Inspiration and Resources - Week Six
Minor White
Books of Interest:
Looking at Photographs: John Szarkowski
This is a picture book, and its first purpose is to provide the material for simple delectation, says Szarkowski in his introduction to this first survey of The Museum of Modern Art's photography collection. A visually splendid album, the book is both a treasury of remarkable photographs and a lively introduction to the aesthetics and the historical development of photography.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
This groundbreaking book proposes that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. Contains a powerful chapter on the history of photography and role that images will play in cultural transformation.
In About Looking John Berger explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see.
Photography Changes Everything
Curator and writer Marvin Heiferman has focused on the influence of photographic images on culture and history.
Seeing Things: A Kid's Guide to Looking at Photographs - Joel Meyerowitz
In this book, acclaimed and beloved photographer Joel Meyerowitz takes readers on a journey through the power and magic of photography: its abilities to freeze time, tell a story, combine several layers into one frame and record life's fleeting and beautiful moments. The book features the work of masters such as William Eggleston, Mary Ellen Mark, Helen Levitt and Walker Evans, among many others. Each picture is accompanied by a short commentary, encouraging readers to look closely and use their imagination to understand key ideas in photography such as light, gesture, composition-and, ultimately, how there is wonder all around us when viewed through the lens.
Seeing Being Seen
This text-based memoir of Michelle Dunn Marsh’s life and work as a book designer, cultural producer, and publisher is punctuated by photographs—gifted to her from projects, obtained through trade, or purchased in support of non-profit arts organizations—by some of American photography’s master practitioners over the last twenty-five years.
Portraits of her by Stephen Shore, Larry Fink, Sylvia Plachy, Will Wilson, and others punctuate a loosely chronological narrative exploring the author’s evolution of seeing, the influences of family, education, geographies, mentors, and photography itself on that process, and her commitment to the printed book as a vessel of future histories.
Seeing Being Seen evolved out of and expands upon an exhibition of the same name at the Highline Heritage Museum in 2019, and includes a checklist of the prints and books shown there, along with an afterword by the museum's director, Nancy Salguero McKay.
When you purchase Seeing Being Seen you will also receive a workbook, Reading Photographs, introducing a step-by-step process developed by Dunn Marsh to train the brain, through the viewing of photographs, to distinguish between what we see, and how we emotionally respond to what we are seeing.
Interview:
Michelle Dunn Marsh - Photograph Magazine Online
A Little Bit of Hungry: An Interview with Michelle Dunn Marsh
Octave of Prayer (Aperture, Vol. 17, No. 1) - Minor White
The (softcover & hardcover) book, Octave of Prayer, Edited by Minor White and published by Aperture books (1972), was a distillation of Whites thoughts on how a photograph could have meaning beyond the image on the paper.
Minor White and the Quest for Spirit