Diane Arbus (1923-1971) was definitely a photographer’s photographer. I absolutely love Norman Mailer’s 1971 quote: “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.” She was the photographer who focused on the freaks and described them as people who had “already passed their test in life.” She wrote “They’re aristocrats.”

Of course, these were through the times in the United States where there were the so-called “Ugly Laws”… intended to stop freaks from going into cafes and diners and public places. They were laws intended to get the disturbing off the street so society could fool itself that normalcy was somehow normal. So, while viewing Diane Arbus’ work, I can’t avoid the conscious echo that super-imposed on her images are the footprints of a society that was beating these people down.

And Diane Arbus, of course, was a disturbed soul in her own right. She committed suicide in 1971 in her 40s… relatively young.

Her work is blunt. Her photographs are a surviving document of the flaws and the differences between human beings through the facilitating perspective of an empathic communicator. In Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, printed in 1972 (a year after her death), the reader is exposed to a selected array of her work in the spirit of the values and ideals that she held through her life. The iconic “Child with a hand grenade in Central Park, NYC 1962″; “Tattooed man at a carnival, Md 1970″; and, “A young [black] man and his pregnant [white] wife in Washington Square Park, NYC 1965″.

While we may make photographs as observers, documenters or collaborators there are certain truths that constrain the resulting artifacts. The photographer chooses what to include or omit from photographs. The photographer selects the correct exposure, the angles and the light. The photographer brings an inevitable bundle of political and social belief systems into the selection and creation of the subject matter.

Looking through the eyes of Diane Arbus is to inhale a social comment about humanity. Why do we ostracise the different? Why are we mesmerised by twins and triplets, or nudists or transvestites?

This is an incredible body of work and nobody would argue that Diane Arbus was anything but a master of her craft and an influence for future generations.

Paul Strand (1990-1976) was an American modernist photographer with a career spanning well over half a century. His work included the first intentionally made abstraction photographs, the first photograph of a part of a mechanical device as a purely aesthetic image, landscapes, architecture and candid portraits of everyday people. One of the most fascinating things about Strand is also the influence of artists like Picasso and Cézanne on what he was trying to achieve with his camera.

Reading Paul Strand: a Retrospective Monograph, the Years 1915-1946, published in 1971 as a hardcover, is something like dipping your big toe into a warm pool and then slowly submersing yourself further on every read through its pages. On first browse there appeared to be less to these images than I had imagined. However, Strand’s photography is deceptively simple, something very difficult to achieve. And it’s important to realise that these photographs were experiments and excursions in a two-dimensional visual world unlike our modern image-intensive iPhone enabled contemporary society. In that sense, it’s important to slow down and appreciate the black and white photographs for what they were in their context of time and space. In one sense, they are aesthetically beautiful images in their own right. In another, they represent the expression and evolution of artistic ideas.

Alfred Stieglitz thought enough of Paul Strand to include him in his Camera Work magazine in 1917 and exhibited Strand at 291, formerly known as Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, located on Fifth Avenue in New York. Stieglitz wrote:

New picture makers happen every day, not only in photography but also painting. New picture makers are notoriously nothing but imitators of the accepted: the best of them imitators of, possibly at one time, original workers… [Strand's] work is pure. It is direct. It does not rely on tricks of process.Alfred Stieglitz

This retrospective of Strand’s work from 1915- 1946 covers only half of his career as a photographer. However, from abstractions to portraits to landscapes there is a strong sense of discoverability within his photographs that compelled me read and re-read this book a half dozen times in succession. Strand was a master of drama in the understated… a man who pushed photography toward art… a creator of deceptively simple images – attributes that I definitely admire.

The important thing for photographers to take away from Paul Strand’s work is that our ideas and perspectives as “new picture makers” come from somewhere. In many cases, they can be traced back to Strand. When you take an aesthetic photograph of a printing press roller… when you break perspective with a fence… when you take abstract photographs of light on contrasting surfaces… there is Strand.

This is an important piece of knowledge for every photographer. Ideas are currency and it’s important to understand the economy of ideas if you hope one day to produce original ideas rather than just pretty pictures.

Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) travelled from New York State to California as a young man alongside his slightly older family friend Collis Huntington. After some time in the West, Watkins took up a temporary position in a daguerreotypy studio and from that moment had found his calling… he would be a photographer.

Watkins had a mammoth camera made by a cabinetmaker to take 18 inch by 22 inch glass negatives and headed on the long and arduous trek to Yosemite where he produced mammoth plate photographs that were received with some acclaim. Although, the best of these Yosemite photographs were produced in the 1860s, while in his 30s as a more accomplished expert in the field. He went on to record much of the development of the West Coast including the gold rush and the ever-expanding railroads.

Watkins also produced a large number of stereoscopic photographic views through his career using a stereo camera, popular in the mid-to-late 1800s, and employed techniques like panorama and ‘putting a framed photograph on a wall’ that were quite novel.

So why have you probably not heard of Carleton Watkins? After all, he was the photographic rival to Edweard Muybridge. His friend Collis Huntington was to be one of the big four Robber Barons of the 19th Century railroads alongside Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker.

The answer is probably that Carleton Watkins left little evidence of his thinking behind in written words to share for posterity.

But he was also, in the end, a victim of fate. On the morning of 18 April, 1906 Carleton Watkins woke to the San Francisco earthquake and a studio where a lifetime work lay in broken glass plates and burning business records. He was approaching 70 and had just arranged for his life’s work to be bought by Stanford University. The post-earthquake fire deleted that work like a blunt force trauma. A half century of work. Gone.

It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that interest in Watkins resurfaced. Remember, he took those Yosemite photographs some 80 years before Ansel Adams trod the timbers into that same park to create his iconic images.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art produced Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception by Douglas R. Nickel as an exhibition book. It not only covers Watkins mammoth plate photographs but includes a large number of other stereoscope, panorama and card photographs.

I think if you take the time to look at the work of Carleton Watkins you’ll be amazed at the quality and detail of those photographs. In the mid-to-late 1800s photography was barely out of its cage and Watkins produced what could be described as perfect landscapes. They were technical masterpieces. Created under extreme difficulty and carried home precariously on the backs of mules.

It makes clear that photography is a medium that started out with perfection and seems to have been met by compromises in every direction. They already had it back in the day, right there.

John Szarkowski (1925-2007) was Director of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1962-1991 and during that period put together Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. This collection of images, published in 1973, accounted for a mere one per cent of MOMAs photography collection including work from the mid 1800s through to the early 1970s.

Each photographer is only represented by a single photograph in this book regardless of their standing or the number of images acquired by MOMA. Also, each photograph is accompanied by a short essay written by Szarkowski on the adjacent page. Each photograph is a black and white. The accompanying essays range from a historic understanding of each image through to discussion about its conception, execution and interpretation that places it into a context beyond a mere picture on the wall. It is important to know who made a photograph, why they thought it was important and how it contributed to the spider-web lineage of photographic geneology.

Szarkowski goes to great lengths to explain another way of seeing photographs. As he reminds the reader, often photographs can misrepresent a situation as much by what is left out as what is included. So knowing a photograph is much more than standing in front of a wall and making a subjective thumbs-up or thumbs-down about aesthetic beauty. A photograph also changes in meaning over time as culture and society change around it.

For example, Robert Doisneau’s photograph At the Cafe, Chez Fraysse, Rue de Seine, Paris, 1958 on pages 172-173 depicts an older man and a younger woman at the bar with wine glasses in front of them. The man is leaning on the bar with his left elbow. The woman faces forward, only part way through her first glass. In Szarkowski’s 1973 interpretation of this photograph he writes of the power between a man and woman in a pseudo-sexual dance, of sorts. In fact, even I found this interpretation offensive given we are now in 2011. This photograph, 50+ years after being made and 40 years after Szarkowski’s interpretation, now reflects a dirty old man, very sleazy, pushing drinks on the young woman who is thinking – “How do I get out of this situation?”

I know that too often I see photographs, particularly in Internet communities that I avoid like the plague, merely judged on sharpness, technical expertise and aesthetic contribution. As an amateur photographer interested in another way of viewing the world I find that perspective slightly repugnant. Give me instead a meaningful moment to step inside the photographer’s mind.

