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15 Photography Books That Will Completely Change How You See
15
items Gear won't make you a better photographer; learning to see will. These are the books I'd hand anyone who is serious about photography, from practical guides that fix your exposure and composition, to essays that change how you think about images, to ...
Sections
3
Learn the Craft
Think Like a Photographer
Iconic Photobooks
Learn the Craft
If you only buy one technical book, make it this one. Bryan Peterson explains aperture, shutter speed and ISO as a creative ‘photographic triangle’ rather than as maths, with clear example photos showing what each choice does. It's the book that fina...
Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson
The best book ever written on composition. Michael Freeman breaks down how the eye moves through a frame: balance, tension, lines, rhythm, contrast and the use of empty space, all illustrated with his own travel photography. Read it once and you'll s...
The Photographer's Eye by Michael Freeman
The perfect first photography book, and the perfect gift. Henry Carroll skips the jargon and teaches through short, punchy lessons on composition, light, lenses and exposure, each paired with a photo by a famous photographer showing the idea in actio...
Read This If You Want to Take Great Photographs
Stuck in a creative rut? This is the cure. Published by Aperture, it collects 307 short assignments and ideas from working photographers and teachers, from simple exercises to wonderfully strange prompts. Open it to a random page, do the assignment, ...
The Photographer's Playbook by Jason Fulford & Gregory Halpern
The most educational photobook I own. It reproduces the actual contact sheets behind famous Magnum images, from Cartier-Bresson to Capa to Steve McCurry, so you can see every frame they shot before and after the iconic one. You realise the masters al...
Magnum Contact Sheets
Think Like a Photographer
Susan Sontag's 1977 essay collection is still the sharpest thing ever written about what photographs do to us: how they turn experience into souvenirs, make suffering consumable and shape how we see the world. It's challenging and occasionally infuri...
On Photography by Susan Sontag
A short, deeply personal book that Roland Barthes wrote after his mother's death, while searching through old photographs of her. It gave us the idea of the ‘punctum’: the small, unplanned detail in a picture that pierces you emotionally. It's more m...
Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
Based on John Berger's groundbreaking 1972 BBC series, this slim book changed how a generation looked at images, from oil paintings to advertising. Its chapters on how the camera changed art, and on how women are depicted and looked at, are essential...
Ways of Seeing by John Berger
Stephen Shore, one of the pioneers of colour photography, explains how a photograph works on the page: the physical print, what the frame includes and excludes, how time is frozen, and how focus creates meaning. Each idea is shown with a carefully ch...
The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore
Iconic Photobooks
Swiss-born Robert Frank drove across the United States in the mid-1950s and came back with 83 grainy, off-kilter black-and-white photographs that showed a lonelier, more divided America than the one in magazines. Critics hated it at first; now it's p...
The Americans by Robert Frank
The book that gave street photography its most famous phrase. Cartier-Bresson's 1952 masterpiece, with a cover drawn by Henri Matisse, pairs his greatest early photographs with an essay on capturing the exact instant when form and meaning line up. St...
The Decisive Moment by Henri Cartier-Bresson
In 1976 MoMA showed William Eggleston's colour photographs of everyday Memphis and Mississippi, and critics called them banal. This book from that show, with its red ceiling, tricycle and supermarket car parks, proved colour could be serious art and ...
William Eggleston's Guide
Sebastião Salgado spent eight years photographing the most untouched corners of the planet, from Antarctic icebergs and Amazon tribes to Namibian dunes, in breathtaking black and white. Genesis is his love letter to the Earth, and the sheer scale and...
Genesis by Sebastião Salgado
Stephen Shore spent the 1970s criss-crossing America with a large-format view camera, patiently photographing main streets, motel rooms, intersections and breakfast plates. The results are calm, precise and endlessly detailed, and they have influence...
Uncommon Places by Stephen Shore
One of photography's great stories: a Chicago nanny who secretly shot more than 100,000 street photographs and showed them to almost nobody. They were discovered at a storage auction in 2007, and this book introduced her to the world. Her sharp eye f...
Vivian Maier: Street Photographer