Book recommendation: Image Makers, Image Takers
October 22, 2007
I just arrived back home from a trip and my next post is to recommend you a book I purchased few weeks ago and I find fascinating. The book is "Image makers, Image Takers".
The book, published in 2007, is a collection of interviews with leading photographers, curators and editors -with 218 images inserted to exemplify the work of the artists. The photographers are categorized based on the type of photography including current leaders in documentary, fashion and advertising, portraiture and art and a chapter with four photographers that exemplify the next generation of artists. This follows with interviews to curators, gallery owners - the people that often times are key to launch the career of new artists- agency directors, editors and publishers. If you are interested in knowing how the artists started their careers, what drives their inspiration, how editors and curators select images and what these experts think in general about the field you will find the book as fascinating as I did.
From the publisher:
Image Makers, Image Takers is the first book to examine systematically what inspires today’s photographers and what it is that makes them succeed. It reveals how some of the world’s most established photographers, from art, documentary, fashion, advertising and portraiture, actually work, and explores what it is that picture editors, curators, gallerists, agency directors and art book publishers are looking for when choosing an image.
Anne-Celine Jaeger delves into the working practice of famous photographers, unveiling the mysterious process of artistic creation involved in making and taking a photograph.
Whether it is basic questions of what to look for in an image, views on cropping or the use of colour over black-and-white, the shapers and makers of taste provide a unique and indispensable account of their working methods.
The book first focuses on photographers’ working practices, from how Mario Sorrenti got the inspiration to photograph a naked Kate Moss draped over a couch for the iconic Calvin Klein campaign to how the Dutch portrait photographer Rineke Dijkstra gets the best out of her subjects. What made the photographer start taking pictures? How did he or she develop a signature style? What is the process involved in going from concept to shoot? How important is postproduction?
Then the book turns to selection. How does the picture editor of the New York Times Magazine decide which photographer to commission for the next fashion spread? What kind of photograph, according to the Senior Curator of London’s Photographers Gallery, is worthy of being hung in a gallery? What advice would art book publisher Gerhard Steidl give a budding photographer? Whether it is the question of what to look for in an image, views on cropping, or the pros and cons of color versus black and white, the shapers of taste give acute and useful accounts of their methods.
Anne-Celine Jaeger is a journalist and critic who has written for many publications, including Wallpaper*, the London Times and the Guardian, as well as the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Art Investor magazine in Germany. She first became fascinated by photography at the age of six – she later graduated from the University of Oxford and then City University, London.
Posted in Books, Photography
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