By far my favourite aspect of this book (and why I will eventually acquire a copy for my bookshelf) are those essays that make Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art a perfect coffee table book. It’s so easy to pick it up and fall to a random photograph with a one to a three minute read. The value of this coffee table style seems to have been lost in recent years.

Because where else would I be more engrossed in all of this than laying on my sofa waiting for inspiration? This book is a gem.

Jeff Carter (1928-2010) left behind an archive of around 55,000 film negatives that spanned a 50 year career as he worked and travelled through the back-lots of Australia. His photographs are of ordinary working class Australians from the cities to the country and along the coastline. Jeff Carter’s letterhead read “photographer for the poor and unknown”, wrote Robert McFarlane in a Sydney Morning Herald obituary on November 6, 2010.

Jeff Carter was a writer and photojournalist with contributions to leading magazines like Women’s Weekly, Pix, People and National Geographic. For a time he was the editor of Outdoors and Fishing. He was also Australia’s best documentary photographer of his generation although there are more simple truths secreted in his photographs than mere cultural records of the day. There is humour, compassion and a hell of a lot of plain and ordinary beauty.

When you read Jeff Carter Retrospective from New Holland Publishers it’s hard not to think of that later iconic Australian with a camera, Rennie Ellis (1940-2003). Although it seems Carter chose the low road and Ellis the high; Carter the ordinary rural Australian and Ellis the contemporary rock stars and urban cultures of his era. Yet for their differences in social surroundings their photography shows a shared Australian documentary genus that seems to link them. Rennie Ellis’ No Standing Only Dancing reflects the bright lights and aspirations of another facet of Australian history and is well worth a read if you can find a copy.

Jeff Carter Retrospective includes a selection of photographs spanning from 1960 over the next 50 years and is split into five sections. ‘The Big Smoke’ looks at Australian urban life transitioning out of the 1950s into the 1960s. ‘Beach Culture’ records our cultural relationship with the expansive Australian coastline. ‘Properly True’ moves inland to the expansive hard country and the people who made it their home through the 1950s to the present day. ‘Men and Women of Australia’ are deceptively simple portraits of ordinary and extraordinary Australians. And ‘The Next Wave’ includes a selection of Australia’s children.

This book, first published in 2005, was republished for the Beach Bush and Battlers exhibition at State Library of New South Wales that was held in early 2011.

Bill Brandt (1904-1983) was a master photographer – a photojournalist, a documentary photographer, he shot portraits of famous identities, explored nudes through distortion and made some beautiful landscapes. Born in Hamburg to an English father and German mother, both with Russian blood in their veins, Brandt spent a number of years in a Swiss sanitorium recovering from tuberculosis. In his early twenties, having recovered, he left for Vienna where a social opportunity afforded him the chance to photograph Ezra Pound… who then introduced him to Man Ray. He moved to Paris and worked in Man Ray’s studio for three months.

At some point in the Paris experience Brandt decided to document life in England and it’s with that work that he opens Shadow of Light. The book is a selection by Bill Brandt of photographs across his career. His dark images of society at all class levels… the England now lost… conjures up a grubbier time. While several are gorgeous beyond their documentary intent, I am repeatedly drawn back to Brandt’s portraits and landscapes.

The portaits are interesting because of their dark contrast, sometimes surreal, often somewhat sinister – plate 77: J. B. Priestly and plate 95: Jaques Lartigue. There is a contemplative Franco Zeffirelli on pate 81 and a worried Pablo Picasso on plate 93. His portraiture style isn’t easily confused with other photographers. It is gritty, dark and bold. And some of the landscapes are simply inspiring works of art.

I should confess that my predilection for Brandt’s photography means I can’t give a non-biased opinion of his work or books. If you haven’t been exposed to Brandt’s photography you should open yourself to the experience. He had an incredible eye. He was also a master of that black and white, almost austerity, that I imagine when I look at scenes. It’s hard to describe. But it’s like a Brandt is darker than the darkest dark. It’s like he has coal under his fingernails. It’s like the surrealist in him opens another doorway to his eyes that changes the world in some almost fractional manner.

Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) was a master photographer born in Hungary. After serving in World War One he worked in an accounting office in Budapest until, in 1925, he followed his heart to Paris, the centre of the art world. In Paris, he quickly made friends friends with artists such as “Leger, Chagall, Vlaminck, Mondrian, Delaunay, Giacometti, Lipchitz, Lurcat, Calder and Zadkine”. And when he wasn’t shooting photographs or sleeping in his room… he hung out at Cafe Du Dome, the centre of their social universe. Kertesz described those 11 years in Paris as the best of his life. He had an international reputation and was greatly respected as an artist and photographer.

Kertesz left Paris for New York in 1936 with his wife for one year. However, the war erupted in Europe and he spent the next 30 years being ignored, under-appreciated and mostly shooting photographs to please himself because the American market was not ready for his European style. They called his nude distortions ‘pornography’ and in turn he refused to buckle under on commercial projects. It was not until Kertesz was an old man that America accepted him as a master photographer.

In the book Kertesz on Kertesz: a Self-Portrait, published in 1985, Kertesz walks the reader through his life story in a personal way using photographs and small pieces of text to guide context. It could have as easily been called “A Conversation with Kertesz” because he reminisces about photographs along the journey.

For example, four friends in World War One were photographed on a communal latrine but one of those men was killed soon after. Yet this was the only photograph Kertesz had to hand the man’s wife, and he did just that. She was pleased. On another occasion a simple photograph of a young soldier writing a letter gets the explanation that this soldier was writing about jumping over a brothel wall on Christmas, 1914. The photograph is elevated by the story.

There is a beautiful photograph on page 28 titled “Hungary, 1918″ that is beautifully framed. At first you see the cobbled alleyway and the peasant woman. Then the ladder. Then you see the cat climbing a ladder right at the top left intersection of thirds.

You can see the positive outlook of his photographs in Paris – chairs on the Champs Elysees; the famous image of four men in business suits walking across a wet Paris street; friends including the sculptor Alexander Calder, Marc and Bella Chagall and Piet Mondrian. I read the book through and studied each photograph at least three times before putting it aside.

Yet, my favourite photograph by far is on page 98 “Self-portrait with life masks, New York, 1976.” He writes,

These life masks were made in 1928, I think. One day I found one broken, and so I took them to a sculptor to fix. He knew my Distortions and so he made the heads like them. One day I came home and there they were. I set up my camera and asked a friend to push the button. Andres Kertesz

‘Kertesz on Kertesz: a Self-Portrait’ is an interesting book to review because what I really want you to do is to go to a library and find a copy. Read it. Immerse yourself into the soul of this artist who contributed a significant legacy to photography. He wrote, of one image of a Paris street taken in 1928 “I think Atget or Berenice Abbott did this street. But not with the cat.”

I hadn’t realised what an interesting man in real life Kertesz had been. It left me with a desire to learn more. It made me appreciate his real message for photographers and artists… work for yourself to your own vision of the world. Even when your friends and peers tell you that you’re crazy.

One of my favourite photographers is Sally Mann, the American best known for the controversial body of work produced around her children. The people who criticise that work probably should be aware that a good part of what somebody takes from a photograph is the baggage they bring to the viewing. But that aside, her life’s work has been far broader than many people realise.

In Deep South she explores the unique Southern American light and produced a body of work that I find impressive. The wet plate collodian process, the large format camera and the great consideration required to shoot and process these beautiful photographs should be respected. This is no simple adventure with a handheld – or dare I say digital – machine gun. Deep South is a primary work of an eminent contemporary American photographer.

Sally Mann’s images from Deep South can be seen on Youtube but the book provides high quality 8 x 10 inch prints that are really required to do the photography justice. It’s only when you can hold and touch this quality of image that you can fully appreciate its intrinsic qualities and values.

This is a book I wish lived on my bookshelf because a number of particular favourites jump off the pages. The first of the Georgia series, on page 9, is of a misty dark scene where some form of ivy covers a massive tree. The first in the Virginia series, on page 27, of a dimly lit landscape is even more compelling with its predominant blackness surrounding the diffused sun. Also, page 31, a river with a leafy branch in the top right quadrant and the misty Georgian shoreline on page 41.

