Here are 100 books that Understanding Exposure fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve passionately pursued the art of screenwriting for decades now, with all the ups and downs that go with that—from the peaks of Hollywood projects winning big awards (I was a writer-producer on HBO’s Band of Brothers), to scripts nobody wanted to read and when they read them, they didn’t want to do anything with them. And everything in between. It’s been my career my entire adult life—doing it, teaching it, and helping others understand the requirements of good screenwriting.
This classic is my go-to for the challenges of living the creative life and how to push through them.
In short, punchy chapters, it identifies the main source of blocks writers and artists have and how to push through them.
I love its approach to the workmanlike attitude one needs to have to create consistently and move toward a goal, and how to be clear-eyed about the inner “resistence” we all have that seems to want to stop us.
A succinct, engaging, and practical guide forsucceeding in any creative sphere, The War ofArt is nothing less than Sun-Tzu for the soul.
What keeps so many of us from doing what we long to do?
Why is there a naysayer within? How can we avoid theroadblocks of any creative endeavor—be it starting up a dreambusiness venture, writing a novel, or painting a masterpiece?
Bestselling novelist Steven Pressfield identifies the enemy thatevery one of us must face, outlines a battle plan to conquer thisinternal foe, then pinpoints just how to achieve the greatest success.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve been a journalist and writer my entire adult life. I’m a mid-30s mother of two who accidentally had my mind blown by ChatGPT a year ago. I felt this burning need to try and express what I was feeling and learning as I discovered this new thing. As I used it more and thought and thought about it, I started questioning my own humanity. I felt alone and alienated, consumed by my thoughts.
Writing Human Again didn’t feel like a choice. My hope is that other people will find some comfort, a renewed appreciation for critical thinking, and perhaps a dash of inspiration and self-improvement along the way.
I recently saw a clip of Rick Rubin talking about art and AI. To paraphrase, he explains that he’s interested in artists because of their point of view. AI has no point of view. I watched him speak so eloquently (and so simply) about something I have tried to put words to for months.
Creativity is akin to magic. It’s what sparks joy. It’s what makes you remember the details you do. What makes creativity powerful isn’t polish, but presence. Part of that story is the ability to notice, to feel, to pay attention to what most people rush past and capture it, if only for a moment.
In The Creative Act, Rick Rubin distills that instinct into a way of being. He reminds us that creativity is a birthright. A way of moving through the world with sensitivity and curiosity. Rubin’s words are art in and of themselves.…
From the legendary music producer, a master at helping people connect with the wellsprings of their creativity, comes a beautifully crafted book many years in the making that offers that same deep wisdom to all of us.
"A gorgeous and inspiring work of art on creation, creativity, the work of the artist. It will gladden the hearts of writers and artists everywhere, and get them working again with a new sense of meaning and direction. A stunning accomplishment.” —Anne Lamott
“I set out to write a book about what to do to make a…
As an artist, photographer, author, and workshop leader, my goal is to help others become more skilled with photographic techniques and more creative with their photographic and artistic practice. I like to tell workshop participants that to take better photographs, one should stand in front of more interesting things. But to become a really better photographer one needs to become a more interesting person. The books in the list have helped me grow as a person and photographer, and I hope they also enhance your technique and your passion as a photographer.
I started writing my photography blog almost twenty years ago. Looking back at the vast number of stories I have written in my blog, I see that many of them are my contemporaneous thoughts about images I am in the process of creating.
This book serves a similar role in the pre-Internet, pre-blogging world: the reader gets a birds-eye view of Weston’s life and creative challenges as he makes some of his most famous images. Why not go to the source? If you want to learn more about creativity and image-making, I completely recommend this glorious day-by-day diary.
