Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities is the fifth book in Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, and it’s a worthy entry to the collection. I’ve learned a few things from the other books in the series—Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude, Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image, Larry Fink on Composition and Improvisation, and Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment—and while I’m not a portrait photographer, not much anyway, I’ve gleaned some good insights from Bey through this book.

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Patrick Demarchelier: Fashion Photography is the second, or other book in the two volume series of American Photographer’s Master Series of workshop-type books from 1989, the other being William Albert Allard: The Photographic Essay. Like its litter mate, Fashion Photography reads like very long puff profile piece from a mass market hobby magazine.

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The Photographic Essay was introduced to me via a conversation on Twitter, if I recall. It was a couple of years ago, I think, and maybe I just read it but didn’t participate and that’s why I can’t find it now. No matter. William Albert Allard was a National Geographic photographer in the 1960s, and then a freelance photographer for the Geographic in the prime years for freelance National Geographic photographers and well into the magazine’s Fox-owned decline.*

In my YouTube blurb for the unboxing, I call The Photographic Essay “… a sort of master class on documentary photography and creating photographic essays….” After spending some time with it, well, I guess I stand by that. Sort of.

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John Szarkowski’s Atget was recommended, or, rather, referenced in Geoff Dyer’s The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, if I recall, as the model on which Dyer based his 100-comments-about-100-pictures arrangement of that book. It’s quite similar to Szarkowski’s classic Looking at Photographs, which I picked up cheap at a Half Price Books years ago, but still haven’t worked all the way through, and shame on me.

In brief, Atget is Szarkowski’s pick of 100 images from MOMA’s Atget collection, paired with essays that speak around the photographs and Atget’s life. It had me laughing and looking closely, and I wholeheartedly recommend you get one through interlibrary loan or something, if you have any interest at all in writing about photography (or writing in general).

But allow me to go on a bit…

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Two Rivers. Joachim Brohm / Alec Soth is an exhibition catalog from an exhibition of the same name at the NRW Forum, Dusseldorf, 29 March – 7 July 2019. I don’t recall who or what recommended it to me, and I have all of the Soth works included in their full books (mostly reprints), but was unfamiliar with Brohm and wondered what sort of conversation their works might have with one another.

After reading the essays (three, from Ralph Goertz, Vince Leo, and Wolfgang Ullrich) and looking through the selected photographs from about 25 years of image making from both artists, well…

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