The most thoughtful photography book yet

 There are lots of photography books in the library. I've been taking a few at a time out over the last several years. Mostly now it's rare to find one I haven't seen, so I've taken to searching on line and putting a hold on the promising ones. That isn't as much fun as browsing, but it's better than travelling to the other branches. 

Or is it? I'm just now looking at a map of the city libraries. At one time long ago, I'd been into every library in the city. Now, hmmm, what with growth, new buildings, I can only recall being in 4 or 5 of them, out of 21. Maybe it's time for a road trip, and how appropriate would it be to take the camera? A few of them are in parts of the city I've never been to, there's been so much growth. For those that don't live here, Calgary has essentially doubled in size since I came here in 1980. There is lots of sprawl, and much of it is ugly. 

But back to the books. There's several different kinds of photography books. How to, travel, landscape, wildlife, portraits, and biography quickly come to mind. Of course there's some cross-over, such as travel and wild life or landscape going together quite well. 

The kind I'm most disappointed in are the ones that purport to help you become a better photographer, and it's a cookie cutter paint by numbers approach. Here's the rules. Here's an image, here's the settings I used, and maybe a bit about the editing. Do that and you'll get a good photo. Except, not. Out of all the things that make up a great photo, the specific camera settings are probably the least important. Lots of great photos break all the rules, yet grab you by the yarbles, and then those elements become an addition to the rules.

Some of the books talk about the art of photography in great detail, comparing various photographers, how the art has evolved over the decades, discussion of the various 'schools' of thought.  They do a scholarly deep dive and to get the most out of it you need to already have an art background. This can be interesting in places, but often it seems pretentious. Don't get me started on the drawbacks of scholarly or intellectual writing.

Photography has changed quickly. It wasn't so long ago that photography wasn't even seen as art, and then only black and white was art, then reluctantly colour was accepted. The only practical way to capture images was on film, and the way most people saw the photographs were in magazines like Look or Life. Then digital came along and for a while there was a book genre that compared film to digital and most of them were out of date by the time they were published. Like computers, which is essentially what a digital camera is, digital cameras got better astonishingly quickly. I used a Sony back in the late 90's that used a 1.4 MB disc as the storage, and it could hold about 30 photos, I think. My camera can hold about 3500 photos (of technically high quality, if perhaps not artistic quality) if I put in the right SD card. Then the iPhone came along, and it's successors and competitors. Now, for most people, for most practical purposes, a phone camera is all that they need. Now, daily, a near infinity of photos are taken, and mercifully, most will never be seen.

Publishers have responded to this by producing books about photography, and photographers have eagerly seized on writing them as a way of expanding their incomes and reputations. There are some exceptions, but generally the authors are better photographers than writers. Since I'm more of a writer first, I pay as much attention to the words as the photos, at least until I can't, for whatever reason. Some of the writing is dreadful. Good thing the library is free.

And then we come to The Photographer's Vision by Michael Freeman. 

He starts with what a photograph is (and isn't), and what makes up a good one and why. I liked this beginning at the beginning, and laying out where he's coming from. There's lots of examples, and there's enough information that you could look up further references. In some ways the book is almost like hypertext, in that there are lots of references to pages you haven't got to yet, if you're reading front to back.  I spent lots of time flipping back and forth. Sometimes this is annoying, in that it might be an indication the book is poorly thought out, but that is not the case here. Photographs can illustrate different concepts, and it can be hard to organize the material. I was finding it interesting to think about how the concepts applied in different contexts.

Like a good photo, the book is layered, with lots of different concepts and points of view in different contexts. There's a bit of history, but it's not overwhelming, or overly scholarly. There's an appreciation of the technical issues earlier photographers faced and overcame. With some of the photos he does a bit of a dive into discussing why they work or why the photographer did it that way. He also places photography and photographs in the larger world, as part of the publishing process that typically photographers have no say in. We take the photos, and an editor decides which get used, and what text goes with them.

The book made me think about my photographic journey. Mostly I've been photographing things, or events, or people, all very much in a "there I was and this is what I saw" context. There's a place for this, but there's deeper levels to explore, and this book has me thinking about that. Somewhere along the line a photograph becomes art. Somewhere viewers stop saying 'ho hum another photo of x', and start saying "wow!" 

All this is from the first read through. It's going to join a select group of books that get a second, even more thoughtful read. I'll probably take some notes. 

If you call yourself a photographer, and you're wondering how to take it to 'the next level' as the marketing drivel calls it, you could do much worse than read this book. Even purchased, the price is many times cheaper than that bit of gear you've been thinking about. It doesn't tell you what to do, or how to do it; rather, Freeman talks about the background to those things; the thinking that goes into deciding what to take a photograph of, and why.

This is the key for me. One can 'learn' something by having someone tell you, but then, all that's happened is that you have been told. It's only when you figure it out for yourself that you really learn. I have high hopes.