Frank Van Riper Talks Photography

Friendly Essays: Frank Van Riper Talks Photography

If there are two kinds of everything, then there are two kinds of books about photography. The most useful kind shows photographs. This has been, for most of photography's history, an extremely important element of the photographic enterprise — it's how most photographers have presented the best of their work for scrutiny and how the greatest photographers have secured their work in the canon. It's also a big part of how they, and we, keep up with the work of other photographers. Newspapers and magazines are important, but evanescent; advertising is remunerative, but credit lines are seldom given. In books, the photographer has historically had the most control over how her pictures have been selected and presented.
The other kind of book are writings about photography. Most of these, I grant you, are technical books, which tell you how developer chemistry works, or how to control off-camera flash, or else they document in excr...