You can pay a lot of money for a book of photographs by even a minor name.  £50 or so for a new one would be quite common and if it’s out of print then even a secondhand copy could be a lot more.  I paid about £50 if I remember rightly for Dave Heath’s   “Multitude, Solitude”  When I had my great book giveaway a couple of years ago I saw it on resale in the charity shop I had given it to for over a £100.  Now it is going on Amazon for £195 used and £378 new. 

So, a while ago, I decided to set myself a limit of £20 in order to bring a little discipline into this whole process.*  And, as ever, that discipline has its rewards.

This book is one of them.  I picked it up for £9 in a secondhand shop before Christmas.  I have no idea who Jenifer Roberts is, or was, and can find out nothing about her on the net.  Published in 1992, in many ways it’s a standard kind of book containing landscapes and portraits from the author’s travels around the world.  They are classical, perhaps even a little out of fashion now but there is nothing wrong with that.  The landscapes can certainly hold their own with the classic ‘Land’ by Fay Godwin which would probably be seen as the benchmark for this kind of work.  Plus she does quote Virgil: “To the spirit of the place and to earth/ the first of the gods….”

What makes the book unusual (apart from the Virgil) is the author’s openness in setting out her general technical approach both to taking the photos in the first place and then to developing and printing them.  And the great lesson is this: the whole process is very, very simple.  That is not to say for a moment that it is easy.  It’s just a great relief in the kaleidoscope of digital imagery tools to have someone set out fundamental rules very clearly.  For example, she says that when you produce your prints there are only two main variables: one is how dark or light you want the print to be, and the other is how much contrast you want.  To be honest, I had never thought of it that simply.  In fact, now I look at the controls in my software, Lightroom, I see that Exposure and Contrast come first.  Unfortunately, they are followed by Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Clarity, Vibrance, Saturation, more Highlights, Lights, Darks, Shadows and Point Curve.  And those are just the tonal controls. Like many, I suspect, I have arrived at my own system largely through intuition.

In the darkroom, beyond those two main variables, the author darkens and lightens tones locally in the print – and that is about it in general terms because grain and sharpness have been taken care of in developing the negative.  A tonal change which you can make in a second onscreen now would have taken her a few hours through from execution to dried print in the darkroom.  She writes that It could take her a week or two to perfect a print.

Then, as you go through the book, for each picture she tells you how she how she saw it when she clicked the shutter – which generally means how she judged the exposure and whether or not she used a filter on the lens – and how she enhanced that in the darkroom.  It takes a lot of confidence and a lot of goodwill to be that open.  It’s really helpful.

I also picked up this one, at the same time for £8.50.  It’s a 1979 publication and that ‘2’ in the title suggests that maybe it’s one of a series.  It contains the thoughts of eight photographers about photography in general and their darkroom technique in particular.  Some of them are pretty well known: Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, Charles Harbutt, Cole Weston.  It’s fascinating – not least because the tone is so even: it’s just a kind of sensible chat.  It reminds me of the Paris Review series of interviews with well-known authors that I used to devour years ago.  You learnt a lot from the references and asides and methods.

This idea, that there are authorities, whom it is worth listening to, is a bit passé these days.  They are probably still there somewhere but everyone is shouting so loud.  The older, cheaper books take you back to a time when voices were not so raised.

“ In order to maintain the rigorous standards of honesty to which this blog aspires I have to confess that I offered a seller on ebay £25 for Charles Harbutt’s “Travelog” for which he was asking £40. He obviously didn’t share my views on rampant consumerism in the photobook market and turned me down.