Welcome to the Curious Eye
I love photography and I love thoughtful writing on photography.
I’ve spent a lifetime in communications, but as I transition from working for others to working to please myself, I intend to use this site to share my thoughts and my photographs.
These are personal pictures. Most have no commercial value. I hope that a handful have artistic value, but at a minimum I hope they are interesting to look at.
Photography Book Archive
I am gradually trying to build an archive of brief summaries and reviews of photography books that others can use if they are curious about the art of photography.
If you are looking for “how to” books, you won’t find many here. But, if you are interested in the history of photography as a means of personal expression, and the criticism of such, there is a good chance you will find this interesting.
Book Reviews and Posts
Camera Lucida in The Guardian
Interested in Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes? This article by Brian Dillon in the Guardian from 2011 offers a good overview and insights that may encourage you to move the book up on your list of must reads. “…what Barthes had written was neither a work of theoretical strictness nor avant-garde polemic, still less a […]
Reinhold Marxhausen and Seeing
Something recently got me thinking about Reinhold Marxhausen and how he helped teach me to see. Marxhausen was an artist and photographer who spent most of his professional life as a professor at Concordia College in Seward, Nebraska. In the mid-1970s I had the good fortune to take a brief evening class from him through […]
Striving for Art
Photography, the Key Concepts by David Bate, Berg Publishers Where exactly does photography fit into the world of art? That photography is, or can be, “art” has been a settled question for a century or more. Far more difficult to answer is: what sorts of photographs are “art.” And, who is it that determines the […]
2009 NPR Story about Robert Frank
One of the great things about Google and the Internet is that you never know when you might stumble upon a prize. This one comes via Google Alerts and is an NPR story from 2009 on Robert Frank. It’s pretty basic stuff, but I have a rule that virtually anything on Robert Frank that I […]
