Seeing is thinking

Stephen Frailey says the inspiration for his book was John Szarkowski's 'Looking at photographs' published in 1973. Both books have a hundred photos though only Lee Friedlander and Henry Wessel appear in each, Frailey's mostly considers well known photographers work from the Seventies onward.

What I enjoyed about the hundred photos in the book was the remarkable range of creative images. Obviously photography in its broadest sense (police mug shots, time lapse, celebrity PR et cetera) was not the book's purpose, instead the author reveals his interpretation of what is or isn't revealed in the pictures and he has some quite thought provoking ideas which you might or might not agree with but this is the point of the book: how to look at and enjoy photography.

Maybe fifty or so photos have people in them, the rest are landscapes, street commonplace, still life and close-ups, industrial plant ( the Bechers) texture and few of those interesting photos that break out of a rectangular format. Fifty-eight are in color. The book's format is very similar to Szarkowski's book with a photo on the right-hand page and block of text on the left. Nicely it's printed with a two hundred screen on a semi-matt art paper.

Well worth getting if you want to discover more about creative photography than meets the eye.