I really enjoyed this book. Sally Mann is, of course, best known for her wonderful photography, but this book confirms that she’s also an excellent writer (the book was after all a finalist for the National Book Award).

The book is subtitled: “A memoir with photographs” and it certainly contains a number of photographs: some by Ms. Mann herself and many from a treasure trove of family photographs found in boxes in her attic. It is these photographs that were the inspiration for the book.

A Los Angeles Times review entitled “Sally Mann’s memoir ‘Hold Still’ as lyrical as her photos” describes it as follows:

Photographer Sally Mann has built her career capturing the intimate details of the bodies, landscapes and objects that surround her. Her subjects have included her young children depicted as wild things (“Immediate Family”), landscapes of her beloved Virginia (“Deep South”) and vivid, raw images of her own body and that of her husband’s (“Proud Flesh”). Her excellent memoir, “Hold Still,” a careful, detailed literary and visual portrait of the photographer’s early influences and experiences, begins with Mann opening what she calls “ancestral boxes” filled with old photographs. She notes that rummaging through old photos, deciding which to keep and which to trash, is a delicate and emotional enterprise fraught with the misguided belief that visual representations of ourselves offer clues to who we are.

I’d love to be able to write something like this, but I see a couple of obstacles. First, I don’t have the boxes of photographs and other memorabilia that she has. I have next to no photographs of my parents and grandparents and very few of myself as a child. While I have a lot of family photographs they mostly date from the late 1970s onwards. Second, I can’t write to save my life. So it’s not looking good for “Howard Dale. A memoir with photographs”.

I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that I’m fond of David Duchemin and his books on cultivating photographic vision. He also does a series of video podcasts and in one of them (unfortunately I don’t remember which) he heartily recommended Freeman Patterson and in particular his book “Photography and the Art of Seeing. A Visual Perception Workshop for Film and Digital Photography“. I’d been given an Amazon.com gift certificate for my birthday so I decided to pick up a copy.

I very much enjoyed it. It’s relatively short (152 pages) and contains numerous pictures to illustrate his points. The major sections are as follows:

Barriers to seeing
Learning to observe – thinking sideways; Relaxed attentiveness
Learning to imagine – imagining; abstracting and selecting
Learning to express – the challenge of expression; unique properties of photography; how a camera sees space; thinking about visual design; elements of visual design: tone; elements of visual design: color; principles of visual design; working with visual design
Photography and the art of seeing

I particularly liked the exercises he proposed, mostly in the “Thinking Sideways” section. I tend to get in a photographic rut where I take pretty much the same type of picture over and over again. I know this, but I have great difficulty figuring out how to break out. Some of these exercise offer an opportunity to do so. One example:

Lock yourself in your bathroom with a camera, a tripod, and a standard lens. Give yourself 20 minutes to make 10 pictures. This is an example I have tried with several students – the resulting slide show have been both hilarious and instructive, and the variety of pictures amazing.

My only criticism is that one of the longer sections: “Thinking about visual design” is completely devoid of illustrative examples.

Well worth reading!

When I added Glass, Brass & Chrome. The American 35m Camera by Kalton C. Laue and Joe A. Bailey to my Amazon wish list I didn’t have high expectations. The cover had a not terribly good black and white picture of a camera on it and somehow I got the impression that the whole thing was little more than a photocopy. As expected for a book on this subject there were few reviews. Still it was one of a relatively small number of books on camera collecting so I thought I’d put it on the list. Someone gave it to me as a Christmas present and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really enjoyed it.

The first part provides an overall history of 35mm photography noting how at first many considered it to be a passing fad that would never replace larger negatives. Different types of lenses, coatings, shutters, rangefinders are described. The evolution of film, in its different formats (at first not standardized), from black and white to color is covered as is the development and growth of flash photography. A chapter is devoted to meters and the final chapter in this part covers development, printing and projection of 35mm film.

The second, longer part, describes each of the major 35mm camera manufacturers and their products with chapters devoted to Argus, Universal, Kodak, Perfex, Bolsey, Kardon, and Bell & Howell. A number of less successful cameras (Clarus, Vokar, Zephyr, Detrola, Spartus, Winpro etc.) are grouped together in a chapter entitled “Has-beens and never weres”. A chapter is also devoted to 35mm stereo cameras. The book concludes with a chapter dealing with Kodak Instamatic cameras.

The book was first published in 1972 and then was re-issued in 2002. There are many useful black and white illustrations. I found the book to be easy to read and free from a lot of the technical jargon that seems to infect books of this type.

One of the things that struck me was the author’s absolute certainty that the Kodak Instamatic System was the format of the future and that the standard 35mm cartridge was a thing of the past. Interestingly despite the advent of digital photography the 35mm cartridge is still with us in 2016 while the last Kodak Instamatic camera was sold in 1988 and 126 film was discontinued in 2006.