However, my three favourite photographs are all from the Deep South series. On page 61 the tree and rock landscape, on page 71 a stick in a sliver of sunlight on a perfectly calm river and my ultimate favourite from the series is on page 83 of a standing tree trunk with a slash mark. For those reasons I have a feeling this book might eventually find a cousin living on my bookshelf.

If you’re really interested in understanding the photographer, you can watch the documentary ‘What Remains: the life and work of Sally Mann’ that has been split into six parts on YouTube – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.

Rebecca Solnit’s book River of Shadows: Edweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West is a photography history journey through the mid-to-late 1800s American West. It is made all the more compelling because it takes an exceptionally interesting character, Muybridge, and places his work and that of other famous artists and inventors and melds it all into a broad historical context. The wild west that was… and the wild west that people believed in.

The underlying premise of Solnit’s journey is photography’s role – along with the railroads and telegraphy – in breaking down the human perception of space and time. In a relatively short space in history people could move vast distances watching panoramas unfold through train windows; they could send a message almost instantaneously over vast distances; and, they could capture time and space in a photograph.

This shift in perception and possibilities can’t be over-emphasised in that before photography the average person had no way of knowing what their forebears looked like – only the rich had paintings to record their image. Suddenly, in the grasp of many, the portrait appeared and the landscape extended the vision of human possibility.

Muybridge’s most famous contribution to photography was an extensive series of ground-breaking motion studies created using the wet-plate collodion process. This can be said to provide the first step toward cinema. But what I found more fascinating than the discovery was the context of the west itself – the Ghost Dance, the Modoc wars, Sitting Bull stopping in battle to calmly smoke a pipe with comrades amid the gunfire, the turbulent history of San Fransisco and its ability to nurture self-reinvention, the back-story of Yosemite and the irrevocable greed of the big four robber barons.

And Muybride was an interesting man in his own right. He was an artist, an inventor, an entrepreneur, a murderer found not guilty against the directions of a trial judge (and should have probably been hung) – and he was a driven perfectionist. He was constantly pushing the new medium of photography into new directions and working at improving it’s technologies to reach those goals.

I couldn’t recommend Rebecca Solnit’s book more highly. It was a compelling read with the historic depth of character to bring everything to life in its own manipulation of space and time. I’d call this one a must-read for photographers and history buffs alike.

Charles Dodgson (1832-1898), Oxford lecturer and mathematician, was a shy, stuttering and half-deaf amateur photographer at the historic point where Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype (very late 1830s) and William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype (early 1840s) developing processes were being pushed aside by Frederick Scott Archer’s wet-plate collodian process (1850s). Where daguerreotype provided the photographer with a clear one-off image the calotype offered the ability to reproduce multiple images but it lacked the crispness of its alternative. Wet-plate collodian brought photography to the masses and “democratized (sic) Victorian photography” by providing an ability to shoot crisp and clear images that could be printed multiple times.

In 1856, Dodgson, better known to the modern world by his pen name Lewis Carroll, purchased a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding Camera in London. He went on to become a portrait photographer of some note and a small number of those portraits included the girl who inspired his classic work ‘Alice in Wonderland’. This book isn’t about Lewis Carroll the writer; it is about one of a small series of photographs of Alice Liddell. That Alice.

Simon Winchester has taken the famous photographic portrait of six-year-old Alice Liddell as the beggar maid and reconstructed around it a world context. The Alice Behind Wonderland brings Charles Dodgson back to life with fine details about his human relationships and motivations. But you should be aware this isn’t a doting look at Lewis Carroll or his book. In essence, this is a book about photography and Dodgson as a photographer.

If you are interested in the history of photography – or extremely well written history of the era – it’s going to provide you with 100 pages of insight. You’ll have more understanding and appreciation of Alice in Wonderland but don’t for a second think this is a deconstruction of nuance and writing style. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one in small snippets as a coffee table book, much as its form factor appears to incite from the reader.