A Few Books at a Time

I had twenty pictures of the Grand Mosque to sequence for a photobook and went looking for inspiration online. I was greeted by a familiar mess: Afghan Girl, weight-loss ads, a picture of someone's lunch, cookie policies. All of it blurs into nothing. 

My experience with photobooks was limited to the wedding album. Large, clunky things that spent most of their lives as coffee table décor or at the bottom of a bookshelf. I was looking for something else. Less fleeting than a social media feed but more intimate than an oversized art book.

I had been taking photographs for ten years, but my knowledge was mostly gear-related. I knew more about Canon, Nikon and Leica than I did about photographers and their work.

I needed to buy some books. I visited amazon.com, typed “photography books” into the search box and selected books by artists whose names I’d heard in passing, books that had an interesting cover, and books that were eligible for FREE shipping to Oman once I spent over $59.00. After settling on a good fifteen, I proceeded to checkout.

Amazon split my order into six shipments. A choice as adverse to the environment as it was to my inbox. There was one benefit: fewer books to a delivery would be easier to digest.

The first batch arrived: Rinko Kawauchi’s Illuminance, Gerry Johansson’s Spanish Summer, and Harry Gruyaert’s Homeland.

Illuminance, the most striking of the three books, pulled me in immediately. It was bound in purple cloth, with softly textured French-fold pages that lent the images a painterly softness. With a single square photograph on each page, every spread relied on the relationship between the images. The book invited dialogue, and my wife and I spent the evening making sense of the pairings.

Spanish Summer was different. A thick book of black-and-white images surveying the Spanish countryside. A stream of identically sized photos with few identifying landmarks and almost no people. This was travel photography without the sparkle and spectacle.

And finally, Homeland, which brings together fifty years of Gruyaert’s work in Belgium and his search for “the beauty of banality” in his birthplace. Bought with the hope that seeing how he photographed his homeland would help me look more closely at my own. Initially, I wasn’t impressed, and maybe I’m still not. But the book is on my shelf, and I’ll keep returning to it.

My collection is bigger now, and I return to these three regularly. Sometimes skimming, sometimes studying, always trying to understand them a little better. I suspect that in a few years their pages will be well-worn and my opinions reconsidered. My bookmarks tab, however, will still be unvisited.