Fans pick 100 books like The Photographer's Eye

In order to retrieve my sense of seeing in the present, I went to my second home in Mexico, read a little each morning, and then went walking without any destination. This is the book I was reading those mornings in Mexico, before my walks. It may seem odd to start with a book about poetry, but this one opened the gate to seeing and to taking my first photograph.

Mr. Palomar, the hero, is named for the great observatory in California, and he, Mr. Palomar, is the Great Observer. He walks, he wonders about what he sees, and how, in a miraculous universe, such a thing could exist. It’s not a page-turner. It’s a page stopper. I savored each page, seeing the smallest thing – a rock, for example -- as Mr.Palomar sees it. Then I suggest that you put the book down, go out into the world, and see everything as an object of wonder.

This is a book that gets obstacles for seeing out of the way. This is the book I turn to if I’m sad, unsure, not confident. It’s not that this Zen master makes me happy or sure of myself. No, she puts my life in perspective: What is the big deal? I imagine her saying. You are a small thing in the universe. But while you are here, it's important to do your work. Read it and you’ll be back in the river, whisked along in the current, one more unimportant but vitally aware part of the great stream of life.

I admit I’m old enough that memories of the post-Vietnam War era had begun to fade (mercifully?) until this book brought them back into sharp focus.

Vientiane, Laos, in 1976, after the Communist takeover, is so vividly portrayed–from the scent of the “Crow Shit blossoms” on the banks of the Mekhong to the inertia of the socialistic hierarchy, to the chicken counter spies turning their neighbors in for their capitalistic extravagances. And I found the 72-year-old Laotian coroner protagonist so endearing!

His cynical outlook and visitations from the dead make him a singularly sage and unconventional hero who can roll with the wildly absurd changes of the new regime. 

In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley recounts a story not so unlike my own and many other sons born of this generation of leathernecks. James is the son of John Bradley, who served on Iwo Jima as a corpsman and was awarded the Navy Cross for his service. He also was one of the boys who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi.

Flags is the result of James Bradley’s research and interviews with survivors of the battle for Iwo Jima, after his father’s passing. At times Flags reads like an action thriller, its battle sequences authentic not only in their depiction of all the clichés Hollywood made famous in the 1950s but in its realism of the true horrors of war, and the impact it had on the survivors.

Antarctica is the one continent I have never taken a photograph in. It has barely changed in the past 100 years, but Hurley’s images still take me to an unknown world and how people have struggled to survive there.

I love the way he can capture the majesty of a landscape that is mostly just one colour and how his photographs give a sense of the puny humans grappling with the harshness of the environment.

I was fascinated, disturbed, captivated, and repelled. If you use this Polaroid camera, the picture shows not what you tried to photograph but something else: a vicious dog that is coming closer and closer with each shot taken. And it is coming to get you.

Don’t use the camera, then? Yes, of course, but…there’s a compulsion to use it regardless. I was hooked by this use of an ordinary-looking camera as the portal to another world.

If there were children in the world this peculiar, there’d need to be a system to deal with them. I hate it when we’re just expected to accept odd things in fiction without their logical consequences, but this book doesn’t do that. Yep, things would suck for kids like these…which is why they’d need a home and a caretaker as peculiar as they were. 

What I really liked about this book wasn’t the setup, though, so much as the part where we really figure out what’s protecting the Home and why it was created in the way it was. I can’t really say more without spoiling things, but it poses a very interesting dilemma: a choice as gray in scope as any real-world dilemma.  

I’ve always wished I could have gone to the moon with the Apollo astronauts. This book is the next best thing!

Image restoration specialist Andy Saunders was able to get access to new digital scans of the original Apollo images, which have been stored in a frozen vault for decades, and with the latest technology and incredibly pain-staking work, has created the highest quality Apollo photographs ever produced. Under-exposed or over-exposed shots are now crystal clear, revealing new details and incredible views of the astronauts, the spacecraft, and the lunar surface.

I love the large, coffee-table-sized book, and it is a must-have for any space enthusiast, historian, or photographer. Simply stunning.

I have loved this book of black & white photographs for nearly 5 decades and still look at it often. It’s like a book of poetry, meant to be lived with rather than simply looked at one or twice. What I like is how quiet these images are while at the same time being incredibly compelling. I see something new in these images almost every time I look at them.  What could be better in a book of photographs? What I’ve learned is that photographs embrace poetry more naturally than narrative storytelling. Yes—it's a picture of a parsnip—but is that an eye in the middle of it looking back at me?