Library Lines
January 19, 2012
Heather Burgess
The words “books” and “reading” are nearly synonymous, but sometimes we forget that there are many wonderful books that are filled with images. These visually-engaging books aren’t all for children, either. Art books are among the many treasures held by the Chatham Area Public Library, and some of our most eye-catching recent additions feature photography.
One of the artistic strengths of photography is its ability to capture the essence of a particular place or time. One prolific street photographer whose works have only recently been made public is Vivian Maier. Taken over the course of five decades on the streets of Chicago, New York, Paris, and other cities, her works are a candid portrait of day-to-day life in the 1950s-1990s. Vivian Maier: American Street Photographer is the first commercially-available collection of her work. While Maier’s photographs emphasized people and the bustle of city life, Ansel Adams’s focus was the majesty of the natural landscape. A collection of his photos of some of our most beautiful natural scenery is collected in Ansel Adams in the National Parks: Photographs from America’s Wild Places. Known for her portraits of celebrities for magazines such as Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, Annie Leibovitz is another of our country’s best-known photographers. Leibovitz’s new book, Pilgrimage, gives a more personal look at her photography, documenting places and subjects she chose to shoot, rather than photos she took because she was fulfilling an assignment. The result is a fascinating series of images of people, places, and objects across the United States as well as the United Kingdom.
While Leibovitz is a celebrity because of her photography, there are a number of celebrities who have subsequently become photographers. Public figures as diverse as Henry Winkler and Nikki Sixx have written about their photographic adventures. Read about Winkler’s various adventures in the river and through the lens in I’ve Never Met an Idiot on the River: Reflections on Family, Photography, and Fly-Fishing. If rock ‘n’ roll is more your style, then maybe Nikki Sixx’s This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography, and Life through the Distorted Lens is for you. One of the most well-known celebrity photographers, due to her close association with the Beatles, is Linda McCartney. A retrospective of her work can be found in the volume Life in Photographs, which features photos selected from her vast archive of over 200,000 images and was produced in close collaboration with Paul McCartney and their children.
Perhaps you’re looking to improve your own snapping skills. The Library has a vast array of manuals for you to choose from. Two good overviews are Tom Ang’s Digital Photography Essentials and The Complete Photographer. Another strong starting point for digital photographers is Chris Grover and Barbara Brundage’s Digital Photography: The Missing Manual. If you’re interested in getting started in professional wedding photography, then The Art of Digital Wedding Photography: Professional Techniques with Style is tailor-made to suit your needs. For those wanting to focus particularly on shots of their own children and grandchildren, Photographing Your Family: And All the Kids and Animals Who Wander through Too by Joel Sartore and John Healey has some great tips.
These are only a few of the huge variety of books of photographs and about photography owned by the Chatham Area Public Library. If you’re looking for some visual stimulation, or for a guide to improving your own photography, we hope you will drop by and let us show you what we’ve got.
