You gotta break your brain sometimes

This originally appeared as part of my weekly Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign up for a weekly update here.

Breaking your brain every so often is a good thing. Daniel Milnor, former Prime Lenses guest, made a great video about this last week talking about the importance of Context and I couldn’t agree more. He inspired me to share some photo books I’ve really been enjoying this week and one that I’m excited to pick up. 

Looking at the work of other photographers helps to reprogram my brain and photographic eye to look for more than out of focus blobs wide open. It also got me away from my phone for an hour or so and as I sat on the floor with a cup of tea listening to The Red Hot Chilli Peppers I felt rejuvenated by the creative possibilities spread in front of me. Seriously, get to a library or book shop and treat yourself. It’s good for the soul as the winter nights draw in around the northern hemisphere. If you’re in the southern then get out with that camera of yours! :)

In Color In Japan

I really love Shin Noguchi’s work and he’s been gracious enough to chat with me on occasion on social. If you’re a Leica shooter you’ll have seen one of this photos in their recent M campaign. His images are wonderful and this book collects together images stretching back to the 90s. On multiple occasions it made me laugh out loud as the images made by this former graphic designer betray that part of his career as well as showing us a playful and cheeky sense of humour. I was expecting to enjoy the images but one thing that really stood out to me was the introduction from Chuck Patch which does a great job of portraying the personality of the photographer. My sense of Shin is that he is a person who is most comfortable observing. Since speaking to a few photographers I’m starting to notice when they choose to present what they find to us in a way that feels natural and like we could step into a frame. Simon Baxter does that with his woodland scenes and I think Shin’s images do that too. At the author’s request I won’t share more images, but if you get the chance to get your hands on the book, do, it’s a type of street photography that is much more satisfying and real than a lot of the stuff that gets thrown around online. I think he has a few copies left available on his website.

The RBook

I didn’t know the work of Frank Kayser before I arrived to catch the end of his exhibition in Wetzlar last year. I’m more of a motorcycle person than a car person and photographically I’ve always loved the photos made for Deus ex Machina, a custom bike and surf brand from Australia. Like their images, Frank has captured a really authentic slice of culture here. A club of hardcore Porsche owners based in California. The book is an absolute beast, nearly 600 pages of great photos of cars and their people as well as thousands of finely crafted words displayed using some absolutely knockout typography. The way the words look on the page will knock your socks off. There were times I had to go back a few pages because I realised I’d stopped reading, I was just sort of drinking it in. 

I messaged Frank last year when I got the book and he joked with me that it would take a year to get through the whole thing. He wasn’t wrong. This is the sort of book that through those long winter nights will remind you of sunny days spent in hot cars. The dust, the smell, the ticking noise cars make when they park up as they cool down. If you’re not a petrolhead when you pick this book up, you will be by the time you put it down.

How to Disappear

This last book only came out yesterday so I haven’t managed to grab a copy yet but I’m excited to see it in person. It’s a collection of photos made by Colin Greenwood, the bassist in the band Radiohead. Capturing behind the scenes images of an era defining band for 20 years already makes this a book worth looking at, but having done so with a Yashica T4 is the icing on a particularly delicious photographic cupcake. I’ve reached out to the publishers to see if there’s any chance of a conversation on the podcast and am indebted to frequent podcast contributor Chris, my step-dad, for sending me a link to an article about the book.