Photographic books that have affected your photography

[chris@seary.com]

Aside from all of the 'how to take photographs' style of book, this is aimed at collections of pictures by your favourite photographers. Which photographic books have changed your perspective on what photography is, and what it can achieve?

Although I've treated myself to many books by artists such as Walker Evans and Joel Meyerowitz recently, the one that sticks in my mind the most is 'I Can Help' by Paul Reas. I went to the Photographer's Gallery near Leicester Square in 1988 and saw Reas's exhibition documenting the transition of industrial towns and cities to retail parks, when Mrs T was doing her best to rid the country of manufacturing. This resonated with the degree I was taking at the time, where I was learning about the motives and results of the Enterprise Zones and Development Corporations that kind of symbolised the 1980s (don't forget that at the beginning of every election campaign, Mrs T's battle bus left from the London Docklands).

Reas's compassionate and eerie phorographs document not just the change in the physical fabric of the regions, but also the social change as well.

Here is the book:
http://www.schaden.com/book/ReaPaueIC04609.html



Tell us all about your experiences through photographic books, and what was special about them.

[Graham]

       I like a picture to be somthing more than a flat representation of somthing we could all see.
      I've just had a look at my book shelf, and where there are several books by the same author I find;
                 
             Elliot Erwitt.......Understated humour.
             Snowdon..........No distracting "Bells and whistles".
             Don McCullin.....Raw, brutal honesty. (Even in his landscapes.)
     
      I see from my own list that it's probably not so much what the pictures have, as what they don't have.
                             Graham.


Would this be a good time to say that I find the work of Martin Parr to have a certain charm!