Books like Print the Legend — picked by fans

This book is a lively, questioning, and comprehensive survey of American photography, from its beginnings to the present. It analyzes achievements in each of the genres, from portraiture, through landscape, to documentary, fashion, etc. It treats individual photographic artists, from Avedon to Weegee, from the views of New York taken by Berenice Abbott to J.T. Zealy’s likenesses of enslaved Africans. American Photography is always concerned to underscore what photographs have to tell us about major aspects of American culture: race and ethnicity, gender and identity, business and technology, religion, and region. It also has numerous well-reproduced images; illuminating sidebars and boxes on such topics as the daguerreotype or picture magazines; a helpful timeline; and notes on further reading and viewing. The book was expanded and retitled as Photography in America in 2015, but the first edition still holds up. 

The late Alan Trachtenberg (he died in 2020) did more than any other scholar or critic to further our understanding of photographs as cultural documents. This book – probing, detailed yet precise, and endlessly interesting – is his masterpiece. The chapters devoted to Civil War photographs and to American Photographs (1938), the extraordinary photobook produced by artist Walker Evans, are especially powerful. There is a sense in which the books I commend by other authors here – including my own The Grass Shall Grow (2020) -- would not be possible without Trachtenberg’s example.

“The Family of Man” – the huge exhibition of documentary photographs curated in 1955 by photographer Edward Steichen at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that then traveled the world – is probably the most influential photography show ever conceived. It included images of individuals and groups representing cultures from around the world. These were made by a gamut of major photographers, the majority of them American. The show was seen in person by hundreds of thousands of people and, literally, millions more have encountered the book version of the show. Sandeen’s engrossing study reveals both how the exhibition reflected Steichen’s own humanistic beliefs and how it spoke to larger cultural concerns. More recent scholarly work by, among others, Shamoon Zamir and Sandeen himself, have shown that “The Family of Man” was more controversial and less specifically “American” than was originally thought.

Women photographers have all too often been overlooked or forgotten. (This happened to the subject of my own book choice, Helen Post.) But Helen Levitt – who really flourished from the 1940s through the 1960s and is now undergoing something of a renaissance – has always had devotees. Steichen invited her to contribute to The Family of Man and one of her most notable admirers, James Agee, the novelist, poet, film critic, and documentarian, was pleased to write the insightful essay to A Way of Seeing. Levitt’s quirky pictures of street life – especially those featuring children, often at play – document quite ordinary customs at a particular moment. Despite never seeming intrusive, they get up close, reveal the photographer’s rapport with her subjects, and present them, so to speak, on the level. Ultimately, these images are so expressive that they become universal, transcending the period in which they… show more.

I’ve always loved the portraits the photographer Félix Nadar made of nineteenth-century Parisian celebrities such as Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.

I went to this book—Nadar’s memoir—to learn more about the making of those pictures. There is a little bit of that, but what really gripped me was the weird and wonderful shaggy dog stories Nadar tells about his adventures in ‘aerostatic photography’—taking pictures from balloons.

Spoiler alert: there is a lot of crashing.

A century after German scholars developed art history as a highly conservative meta-theory well suited to the study of the broader categories of “civilization” and “culture,” the Viennese psychoanalytic movement developed a highly radical meta-theory that posited civilization and culture as fictions meant to curb individual desires. 

Art historian Mary Bergstein illuminates photography's rich role in Freud’s thinking. Bergstein deftly reminds us that Freud’s interdisciplinary approach to the history of art and the new science of psychoanalysis was specifically meaningful to his time and place. During the brief period when Vienna would be recognized as the capital of European modernism, psychoanalysis developed as a meta-theory—a radical one—with the cult of individual desires and fears at its heart.

When the Hungarian-French photographer Brassai arrived in Paris in 1924, he taught himself French by reading Proust. As a photographer, he was fascinated by a similarity between his own impulse to make pictures and how the novelist used the photographic process as a metaphor for establishing or obscuring his character’s inner and outer worlds, as if both he and Proust were developing images in their respective darkrooms. Proust, Brassai saw, “used his own body as an ultra-sensitive plate, managing to capture and register thousands of impressions.” He was like a reporter with a camera—sometimes a portraitist, a landscapist, and, “sometimes Proust rivals the paparazzi.”

Mention the name ‘Lewis Carroll’ and most people will immediately think of the two Alice books. Very few would equate the name to Charles Dodgson, the photographer. This, however, is the aspect of the multi-talented Oxford don which Gernsheim, a professional photographer himself, appraised in his 1949 first edition for the very first time, concluding that Dodgson was ‘the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century. Many of the black and white plates substantiate this claim, but equally, Dodgson’s mastery of this new invention enabled him to meet and photograph (sometimes uniquely) numerous famous writers and artists, as well as many Oxford contemporaries. As an aside, Edward Wakeling’s 2015 Catalogue Raisonné is a comprehensive listing of every one of Dodgson’s hundreds of known photographs.

The Civil War was the first conflict in history to leave a detailed photographic record, and no one did it better than Mathew Brady. More than ten thousand war images are attributed to his studio and he did iconic portraits of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, Walt Whitman, Horace Greeley, and other celebrities.

Today, artificial intelligence, iPhones, and streaming video are remaking our world. But back in the 1850s, photography was the latest technology. It soon became so affordable that soldiers on both sides of the struggle sent a visually accurate memento to loved ones back home before they marched into battle. 

This book mixes history, social classes, cultures, and repression in a broiling stew of love, fear, and the will to survive that kept me captivated.

I wanted to see the characters overcome their own weaknesses as they built their survival skills in this captivating story that takes place in Spain during the Franco dictatorship.