Vast collection of Ralph Gibson's work from 1960-1999, with over 800 richly reproduced photos in a heavy brick of a paperback.Thought-provoking. It urges you to expand your horizons beyond the classic street photography cliche that every HC wanna-B seems to be striving for (worthily, mind you), and to think outside of the box.
The book is short in words, but here's a valuable quote:
One day Dorothea (Lange) looked at my photographs and told me, "Your problem is that you don't have a point of departure. If you are going down to the drugstore to buy toothpaste and have your camera with you, the chances of making an important photograph are greater than if you just stand on the street corner waiting for something to happen." I promptly returned to the street corner. It was only years later while working on The Somnambulist that I finally understood the wisdom of her admonition. Since then I have always worked with a point of departure. Every photograph is relevant to an idea that is being examined, a series, or a book. Within this matrix infinite possibilities remain but the chaos is diminished.
(Since this is the first Book post of 2007, let me repost this: 770? In case you haven't figured it out yet, that's the Dewey Decimal Classification number for Photography and Photographs. I figure that in the future, it would similarly help search for these blog entries.)
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