For more than 15 years, Edward Weston kept a diary in which he recorded his struggle to understand himself, his society and his art. His journal has become a classic of photographic literature. Weston was a towering figure in twentieth-century photography, whose restless quest for beauty and the mystical presence behind it resulted in a body of work unrivaled in the medium. John Szarkowski observes that “It was as though the things of everyday experience had been transformed... into organic sculptures, the forms of which were both the expression and the justification of the life within... He had freed his…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
As an artist, photographer, author, and workshop leader, my goal is to help others become more skilled with photographic techniques and more creative with their photographic and artistic practice. I like to tell workshop participants that to take better photographs, one should stand in front of more interesting things. But to become a really better photographer one needs to become a more interesting person. The books in the list have helped me grow as a person and photographer, and I hope they also enhance your technique and your passion as a photographer.
Photographers know that as a matter of physics you cannot actually photograph an object; you can only photograph the light reflected or emitted by the object. This being the case, to photograph landscapes and nature it is vitally important to understand the principles that I apply.
I love that this book explains carefully how rainbows and shadows work, and most importantly how one can take advantage of the principles of applied physics to improve one’s ability to capture spectacular images that rely on natural phenomena.
We live in a world of optical marvels - from the commonplace but beautiful rainbow, to the rare and eerie superior mirage. But how many of us really understand how a rainbow is formed, why the setting sun is red and flattened, or even why the sky at night is not absolutely black? This beautiful and informative guide provides clear explanations to all naturally occurring optical phenomena seen with the naked eye, including shadows, halos, water optics, mirages and a host of other spectacles. Separating myth from reality, it outlines the basic principles involved, and supports them with many figures…
Growing up, I enjoyed reading about history, especially the Civil War. So, when I stumbled upon the exploits of John Yates Beall and Bennet Burley (the rebel spies are mentioned in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals), I didn’t believe it at first. After all, my hometown is near Niagara Falls, N.Y., and I’d never heard of this plan to seize the U.S.S. Michigan warship on Lake Erie. As I learned more about the extensive spy network that once existed along our northern border with Canada, I discovered how this audacious plan connected with Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, John Wilkes Booth, William Seward, and other luminaries from the time.
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.
In the 1840s and 1850s, "Brady of Broadway" was one of the most successful and acclaimed Manhattan portrait galleries. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Dolley Madison, Henry James as a boy with his father, Horace Greeley, Edgar Allan Poe, the Prince of Wales, and Jenny Lind were among the dignitaries photographed in Mathew Brady's studio. But it was during the Civil War that he became the founding father of what is now called photojournalism and his photography became an enduring part of American history.
The Civil War was the first war in history to leave a detailed photographic record, and Mathew…
Against all odds, women journalists have built a robust tradition of telling the truth and getting to the heart of the story no matter the obstacles. In a world where the Fourth Estate is ever more crucial, the history of female reporters is all the more relevant as a source of information and inspiration for the next generation of correspondents. As a woman’s historian and passionate supporter of freedom of the press I’m always on the lookout for great histories of these intrepid reporters whose lives also happen to make for great reads.
As a kid, I wanted to be Lauren Bacall when I grew up. I watched To Have and Have Not almost weekly, emulating her sultry moves as “Slim” and wishing that I too could one day undermine the Nazis in a little black dress.
I don’t regret my choice of teenage role model, but I do wish I had known about Lee Miller back then, who would have offered a real-life example of a femme fatale fighting for good with her talents. However, rather than grit and charm, Miller used her camera to expose the true cost of fascism.
Carolyn Burke's biography takes us on an extraordinary journey through Miller’s life—from her days as a model to her work as a war correspondent. Miller had an uncanny ability to connect with the subjects of her photographs, creating a bridge between their world and ours.
Lee Miller's life embodied all the contradictions and complications of the twentieth century: a model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and domestic goddess, she was also America's first female war correspondent. Carolyn Burke, a biographer and art critic, here reveals how the muse who inspired Man Ray, Cocteau, and Picasso could be the same person who unflinchingly photographed the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Burke captures all the verve and energy of Miller's life, from her early childhood trauma to her stint as a Vogue model and art-world ingenue, from her harrowing years as a war correspondent to…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Growing up in the 1970s, I loved my family’s cheap plastic Polaroid OneStep camera and the magic pictures that developed right before my eyes. Thirty years later, I was incredibly lucky to be the first researcher to get access to the Polaroid archive just as the company was going bust. For me, the key to Polaroid photography is that it is fun, and all the books on my list are, in one way or another, about the lighter, playful side of photography. I hope that they take you off the beaten track of the history of popular photography and into some quirky and interesting corners.
