The Photography Book Book

I like this kind of books for one reason, one can look through them and find something that might be interesting to explore better. And this one is a good one. It's more than 500 pages long, and on each page there is a single photograph (in a very rare cases, more than one like on the page that feature Duane Michals' series "I build a Pyramid" for example), by a single photographer (with few exceptions like Lévy & Sons). Above each photograph there is a little bit about the photo, and the photographer. The oldest photo is since 1850s, and the newest from 1990s.

I have been looking through this for the past month or so, and it fascinates me. I've been interested in photography for a long time, so there is a lot of stuff in this book which I have seen before, some of my favorite photographers can be found in this book. Photographers like Minor White, Jerry N. Uelsmann, Elliot Erwitt, to name just a few. But of course there are other that I don't like very much, like Richard Prince for example. His re-photography concept just doesn't interest me in the least. That is to be expected for a collection of this kind.

Because it has such a large scope, photographers from around the world, and through a period that spans more than a century, one can see how the medium has evolved, but there is one thing that makes that a bit tricker than it might have been. The photographs are ordered is alphabetical, the last name of the photographer determines where the photo ends up in this book. This make it an interesting to look through, but one can't get the sense of style changing as one might have if the photos had been odprdered by the year they had been taken. Still I found it very interesting.