Collecting photography books

If you can afford one of the prints above (about 30,000 euros each) then this post is probably not for you.
And I hate you (but in the best possible way).

Well-heeled white-gloved obsessive-compulsive collector types, move along to a site on connoisseurship that covers buying and selling prints, insuring them, et cetera et cetera. I have little interest in the kind of collecting that fetishizes appraisals ("near-fine condition with slight wear to dust jacket") and "investing" in books that you never open for fear of smudging a page. When I was at the "Paris Photo" show in November, I can't say that I didn't covet the prints. I would love a signed Cartier-Bresson, but I don't have a spare 25,000 euros in my wallet.

Enter the middlebrow solution to the collecting impulse: the photography book.

The countdown
Only recently have I started to buy photography books, most of them as prep work for either the photo class I taught in Paris last fall or the one I'm teaching here now. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into when I made up a list of books to buy back in December. I had about $1300 in books just sitting in an Amazon.com cart waiting for new funding to hit my research account on January 1st. Consequently, the "only 4 left in stock," "only 3 left in stock," shopping cart countdown became more interesting to me than what was happening in Times Square. By the time I hit "buy now," a couple of the books were no longer in stock. No biggie, right? They'll replenish their stock, I thought. Nope. Suddenly, books in the "buy from these sellers" part of the Amazon marketplace doubled or tripled in price. The most confusing case was Bruce Davidson's Journey of Consciousness, which went from supposed availability at $158, to a "buy from this seller" price of $997, and has now been relisted as a pre-order under the title Outside Inside for $158. It's as confusing as the stock market—but a lot more reliable. Here's why:

I will quote a really excellent basic guide to collecting photography books in which the author (Mike Johnston) describes the life cycle of a photo book:

1. Newly released, available in bookstores for full price. Not available everywhere, but readily available if you keep up with your sources.

2. Remaindered or sold on sale. Seems like nobody wants it. Book is common and cheap at this point.

3. Book is out of print; remainders are gone; book starts to get harder to find.

4. Most copies have gone into libraries or private hands; book is scarce, found mostly on the used / rare market; value rises. If it's a good book, the value can rise quite a lot.

That cycle is not good for publishers but great for collectors. I know from personal experience that you have to fight tooth and nail to get an exhibition catalog published these days. Well before the recession, museum directors were drastically cutting down on catalogs. Many important shows open and close with no publication, and those that have catalogs have limited runs to cut their losses.

Take Irving Penn's Small Trades (pictured above): This wonderful exhibition catalog from a recent show at the Getty, was on sale for around $35 at Amazon in December. Then it went out of print. Now you are lucky if you don't have to pay several times the original price to get one. As I write this, one person is selling them at $165 on ebay.

Another example:
I bought a new copy of this 2002 William Eggleston book off of eBay for $140. Pretty expensive since it retailed for $40 only 8 years ago. But compared to the sellers at Amazon, where you can't buy a new one and a "very good" used one is $385, the eBay price felt like a steal.

The collecting begins...
If you like photography anyway (and I assume you do), then knowing that your book collection will outperform your stock portfolio (OK, bad example) adds a new level of enjoyment to your image acquisition addiction. If you're like me, you don't buy books to make money, but it's part of human nature to enjoy possessing an object of desire. And along those same lines, it can be fun to drool over another person's collection. When you find yourself fantasizing that you happen to stumble upon one of the ten most collectible photography books of all time at a garage sale, then you know you're caught in the circuit of what some academics like to call "mimetic desire."

and now for a mental palette cleansing break....
Remember the Beanie Baby craze? Remember that hilarious "3rd Rock from the Sun" episode about "Fuzzy Buddies?"


best. cast. ever.

but back to photography book collecting...
Collecting photo books is not a frenzied activity, and it isn't a phenomenon in which one company makes a calculated attempt to drive sales through a mania of consumerism. In fact, go to a local chain bookstore like Borders or Barnes & Noble. Go. I'll wait.

Back already? Well, did you notice how pathetic the photo book section is? My local Borders has at most two or three small shelves devoted to photo art books. No craze going on there. The uninspiring selection means that you will have to make an effort just to know what photo books exist in print.

