Recommended Reading

Last month, in a post I did about the death of the photo curator John Szarkowski, I mentioned that one of the best photography books I ever read was Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence by the photographer Tod Papageorge. The book is a brilliant rethinking of how Frank, in his masterpiece The Americans, came to grips with Evans' masterpiece, American Photographs.

The Papageorge book, which originated as the catalogue for a 1981 show that he organized at the Yale University Art Gallery, has been out of print for years. But a few days ago Eric Etheridge, a New York blogger and photographer, got in touch to let me know that with Papageorge's permission he has posted the full text as a PDF on his blogsite. You can find it here. It's definitely worth a look. So is Etheridge's blog, where he hopes to post other worthwhile but hard to find photography texts in the future.