Summer Reading List #3
My annual list of 10 recommendations - read, watch, live alongside doubt
For the third year in a row, I’ve put together a list of favourite recent reads and watches that relate to photography and creative practice. The unintended theme of the list this year was diary and memoir, as well as lots of interesting experimentation with form: a novel in fragments inside a long interview; a decade of journals collaged and re-purposed; despatches from the lives of a painter, a sculptor, a violinist.
Reading over my draft today, as I prepare to publish it, I’m struck by the thread of my own personal doubt and faltering that keeps surfacing in my responses to these ten books and films. I thought about editing it out, but then I felt it would be more honest — and in the spirit of many of the works on this list, as you’ll discover — to leave it all in. I want to cop to the rhythms of uncertainty and inconclusiveness that are, it seems, common to most artists. Frankly, too, I think it’s a particularly hard moment to maintain conviction in the importance of one’s own creative work. Art can’t make the world better, as much as the idealist in me wants that to be so, and every day the news reminds me of it. (In the meantime, keep writing to your MP and donating when you can — I still believe that clear collective action and refusal can, if slowly, move the needle).
Anyway — many of the works on this list made me feel that moments of faltering don’t have to be something to hide, but instead can give texture to a work, as well as — in the best case — reassuring others who feel similarly. These eight books and two films were meaningful to me, and I think meaning and pleasure are important, even (and especially) in moments of creative inertia and disillusionment. I admire all the artists, working today and in the past, who’ve carried on making things, and thinking things, and reading and writing, during their own moments of doubt, and I’m grateful for their generosity in sharing it.
You can read the previous lists here and here.
