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
In Search of Things as They Are
Disappearing Witness by Gretchen Garner. Johns Hopkins University Press. Gretchen Garner thinks documentary photography contributes something that is worth preserving. For much of the 20th Century, that would have seemed like a ridiculously self-evident perspective. Documentary photography, or more precisely, what Garner refers to as spontaneous witness, dominated photography for most of the past century […]
Two Languages: Words and Pictures
Philip Gefter, Photography After Frank. “Many people approach the act of looking at photographs with an inherent blind spot. They need to know what it is before they can appreciate how it looks.” For me this statement, and the essay it is from, would alone have made reading Philip Gefter’s “Photography After Frank” worthwhile. It […]
On Topographics, Street Photogaphy and Lewis Sullivan
Perhaps it’s just me. But when I visited three separate exhibitions and a single piece in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago they meshed into a larger reflection on the context, connections and cross-pollinating influences of street photography and “New Topographics.” At the center is an exhibit of Lewis Baltz’s Prototypes which […]
Thinking about Beaumont
The History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall. The Museum of Modern Art (1982 Edition) Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography is so much a part of the history that it documents that it can be hard to read it today and evaluate the book on its own merits. I first read Newhall’s history more than 35 […]
