing, Brassai soon became convinced that he had discovered a kindred spirit. Brassai wrote: "In his battle against Time, that enemy of our precarious existence, ever on the offensive though never openly so, it was in photography, also…
Janet Somerville taught literature for 25 years in Toronto. She served on the PEN Canada Board and chaired many benefits that featured writers including Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Stephen King, Alice Munro, Azar Nafisi, and Ian Rankin. She contributes frequently to theToronto StarBook Pages, and has been handwriting a #LetterADay for 8 years. Since 2015 she has been immersed in Martha Gellhorn’s life and words, with ongoing access to Gellhorn’s restricted papers in Boston. Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949 is her first book, now also available from Penguin Random House Audio, read by the Tony Award-winning Ellen Barkin.
Miller was one of the great combat photographers of WWII, but she also documented the social consequences of the conflict, particularly the lives of women on the European front. She would also write about what she saw forBritish Vogue. She photographed Martha Gellhorn in London in 1943 as part of a series about women correspondents.
In addition to an introduction by Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, Roberts provides insightful commentary that places each image within the context of women’s roles throughout the landscape of war.
Lee Miller photographed innumerable women during her career, first as a fashion photographer and then as a journalist during the Second World War, documenting the social consequences of the conflict, particularly the impact of the war on women across Europe. Her work as a war photographer is perhaps that for which she is best remembered - in fact she was among the 20th century's most important photographers on the subject. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, Lee Miller: A Woman's War tells the story beyond the battlefields of the Second World War by way of…
