 You know you should be looking at photography books because they're such a vital resource for improving your photography, but there never seems to be any real time. We know we should, and yet we never do. How's it, how's it? Photobooks, monographs, books about photographers, whatever you want to call them, they are hugely important in the world of improving one's photography, and yet they just get overlooked. Probably because in the modern world there are so many demands on our time. So how do we fit these things into, these important vital elements in our wonderful hobby into our lives? I believe it's important that we find a dedicated time, at least maybe once a week, you know, once a month, whenever that you just devote yourself to letting monographs work their magic on you. And we can start with monographs, because I think that those are the books that hold the most promise for, you know, for the photographer like yourself, who wants to experience different photography. And that's an important where there is experience. And I think that monographs play not only a vital role in helping us find and explore new photography, but also reconnect us with the organic-ness of the magic of photography, because it is getting closer to what I feel a photograph should be, which is obviously a printed thing, a printed photograph. And these days, with digital, now I'm not knocking digital here by any sense of the imagination, but everything seems to be at a remove. We photograph digitally, we process on computers, and we look at things on a screen. And for me, that feels like there's an oddly transparent yet very solid barrier between me and the image. It doesn't feel real somehow, probably because it is on a screen. We equate things that are on screen as not being necessarily real. So when you look at a monograph, you flick through the pages, you feel the heft of the book, you feel, you hear there's a whole tactile thing going on. It's more sensory work of play and it helps you feel the photograph. It allows you to take time for the photograph in that monograph to work its magic on you, to let it marinate in your brain. So if you can develop or rather sort of find a few minutes here and there that you do on a regular basis, so it becomes a habit of just at least spending some time with a photograph. You don't have to go through entire monographs in one go, but if you take the time maybe before bed each night, instead of watching TV or watching YouTube in bed, if you're watching this video, don't do something, but that's the whole point. You know that there are times that you kind of fill with filler, that you could devote maybe 10 or 15 minutes to looking at some photographs. I would implore you to try and make it a habit to look at photos whenever you are able to. And before you know it, you will be finding that that fits in quite nicely with your sort of day to day routine. And of course, the more that you look at photographs and the more that you think about photography, the more it is going to help you form and help you grow your own image-making skills. None of this really means anything. If you're not reading books that pique your interest, I have a couple of books here. This is The Mind's Eye by Henry Cartier-Bresson. There's a couple of John Burgers here and there's some Ron Barthes as a camera lucider, which I once spent in time video quarrying with Cameron Lucinda, which is a thing. But if you are not into more theoretical talk about photography, then reading those kind of books is going to put you off because it's going to remind you of those dense and heavy textbooks that you were given at school to read. And you sort of go, oh, I'm not really invested in that. So, you know, these are these are helpful things. But if you're not into them, then then don't read them. Don't feel that you need to read the greats if you want to call them that. You know, to feel that you are a round of photography because it's not the case at all. It's a road that can lead down into this kind of snobbery thing. And we're like, oh, well, yes, you know, I've read Barthes and I've read John Burgers. And I disagree with some of his points and something. You know, that's kind of that snootiness. And I would hesitate or I would actually not hesitate. I would leap on the chance to tell you to not go down the road of snootiness. The photography is far too full of all this sort of stuff. So we don't want you to sort of become somebody who's being told that you should read certain things. So find books that you enjoy. If Barthes and John Berger and Kajaperson's writings and stuff are not quite your flavor, then you can turn to things like this is a photographer's A to Z. This is from the Tashon Bibliosecca Universalist, I think that. So Tashon do some really cool little, I say little, because they are sort of small books, of photography that are affordable and we'll get back to that point later on. And this is great. I use this quite often on the channel. It's a photographer's A to Z. And I go through and I will just mark the things that interest me with little stickers and I'll come back to that later on. And again, we'll come back to that because another point that's coming up later is this idea that, you know, these are not one-shot deals. These are, for one of the better word, reference books. And that sounds a bit boring to call them that, that you can revisit again and again and again and always discover something new. And those kind of books are great because going back to that point about, you know, looking at small sections a day, you could read about two or three photographers. What a fantastic way to finish the evening. At this stage, it would be remiss of me not to talk about Brooks Jensen. So Brooks Jensen is a writer who has some very interesting things to say. And he kind of neatly straddles this line between academic writing, if you want to call it that, and more, oh, I don't know. It's a conversational thought pieces. And that's another great book that you can jump into, read a segment because they're fairly short segments and let them just marinate because they will help inform the way that you think about photography. So that's, you know, they're really great. So don't feel that, yeah, you have to go with those hardcore, upright, you know, academic textbooks. One thing of books that I'm not really talking about here and you may have noticed is sort of technical how to manuals. I don't really think that they are kind of what we're looking at here. They are just something that you pick up and says, you know, do this with your camera and do that. And with those, they're not really something you want to sit and think about. They are kind of more practical, you know, follow along in the manual and do things. But something like these books, so this is called Do Photo and it's called Observe, Compose, Capture and Standout. And again, I will link to all of these books in the description box below. This is a little bit more that there are sort of practical things that you can try in here. And but rather than being just practical, that they are going to start giving you some thought about how to approach situations in certain ways. That's because that's that's a really big thing. It's no good, you know, just reading about how apertures work or how shutter speeds work. If you aren't thinking about how to employ them in a in a sensible way in your photography. And that's this. So books like this are really good at sort of giving you, especially the beginner, an idea about why, why we are doing things in a certain