My advice is to look at Photo-Eye bookstore online. It's not as fun as paging through the real thing, but it is as good as it gets online. For many of the books, Photo-Eye uses "booktease" to show you some pages, but you will never be able to flip through an entire book. Possibly the best place to start is with one of their "best of" lists. The 2008 and 2009 "best of" lists compile lists from a variety of professionals. You can look at the individual lists as well as see the most frequently mentioned works. Sometimes, when you see the same book on everybody's list, you might just take the plunge and buy it. That's what I did and I have been very happy with the results (I'll share some in the next post).

Photo-Eye also does auctions—you can read a fun and informative interview with Eric Miles, the director of Photo-Eye auctions, on Elizabeth Avedon's blog.

March Monthly Special: Masking

I have a love/hate relationship with masking and compositing in Photoshop. On the one hand, I love how layer masks can be used to make selective adjustments to an image. On the other hand, I really hate compositing. Thanks to the ridiculous representation of image manipulation in movies and TV shows, most people think that completely changing a face or an environment is a click or two away. The nightmarish result of that attitude happens when I do a group portrait of a large family (or worse, a massive family reunion) and the client wants me to composite Suzie's head from photo 1 with Joe's from photo 3, Jim's from photo 4, Mary's from photo 8—oh, and while you're at it, could you swap out the eyes on Bob, Jane, and Dave? And the baby would probably look better if you turned its head 30 degrees to the left. I cringe just thinking about it.

I hate compositing, but knowing how to do it comes in handy. Look at my banner, for example. I wasn't about to actually take a photo of a bunch of photos being dropped into a take-out box that just happened to have my photo logo on the side. So I used masking and compositing to get the photo I wanted.

I mask way more frequently than I composite. When I whiten teeth, for example, I do an overall image adjustment, add a black mask, and then use a white brush to paint in the effect on the teeth. That kind of fairly casual brush-in masking is the least tedious. Other cases require complex selections. Here's a quick example of a not-so-complex selection that will make the principles clear to readers who are not in the habit of using masks:

In the above photo (part of an ABC Paris project I have been expanding lately), I want to bring out the sky a little more. That's easy enough to do with a curves layer:
I pull the curve down and get a darker sky, but here's the problem: the architectural portion of the photo is already pretty dark. Any darker and it will lose all of the shadow details, which is pretty much a cardinal sin for most photographers. What to do? I don't want the shadow detail police knocking on my door, but I do want a more dramatic sky. Here's where the mask comes in.
When you add a curves adjustment layer, Photoshop has already assumed that you want a mask to go with it. The default mask is white, which means that the adjustment is going to show everywhere by default. Click on the mask and paint in some black, however, and you can mask out the adjustment. In fact, it's not about black and white, you can mask with shades of gray (i.e. at a lower opacity) for even more control. But in this example, I just want a clean mask: black out the building and leave the curves adjustment for the sky only.

Since this isn't meant to be a full-fledged tutorial, let me just give a quick rundown of the process: With the image layer active, I used the magic wand tool (which is way more fun than, say, the pen tool, because hey! it's magic) to create a selection (look for a post on selections soon).

Once the dotted lines commonly known as "dancing ants" indicate that I have the building selected, I make the mask part of the curves adjustment layer active. Even though I made the selection on the background layer, I can use the selection on any layer as long as those ants are still dancing. Next, I simply use the paint bucket tool to dump black into the selection.

And that's it. My sky is now more blue. I went from this sky:
to this sky:
without changing the building in any way.

That's just a simple example of how masking can help. I could spend a whole year doing masking a compositing tutorials, but then I'd have to spend the next 5 in an asylum. So, in order to keep what's left of my sanity, I will do a few this month but will also do some completely unrelated posts. For those of you brave few who want to share by linking back to this post, do some masking and/or compositing and show us your work. (the FAQ explains how)

NOTE: I changed this month to masking only. (4/5/10)

What's been eating up all my time and keeping me from posting?

Oddly enough, a new photo class that I am teaching this semester is largely responsible for my lack of frequent posts. So, a little explanation before I turn over a new leaf this month.

I'm teaching a class called "French and American Cultural Values through Photography." Sounds very red state, doesn't it? "Values" is such a packed word. In the singular it makes me think "cheap" as in "extra value menu." In the plural, it makes me think of conservative political speeches, as in "family values" and "traditional values." The class blog—"valuesphotography.blogspot.com"—sounds like a campaign site, which is not at all the intent. One of the class objectives is to analyze the works of important French and American photographers as part of a cross-cultural dialogue. For example, the obsession of cataloging and preserving French culture in the 19th century (think Atget, Marville, etc.) ended up influencing ambitious American projects such as the FSA (think Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, etc.) which in turn influenced some of the Magnum group photographers (such as Henri Cartier-Bresson) and so on...