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.
The first complete English translation of Nadar's intelligent and witty memoir, a series of vignettes that capture his experiences in the early days of photography.
Celebrated nineteenth-century photographer—and writer, actor, caricaturist, inventor, and balloonist—Félix Nadar published this memoir of his photographic life in 1900 at the age of eighty. Composed as a series of vignettes (we might view them as a series of “written photographs”), this intelligent and witty book offers stories of Nadar's experiences in the early years of photography, memorable character sketches, and meditations on history. It is a classic work, cited by writers from Walter Benjamin to…
I am an Oxford local historian, and the only Oxford guide endorsed by the Lewis Carroll Society. I have helped shape Oxford’s annual Alice’s Day since the first one in 2007, and have participated in French, Dutch, Canadian, Brazilian and British TV and radio documentaries, most notably for BBC 2 and BBC Radio 4. My interest is mainly the many Oxford realities which are hidden away within the apparent fantasy of the ‘Alice’ books, an angle which has enabled me to lecture on this internationally famous topic as far away as Assam in India. Subsequently, my appreciation of Carroll’s versatility as a mathematician, photographer, inventor, diarist, and letter writer has grown steadily over the years.
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.
I discovered Jewish photographers a couple of decades ago when I worked on a book, Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images. At the time, I was intrigued with how to tell the city’s history through photographs. Then, when I started to request permission to publish, I discovered that most of the photographers were Jewish New Yorkers. That sent me down a twisting path as I learned about more and more and more Jewish photographers. All types of photographers: professional and lay, photojournalists and street photographers, fashion photographers and family photographers. I fell in love with the multitude of their images. Turns out I was not the only one.
It filled me with wonder at how much one could learn from studying just one photograph. The photo, by Dmitri Baltermants, a Soviet Jewish photojournalist, was taken outside of Kerch, in Ukraine, of dead bodies lying in the snow in 1942. Baltermants focused on a non-Jewish woman mourning the death of her non-Jewish husband, but the photo came to symbolize so much more.
I love how Shneer traces the path of this photo across decades, illuminating how many meanings can be attached to a single image.
In January 1942, Soviet press photographers came upon a scene like none they had ever documented. That day, they took pictures of the first liberation of a German mass atrocity, where an estimated 7,000 Jews and others were executed at an anti-tank trench near Kerch on the Crimean peninsula. Dmitri Baltermants, a photojournalist working for the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia, took photos that day that would have a long life in shaping the image of Nazi genocide in and against the Soviet Union. Presenting never before seen photographs, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph shows how Baltermants used the image…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
The wilderness has fascinated me since childhood. I spent much of my teens and twenties rock-climbing, ice-climbing, and mountaineering in ranges from Alaska to Argentina. By my early 30s, however, my interest in outdoor sports was waning, and my interest in photographing wild places was soaring. I became a full-time wilderness landscape photographer in 1993. For fifteen years, I shot 4x5 film. Then, in 2008, I retired my film cameras for good and began shooting digitally. Today, after more than 30 years of full-time landscape photography, I am still enthralled with the arduous, ecstatic experience of trying to capture the elusive beauty of the wilderness.
I loved this book because it deepened my understanding of light, lenses, cameras, how humans view color, and the limits of human vision. I strongly believe that the more I know about the tools I use to create my images and how my images are perceived by my viewers, the better a photographer I will become.
Reading this book took me one long step further toward that goal.
While there are many books that teach the "how-to" of photography, Science for the Curious Photographer is a book for those who also want to understand how photography works. Beginning with an introduction to the history and science of photography, Charles S. Johnson, Jr. addresses questions about the principles of photography, such as why a camera needs a lens, how lenses work, and why modern lenses are so complicated.
Addressing the complex aspects of digital photography, the book discusses color management, resolution, "noise" in images, and the limits of human perception. The creation and appreciation of art in photography is…
