The Power of Books

Photography by Mladen Penev (Click)

Via Goodies

Books Will Never Be This Beautiful Again

Untitled by Anna Gay

Clicking on the image will take you to Georgia creative photographer Anna’s Gay’s posting on Flickr and I just discovered that she has a blog as well where she posted about this scan of a chromogenic print here.

More Time to Read

1st Prize Contemporary Issues Single – Micah Albert/USA/Redux Images – April 3, 2012, Nairobi, Kenya. Pausing in the rain, a woman working as a trash picker at the 30-acre dump, which literally spills into households of one million people living in nearby slums, wishes she had more time to look at the books she comes across. She even likes the industrial parts catalogs. “It gives me something else to do in the day besides picking [trash],” she said.

A 2013 World Press Photo Contest winner.
See more amazing photos at Boston.Com.

Via: TYWKIWDBI (where it’s always worth reading the intelligent comment streams)

Think: About Crediting the Creator

Maybe it was the master of 9GAG.COM, but who was the artist? I searched for the original without success. It’s all over the ‘Net and if the artist chose to share it without credit – as so many generously do – I hope they are aware of and enjoy its popularity.

Reading in Colour Circa 1910

This image is from a very interesting post at Kuriositas about colour photography in the early 1900’s.

I wonder how long the elegantly boutonniere’d subject had to hold up this hefty volume for this pose. He must have had strong hands. He wears a look of what could be impatience dissolving into annoyance, which may have been staged (serious countenances being de rigueur for formal photographs at the time), or perhaps it was the strain of the pose after all. I tried to make out the title of the book to no avail. Let me know if you can identify it or anything else about this intriguing photograph.

Man Reading

Public Domain Review

Do you read during your break?

From The Library Time Machine, via Edwardian Era

Hope the kids are as excited about going back to school as these animals apparently are

The Cat Who Always Reads the Business Pages

The Dog Who’s Completed the Optional Reading List

The Cat Who Knows the Librarians by Name

Enjoy the entire collection of 25 pictures at Buzzfeed.

Wonderland by Kirsty Mitchell

Over three years, artist  Kirsty Mitchell has created an incredible series of fantasy images in memory of her late mother.

Ms. Mitchell found solace in her photography after her mother’s death from cancer.

‘This escapism grew into the concept of creating an unexplained storybook without words, dedicated to her [my mother], that would echo the fragments of the fairytales she read to me constantly as a child.’

Read more and see more stunning images at Mail Online.

Dramatic Book Art by Thomas Allen: 2-D Turned 3-D Turned 2-D…

As a hobby photographer myself, I can appreciate the skill and artistry involved in shooting Thomas Allen’s precise and dramatic book art. As a photographer first, the Michigan artist creates his book carvings specifically to photograph; the media is inseparable from the presentation.

“I cut, crimp, crease and convert the covers of vintage paperbacks into three-dimensional tableau and photograph them–an idea that feeds my penchant for pop-up books and other things 3D. The subjects are bit players who, for a brief time, found fame printed on the glossy surfaces of dime novels. My mitts and an X-acto knife work together to persuade skirts and gumshoes to return to the stage for one final performance in a slightly different production. The spotlight is aimed at gams and mugs long enough to immortalize them on yet another flat, glossy surface – film. The result is a re-imagined look at a product of pop culture whose sales relied more on seductive, eye-popping visuals than literary content–thus proving that you can judge a book by its cover!”  ~Thomas Allen

By controlling the lighting and depth of field, Allen alters the ‘reality’ of characters from pulp fiction covers. Shooting with film in a 4×5 view camera, he rotates and tilts the camera’s elements to direct the narrow plane of focus for an intensely dramatic feel.

A plethora of awards, exhibitions and published works decorate Allen’s CV.  With his mother’s blessing (I love his mother), Allen switched university majors in 1985 from Criminal Justice to Art and has not looked back. Drawing and printmaking appealed until he took a photography class with a particularly inspiring teacher. Altered books – initially children’s primary readers used in autobiographical collages – were the subject of his first professional portfolio.

Subsequent projects have included the interpretation of science with books and cutouts, and of mythology using altered anatomy books – an attempt to show that fact validates fiction.

A 2001 fellowship from Minnesota State Arts Board was awarded for Allen’s proposal to create art based on his physical ability to cut with a knife, his skill with lighting and no other props.

“This is where my work with vintage (pulp) novels began. The first photograph to surface from that was RED (2002).  I had the book in my collection (secretly taken from my uncle’s house some years earlier). I was cutting it and found that if I folded the pieces in a certain way and looked at it from a precise angle, the characters would look 3-dimensional, like the ones found in pop-up books (which I adore).” ~ Thomas Allen”

“Everything catapulted from there. I eventually turned my attention to those types of books because (a) they were from a very exciting period in pop culture where cover images were used to sell books and (b) the range of expressions, emotions and characters was very broad and plentiful.  I was also fascinated with the notion that a character’s expression/glance/position could be removed from it’s original context and made to mean something else by how it was cut and paired with characters from other covers.” – Thomas Allen

Last year Allen was asked to create series of positive and uplifting photographs based on notable children’s books for The Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center and Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan Tower of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He chose Stuart Little and The Phantom Tollbooth. From Allen’s blog, where he has generously shared the fascinating creative process as well as the dedicated images: “Basing artwork on children’s literature is part of The Johns Hopkins Books + Healing initiative and sings of their committed relationship with the national REACH OUT AND READ program.”

Allen has moved on from altered books as subject but writes, “I am, and will always be, an artist who builds/fashions/fabricates/constructs things for the camera. For me, the act of making something to photograph is just as important (if not more important) than making the photograph.”

In his email giving me permission to use  his images for this post, Thomas Allen included this delightful conversation with his daughter:

Miren: “Daddy. Grow up!”

Me: “Grow up? If I do that then I’ll have to stop being funny. Which would you rather have—funny daddy or boring daddy?

Miren: (Thinks for a moment) “Funny.”

Thank you, Tom for the honour of featuring your work here and the pleasure of learning more about it. I hope you don’t grow up too soon, since I look forward to seeing your future creations.

Thomas Allen Online