The cultural ping-pong (I could say "dialectic" but it's too late for academic speak) is fascinating, but making the connections takes time. And none of my assignments or lesson prep this past month had anything to do with "The Face"—last month's theme here at Take-out Photo. After a little reflection, I decided that my self-imposed restrictions were absurd. Why exclude material because it doesn't fit the "Monthly Special"? It's a photography blog after all. Which leads to my new month's resolution (I don't do "New Year's resolutions"):

Henceforth, I will not aim to make all posts fit within the monthly theme.

I'm not giving up on the "Monthly Special," nor am I giving up on the participatory links (even if only about 1 in 5,000of my readers posts a link), but I am going to provide a more steady stream of ideas and inspiration regardless of theme. And I will consider requests.

A new monthly special will be posted tomorrow, and knowing that I won't have to come up with a month of posts on the topic just might lead me to tackle a theme I dread. We'll see...

Meanwhile, if you want a look at what my students have been up to, they just posted a Sophie Calle inspired assignment. Only one of the students is a photography major, so it has been fun to push people to move beyond the academic cultural/historical material and also make them do photo essay assignments. The idea behind the assignment was to do something conceptual about the self and others within some kind of self-imposed set of rules. In Sophie Calle's work, living the project is as important as creating it and text is as important as image (she doesn't always take her own photos). I had more fun reading through these assignments than I have ever had grading student work. Here are just a few examples:

• one student recreated "missed connections" moments from Craigslist personals.
• one student told an embarrassing story to a variety of strangers.
• one student's Julie & Julia-esque endeavor to eat an entire pig actually made me want to try out a few recipes (not the pig feet, however)
• the horribly judgmental spot-on commentary about various BYU students had me laughing out loud

And there are a lot more, so check them out for fun.

Retoucher's eye

I've been horrible about posting lately, in part due to a lot of time spent retouching photo orders. A few days ago I noticed that I was getting a bad case of what I will call "retoucher's eye." It hasn't made its way into the annals of medical nosology . Not yet. But I bet that I am not alone in experiencing this. Can you guess what it is?

Let me digress for a moment and tell you about the worst job of my youth. I couldn't have been much older than 14 when a friend told me about a summer job working for an inventory auditing company. You don't have a lot of options at that age (or at any age in today's economy, but let's not think about that right now), so I took a calculator aptitude test and they signed me up. We worked our way through dozens of Fred Meyer stores. We slept in seedy motels and spent 12 hours a day counting. Most tedious job: counting bins of screws one at a time. Most embarrassing for a teenager: counting feminine hygiene products amidst shopping women. The days were long, but the nights were worse. I don't know who came up with the idea of "counting sheep" as a pleasant sleep-inducing activity, but it sure as hell wasn't me. At night, the numbers marched across my ceiling like those freaky "pink elephants on parade" in Dumbo. About two weeks of that and I quit.

And then there's Tetris. Play it enough and you get "Tetrisitis"—the phenomenon of seeing block formations when you're not actually playing the game.

I bet you are starting to understand "retoucher's eye." Spend enough consecutive hours retouching people's faces and pretty soon the Photoshop tool palette follows you everywhere. I first noticed it when I was having lunch with a friend and in my mind I kept lassoing any oversized pores with the patch tool and doing other touch-ups while we talked. Frightening, isn't it? I found it hard to look at anyone (myself included) without mentally retouching. This is what plastic surgeons must do every day. And dentists. And fashion consultants. And makeup artists. etc. etc.

If you are anything like my wife's friend Jill (hi Jill, if you're reading) and you think that retouching someone's appearance is morally questionable, then this must be a satisfying cautionary tale.

What do you think? Ever had retoucher's eye or something similar?

Obviously, I'm not about to stop retouching people's faces. That's part of why they hire me. I already have my own moral philosophy of retouching, which is to keep it natural. If you look at my tutorials you will see the changes in my "before" and "after" photos tend to be subtle. But then, the more you train yourself to work on subtle details, the more you are going to notice them, so even if you achieve photos that don't look retouched, you can still get retoucher's eye.