Summer Reading List

10 recommendations for photo-related reading (and watching)

Hi! Over the past few months I’ve been thinking about what I can add for paid subscribers to this newsletter. I have a few ideas rolling around: some more diaristic essays, Q&As, notes on craft/working methods, reviews of exhibitions and books, as well as creative experiments-in-progress (and any requests or recommendations for newsletters outside my current core duo of essays & conversations are, of course, always welcome).

For the first paid offering, I’ve put together a list of recent reads (and two films), all of which have some relationship to photography, and all of which I sincerely loved and found particularly meaningful or thought-provoking. Each one is informing my current practice in some way; many of them have shaped various essays in the newsletter so far.

I’ve tried to stay relatively off the beaten track so that the list feels fresh and interesting: no Sontag or Barthes to be found. Essays, novels, memoir, a book-length conversation. All of them have much to offer for a photo-interested reader, whether you’re a photographer or not. As I wrote my notes for the list, I noticed a few common themes: frequent reference to, and quotation from, other works; extended reflections on that writer’s own artistic practice, whether in writing or in another discipline; and six of the eight books listed contain photographs, though none of them is a photobook.