Recommendations you can check.
Documentary filmmaker (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) and author of Believing is Seeing.
6 things
GettysburgBook William Frassanito
Frassanito was obsessed with Gettysburg and with reconnecting photographs of the Civil War to the circumstances under which they were taken. Through this obsessive quest, he reconnects the photographs to actual geographic places and reorders them to reflect the real sequence of events. It's a deeply fascinating enterprise and I was inspired by his work.
Five Books interview on photography and reality
2011-09-30·fivebooks.com ↗
A Day with PicassoBook Billy Kluver
It's an obvious precursor to what I've been trying to do. It's also a great book in its own right. Unfortunately, Klüver died just a couple of years before I started working on my own book. I would have loved to talk to him.
Five Books interview on photography and reality
2011-09-30·fivebooks.com ↗
Six Seconds in DallasBook Josiah Thompson
Another book I would like to mention is Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas [about the Kennedy footage]. It's an early example of an attempt to do just what we're talking about – piecing together reality through photography, or in this case film.
Five Books interview on photography and reality
2011-09-30·fivebooks.com ↗
The Perfect MediumBook Clement Cheroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem and Sophie Schmit
These images answer certain people's hopes and dreams – that they can reconnect with those that are lost, that the deceased are always with us. One example is William H Mumler, the famous spirit photographer who created a picture of Mary Lincoln with the ghost of her deceased husband hovering in the background.
Five Books interview on photography and reality
2011-09-30·fivebooks.com ↗
Lee Miller's WarBook Antony Penrose and David E Scherman
There's this wonderful photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub, taken by her boyfriend at the time – a Life photographer she had teamed up with, David Scherman.
Five Books interview on photography and reality
2011-09-30·fivebooks.com ↗
The Auschwitz AlbumBook Peter Hellman
I feel the pull of The Auschwitz Album very powerfully. We're looking at something that is indecent, it's cruel beyond imagination and yet it's real. It concerns real people and real historical events.
Five Books interview on photography and reality
2011-09-30·fivebooks.com ↗
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.