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This summer I plan to read the best book on photography ever written. Actually, I'll be rereading it. First published 36 years ago, the book was passed down to me by Sean Callahan, the founding editor of American Photographer magazine, the forerunner of American Photo. Sean told me at the time that it was the best book ever written about photography, and he was right. It's been sitting on a bookcase shelf in my office for years and years, dog-eared and finger-smudged from constant referencing. This summer I'm going to pick it up again and look at it closely, from beginning to end. It will be like discovering the magic of photography all over again.
I'm going to be coy and tell you which book I'm talking about in a moment. In the meantime, I will tell you that it isn't the photo book most cited when we poll famous photographers on their own favorites. That distinction actually goes to two books, Robert Frank's The Americans and Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment.
My favorite book isn't really an art book at all, but a book on the history of photography, as seen from a particular point of view. To my eye it's beautiful, but it's not the kind of sacred object that The Americans or The Decisive Moment is.
I'm not technically a photo-book collector; I'm more of an accumulator. Publishing companies send us all the new releases, hoping for reviews or others kinds of publicity, and over the past 15 years the number of photography books being published has exploded. (Just as interest in photography as an art has exploded in museums and art auctions.) I keep the books I really like on some shelves in my office. It's one of the perks of the job -- maybe the best one. My library represents art history and personal history too. The books remind me of the people I've met, the stories I've worked on, and how much I still have to learn about photography.
Unlike me, the British photographer Martin Parr is a real collector of photography books. He's a student of the medium who admires books for what they contain and as things of beauty in themselves. His own collection of photo books was featured last year in The Photobook: The Story of Photography through the History of the Photobook (Phaidon Press), a beautiful volume that went straight to one of my shelves. This fall Parr will be bringing out volume two of this essential reference, and that will stay in my office too.
I arrange the titles in my bookcase in purely personal ways. I have a special place reserved for the 1997 book Requiem by Horst Faas and Tim Page, a magnificent tribute to the photographers killed during the Vietnam War. Next to it, I've just placed a new book called This Is Our War: Servicemen's Photographs of Life in Iraq (Artisan). A collection of pictures culled from thousands of images that GQ magazine received from G.I.s fighting our latest war, it's as first-hand a visual report of the fighting as we're likely to see.
Another new book I'm keeping is reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow (Aperture). It features brilliant young photographers chosen by curators from the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland, so their names are new to me. That's why I'm hanging onto it.
And I already know I'll add to my shelf Joel Meyerowitz's new book, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive (Phaidon), which is due for release in September. Meyerowitz has been working on this project since shortly after 9/11, and five years later his pictures still have the power to crush you.
But, as I said, the number-one goal this summer is to return to the past and reread my all-time favorite book about photography. It's called Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Written by the museum's former curator of photography, John Szarkowski, it's an essential primer on photography's essential artists, from David Octavius Hill to Lewis Hine to Berenice Abbott -- the kind of book you'd want if you were stranded on a desert island and could have only one guide to the art of photography.
Szarkowski's writing is free of artistic verbiage and flashes with the precision of a scalpel. "Photography is a matter of eyes, intuition, and intellect," he writes at one point. "For eyes and intuition, no photographer was ever more richly endowed than Edward Weston."
You can find Looking at Photographs at amazon.com for around $24. The amount of time the book has stayed in print is a good indication of the impact it has had. If you haven't already read it, I urge you to. And if you have any other reading suggestions, we would love to hear about them.
E-mail your suggested summer reading to editor@popphoto.com.
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