The Americans by Robert Frank

This book collects a series of photographs Robert Frank took while traveling across America on a Guggenheim grant in 1955 and 1956 and presents them in the style of Walker Evans's American Photographs: black and white, one photograph per spread. Even though there is an essay by Jack Kerouac introducing the collection, the photographs stand on their own. They are moving and beautiful and cover a wide variety of American life.

American Photographs by Walker Evans

This volume reproduces the exhibit catalogue for Walker Evans's 1938 one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including a descriptive essay by Lincoln Kirstein. The photographs are gorgeous and really display a lovely variety of American life and culture, from rural to urban (some of the pictures are repeated in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). The photographs are magnificent and the collection is well-worth looking into for anyone interested in American history or American photography.

Legion by Brandon Sanderson

This book is about a supposedly sane man, Stephen Leeds, who is surrounded by multiple personalities with extraordinary skills. Leeds and his team of aspects are called in to find the inventor of a camera which can take photographs of the past. There's a little bit of adventure and a lot of speculation in this story. I enjoyed it, and I have a feeling there's more to it--or rather more to the character Leeds, who has a mysterious woman who disappeared in his past. Unless you're a big Sanderson fan or entirely opposed to e-books, I'd recommend the e-book rather than the print version: the novella size seems more reasonably priced digitally than in hard copy.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

This book is the story of Jacob's quest to decipher the meaning behind his grandfather's mysterious last words. As it turns out, his grandfather was one of the children sent from mainland Europe to England to escape the Holocaust--but he was subject to additional dangers because he was peculiar and so found himself in the care of Miss Peregrine. The book is beautifully illustrated with vintage photographs (repurposed as illustrations of the peculiar children) and a mythology slowly develops. Indeed, as the story continues, you begin to realize that worlds and ideas are opened that could not possibly be closed within the confines of the novel. I'll be interested in seeing how the sequel develops and how the world of the peculiar children plays out. The part of this novel that felt clunkiest to me was the portrayal family relationships between Jacob and his family (especially his parents). I understand why the main character needs to be a loner or isolated in this story, but it didn't seem to be handled quite as smoothly as it could have been. Otherwise a fantastic and fantastical story!

Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphor, and Media into the Twenty-First Century by Marina Warner

This book investigates representations of the spirit and the supernatural, starting early but really hitting its stride around the early eighteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. It considers representations of the self and a spiritual presence in material (wax, cloud, photographs, film) and immaterial (ether, air, ectoplasm) forms. The book casts a wide-ranging net to gather its evidence--we see examples drawn from art, literature, material culture, and many other places. Generally it argues that despite our increasing understanding of the processes in the world and our increasing secularization, we still need, perhaps more than ever, representations of spirit. I thought the last chapter, on zombies, was particularly effective. The book had a refreshing tone--it treats moments of spiritualism (like knocking, expulsion of ectoplasm, etc.) as moments to be studied for their interpretative value, not as phenomena to be definitively proven or disproven.

Understanding Exposure, 3rd Edition: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera by Bryan Peterson

This book is an incredibly helpful resource on how to take photography beyond your point and shoot camera. I found the sections on which aperture to choose and how to meter your shots correctly especially helpful, although I know the whole thing gave me both the theory and the practical knowledge necessary to  improve my photography skills. I would recommend that any photography enthusiast buy this book. The beautiful photographs used to illustrate the points are a benefit.

The Photographer's Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos by Michael Freeman

This book goes through what makes a pleasing composition. I found the pictures beautiful and the text helpful to show how the pictures were composed. This book would be very helpful for those looking to improve their composition skills. If you need more detail about the settings to use on your camera to achieve these results, you'll need to supplement this book with another.

National Geographic: The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography by Bob Martin, Richard Olsenius, Robert Clark, John Healey, and Debbie Grossman

I found this guide to be a little dated in places (especially on technical specifications of digital cameras and backing up your images) and a little basic in others (the projects chapter offered some creative opportunities and lots of things that can be as easily and cheaply done through commercial services now and the first chapter felt too basic). Still, it offered good tips and ideas for taking and improving pictures--especially what to think about as far as ISO, aperture, and shutter speed settings are concerned. There was a short section on photoshop which was actually less dated than a lot of the other digital information. The pictures used to illustrate the book are beautiful, but some are hard to see because of the binding.

John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War by Franny Nudelman

This monograph looks at the ways that Civil War-era practices of portraying the body, starting with the song "John Brown's Body" incorporate people into the nationalistic labor of supporting the war effort. Nudelman reads a wide variety of cultural texts, from "Benito Cereno" and Melville and Whitman's war poems, to battlefield photographs, to practices of dissection. The book's arguments were convincing--and Nudelman sold me on her work's relevance to modern instances of violence.

Legal Handbook for Photographers by Bert Krages

This book presented legal challenges that might face photographers from a variety of perspectives (i.e. from taking pictures, to publishing them, to defending copyrights) in a level-headed and informative way. The main messages I will be taking away from this book are that it's important to understand your rights, it's better to explain clearly what you're doing (and often to ask permission first), and that if you can avoid legal recourse, it's often cheaper and better than taking someone to court.