way. I really hope that you're enjoying this video because when you enjoy this and you watch it all the way through, it helps YouTube to suggest this kind of content to other people like yourselves who are maybe interested in thinking about the wire photography. So if you are, I would love for you to hit subscribe button because not only will you obviously get notified about new videos when they come up, but it gives YouTube more information to be able to surface this idea to other people like yourselves who enjoy talking about photography rather than about gear. This book, this one here, Chris McCall Sunburn. Who wants to give me a thousand pounds for this book? No one? So apparently if you go on Amazon, this book is valued at a thousand pounds. Give or take. I think that's ridiculous. And I do want to take this moment to apologize to everybody who has watched one of my videos and looked at the books that I'm talking about, the monographs and you know, oh that's really cool and I have a link to them in the description box below. Only to find that they are, you know, two, three, four, five hundred dollars and that's crazy. And I see that this is a ridiculous, and I thought it's time that I kind of addressed this point because you know, I do talk about monographs and books a lot and sometimes I link to them and I don't really look at the price because I'm not buying them, I have them. And it's only when I kind of go, oh, actually, do you know what that's? Quite a lot. And I think if you want to spend a thousand dollars on your thousand pounds, right? Because it's not dollars on Christmas course sunburn, yeah, fine, drop me a line, we'll have a chat. But I don't think that that's worthwhile about buying things, especially sort of monographs. Now, you know, this is a personal opinion and I certainly don't buy monographs as an investment. I don't, you know, I'm not that kind of person but I wonder why that they should be so expensive. And I appreciate there's kind of a spline demand issue going on and what have you. But I've always kind of felt that books are only worth what somebody's willing to pay for them. And evidently, there are people out there who are willing to pay for some of these things in a high price. So what can you do about this? Firstly, is look, keep your eyes open, just look, right? There are bargains galore to be had. I think in a comment section recently, somebody was talking about picking up a copy of evidence in the American West for like five or $10 or something in the thrift store in the States when you've gone to Amazon and they're like $300. And that's kind of your number one best bet is to go to car boot sales. I said in the UK, I don't have car boots. I don't know, imagine in the States you do as well that you go there and you just keep your eyes open. Thrift stores, charity places, all sorts of things, they will have often just piles of books that are just dumped at my local supermarket when I'm checking out. There's like a charity bookshelf thing in front of me and I've got so many cookery books because I like cooking that have been 50p donations. Now they're not wildly expensive books but keep your eyes open because you never know what you might find. A great example of this is a selection of books and these are the time life books of photography that I was first introduced to as a photo student. And in the States, they are not particularly expensive. I think it's maybe like kind of $50 for the whole set and if memory serves us about 20 volumes in the whole thing. And these are fantastic resources because they talk about photographers whom some of whom have fallen out of favor. They talk about photographers and in a way that is a less kind of sensationalist than you tend to find today. And they talk about not just the photographers themselves but about the process of photography. Why we photographs? I mentioned the great themes in a previous video. And those are resources that so few people even mentioned today if you go on to read it and you talk on the photography subreddit. I think if you were to mention the time life books or Roland Barthes or Aperture magazine or have you, those people wouldn't know. And that's what comes back to this idea of people going back and back and back to this same source of ideas and of inspiration I talked about in a previous video and making what was a lovely crystal clear lake, this muddy sludge. There was a quote by a great Stoic that said that you can't step into the same river twice. Think about that for a minute that the river flows past. I mean, it is always different every time we revisit it. And that's kind of why I think investing in monographs of photography and looking at monographs is such a good idea. Now I may have said investing, but I'm not talking about like financial investment. I'm just talking about spending a few dollars and investing in your hobby, in your ideas, not, you know. And when you look at images, when you look at books, every time you see them, you interpret the photograph in a slightly different way. So, you know, I think there's that Avidan book. The very first video on this channel was Richard Avidan's autobiography, which I got when I was 20 maybe, so that's about 28 years ago, somewhere that I have lost count, all right. And that book is different. The way that I interpret those photographs is different, extremely different. To the way that I interpreted them when I was younger, when I was that snotty, know-it-all 20-year-old who thought he was gonna take the photography world by storm. So, by having a collection of monographs that you can revisit, it helps you see and discover new things. There's a YouTube channel called Ryan Holiday and he talks about stoicism and he talks about the idea of how you get the most from writing. And in his case, it's about reading the stoics and digesting the ideas that they have passed down to us. And he says, look, you read the passage and you underline some things. You make a couple of notes and then you leave it. You leave it for a week, you leave it for a month. What have you? And you let that idea just circulate in your brain for a little bit. And then you come back to it a little bit later on. And after this kind of marination has taken its place. And you see what now resonates with you again. And I think photography would be an excellent, excellent way of doing this is that you look at photographs and you bookmark them in your monographs and you think, wow, that's a book. That's an image I would like to come back to and see again later on. I wanna revisit this idea and you put it on one side and you leave the book for a week and you come back and you look at it and then you go, wow, okay. I see things within this now that are slightly different. And it labels you to disappear back the layers almost of the photograph and to absorb the essence of it. And we talked a lot today about absorbing the essence of things and finding the time, taking the time, making the time to invest in ourselves. There's that word again, investing. It is such an important aspect of photography that we take the time, not just to practice the technical aspect of it, you know, the practical elements, but also taking the time to exercise the way that we think about photography. Because the more that you do that, the more then you are in control of the way that you see the world, of the opportunities that are there for you. Thank you ever so much for watching. I'm gonna link to a video right here that goes into more depth about how you can start to see the world with a unique eye.