Some of my recent acquisitions
Perhaps wearing my new publisher hat has flamed a desire to build up my personal photography library. So I had already been thinking about my collection when someone twittered on Friday that Sam Weller's, one of Salt Lake's fine independent bookstores, was having a massive book sale: 30% off rare books and 50% discount on general used books. I put three books on hold while we went for tacos, and returned on Saturday to make a careful survey of the remaining selection.
Over the years, I have amassed a bunch of tradebooks, mostly on software of version x.0, now out of date, a very few high quality books by individual photographers I admire, and even fewer books on craft that will stand the test of time. Faced with such a wealth of books on Saturday, some extraordinarily expensive even with the discount, how to choose? Annie Leibovitz or Joyce Tenneson? Edward Steichen's war photos or Edward Weston's daybooks? A full set of Ansel Adams' Photography Series (Camera, Negative, and Print) in the rare book room or a book by Eliot Porter for $7.50. Most of my haul is in the photo above.
Because looking at photographs, and good photographs, is so important, I have promised to myself a modest monthly budget (which I definitely exceeded on Saturday) to add to my library. I'm focusing on titles that fit into these categories:
- the craft of photography (I'm looking for sturdy reference books whose concepts outlast the technology of the time they were written),
- the history of photography (both as a technology and art form),
- well-edited collections of multiple photographers (exploring the breadth of the field),
- significant works by single photographers (to study the depth and variety of individuals in the field),
- books that inspire my creative spirit (not necessarily photography books),
- and miscellaneous books I don't want to live without (like the work of a photographer I have met, or about a place I have visited).
Some of the new acquisitions are pure indulgence, like three books at once by Porter (even if they were nearly free). I may have a real treasure in the box: a signed first edition of Referencing Art by Jerry Uelsmann. Rather than write about them all now, I will post more about them after I have spent some time studying them. Today, I am thinking about one of the first books with fine photography that I ever saw and later came to own.
My sophomore college dorm had a small library, mostly leftover textbooks from previous residents. But lost among the 19th century German philosophers and outdated sociology textbooks, I found a copy of Not Man Apart, with lines from the poetry of Californian Robinson Jeffers juxtaposed to photographs of the Big Sur coast by all the western masters. Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and Edward Weston I had heard of; Wynn Bullock, Steve Crouch and Cedric Wright were complete revelations, as was the title poem (the link has a photo of Jeffers by Adams that was published in the book). I knew that coast, loved it deeply, and yet had never seen it the way those photographers had. I wanted to see what they saw, or more to the point, I wanted to see as deeply as they saw.
I "adopted" that book when the library was being purged at the end that school year, and I have it today. I am more hopeful about humanity's place in nature than I was when I first read Jeffers' poetry as a teenager; the photographs themselves still rock me to the core. They remind me what is possible to aspire to witness with a little machine called a camera and the never-simple craft called photography.
What photography book would you most like to own? Whose images first inspired you as a photographer? Whose work as inspired you enough lately that you added it to your own library?
