The most recommended fine art photography books

The black-and-white images of Ralph Eugene Meatyard have long fascinated me and informed my visual work and writing. Meatyard was, by profession, an optician in Lexington, Kentucky, yet his personal passion was making photographs. His subjects were his wife, children, and family friends, who he often posed in murky settings as they wore masks and held dolls. These images are both disquieting and euphonious, tapping into something primal that hints at the secretive world of childhood.

Women photographers have all too often been overlooked or forgotten. (This happened to the subject of my own book choice, Helen Post.) But Helen Levitt – who really flourished from the 1940s through the 1960s and is now undergoing something of a renaissance – has always had devotees. Steichen invited her to contribute to The Family of Man and one of her most notable admirers, James Agee, the novelist, poet, film critic, and documentarian, was pleased to write the insightful essay to A Way of Seeing. Levitt’s quirky pictures of street life – especially those featuring children, often at play – document quite ordinary customs at a particular moment. Despite never seeming intrusive, they get up close, reveal the photographer’s rapport with her subjects, and present them, so to speak, on the level. Ultimately, these images are so expressive that they become universal, transcending the period in which they… show more.

Hold Still by Sally Mann – another memoir by an intriguing, strong-willed, fascinating woman. I became interested in Sally Mann when I first saw her book of amazing photographs of her children, Immediate Family. Since then I kept up with her photography and was thrilled to read her memoir. She writes of her childhood in the south, her parents, her relationship with her husband and children, the controversy surrounding those early stages photographs, her career, and beyond in absolutely lovely prose accompanied by many photos. She’s an impressive, talented woman, and her success is well deserved.

I think that Brad has an amazing photographer's eye.

Using drones, he has created a unique book of photographs of swimming pools from above. This could have been a mundane subject, but in Brad’s hands, each photo is perfectly framed, sized, and cropped to reveal geometry you would not expect, reminiscent of a colorful abstract painting. What I like about his work is how he can look at a pool and find the perfect abstract detail: a sinuous curve, geometric lines, and rectangles, little bits of pool furniture, blue sparkling water combined in a way that no one else would have seen. 

This book presents hundreds of photographs taken by Agence France Presse around the world in the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic. The images span the full range from the mundane (people exercising at home) to the bizarre (weird home-made face masks) to those that are frightening and tragic (mass coffins and graves). Over 150 countries are represented in these images, which are arranged chronologically, thereby presenting a visual global timeline of the major events occurring during this crucial early period of the continuing pandemic, when this disease was still a mysterious threat. This book helps us to remember the feelings of urgency, confusion, panic, and fear that were part of this period, as people came to terms with the upheavals wrought by the pandemic.

This book is the perfect antidote to all the stereotypes written about Japan’s subcultures. Nothing annoys me more than coverage that labels Japan as weird, quirky, or bizarre when really it just has different elements to the culture of those who use such labels. 

That kind of othering ignores that beneath the surface, there’s much that unites Japanese with Americans or Brits or anyone else. We all laugh, cry, and experience a similar raft of emotions from birth to death. What I love about this book, beyond Wong’s superb photography, is how his interviews humanize the cosplayers, gyaru and varied otaku he meets, while also offering insights into their passions and lifestyles. 

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.

As a photography critic for The New York Times, Grundberg was present when a generation of artists began to take apart the photographic image and transform its meaning in society. He wrote about post-modern practice in the present tense, as it was happening. This book is a collection of his reviews and essays from the 1980s when the medium was at a crossroads; the factual veracity of photography was enduring challenges at every turn and the valuation of the photograph as an art object was under critical scrutiny.

I own five signed copies of this book which I loan out to young photographers. The lesson in this book of documentary photographs is the irrelevance of information and the importance of emotion. In this way, Jeff’s work redefines photography by expanding the very notion of what a documentary photograph is….and can be. In 2004 Jeff was diagnosed with lymphoma. Soon afterwards Kodak discontinued the production of Kodachrome, the film his entire visual vocabulary was based on and now was gone forever. What do you do when confronted with physical and creative mortality? The Last Roll, by Jeff Jacobson, is an amazing response to this question. 

I love photography books but, my hands-down favorite is Humans of New York. New York City is truly America’s melting pot, a gourmet stew of nationalities, personalities, fragile seniors, young billionaires, paupers, and everything in between. The city has much of what’s right with the world and its burst of humanity can all be seen in this book.

Unlike many photo books, this one has no excess verbiage. Stanton lets the pictures or their subjects tell the stories. There are hairstylists, hipsters, mommies, cute kids, teens with tattoos and purple hair, and a guy busking in the park with his viola while wearing a pink gorilla suit. The caption reads: “Damn liberal arts degree.” The author created this as a summer project and ended with 300 pages of delight.