Reader's Comments - Index of - Free

Dead Trees
Susan Sontag's "On Phtography" is pretty good too.
-- Don Rivington, June 12, 2001
I've been buying occasional copies of "Photo Life", a Canadian publication, for about a year or so. It's a
well laid out magazine with generally excellent reproduction of photos. They have started recently to
include a digital section of a "magazine within the magazine". It's not very heavy into technical issues
but does do some equipment reviews. It's the only source, other than John Shaw's column in the online
Photo Safaris magazine, that I have read which mentions the new Nikon 80-400 VR's problems with
slow autofocusing. Reports seem to be very well done.
An online publication I have recently discovered and have been following is the monthly Digital
Journalist (www.digitaljournalist.org). As a former news photographer, I can fully appreciate the issues
involved. I would expect the archive of photojournalism would appeal to a large segment of a population
who grew up with the great news magazines of the past.
-- Lee Shively, November 23, 2001
Read this page and you will get the mistaken impression that most great photographers are American,
and at the most a couple of Western Europeans can hold a camera, with the rest of the world being
photographically illiterate. Outside of Western classical music (which had a totally valid reason)
photography has to be the most provincial of the arts.
In no particular order, check out books in the bookstore by
1. Koudelka 2. Graciela Iturbide 3. Sebastiao Salgado 4. Abbas 5. Raghu Rai and/or Raghubir Singh.
etc. etc.
A considerable body of work by African Photographers also exists, though mostly on the web. There is a
standard (and rather tedious now) view in American circles that photography arose and was mostly
advanced by certain U.S. (and a few European) photographers, such as Steiglitz, Steichen, Ansel Adams,
Cartier-Bresson and the like.
IMHO, the truth is far more complex. Photography is an unusually accessible technology and art form,
and its practitioners have ranged across the globe over the last 150 years (look at the work of Raja Deen
Dayal, in 1870s India) and the commonplace historical narrative of artistic development (Steiglitz et. al)
is actually quite arbitrary and seeks merely to create easily understandable (and self-centered) coherence
out of a huge global swirl of artistic activity.
Walk into a store and pick those books out of the shelf at random. There are and have been many equally
great and equally important photographers in this world.
http://www.photo.net/books/ (14 of 20)7/3/2005 2:23:26 AM