I recently bought the unseen by Saul Leiter, beautiful book with a lot of great photos.
I am curious though as someone who’s never taken a photography class, what are the best ways to learn from a book like this?
-what should I be looking for? -compositions? -should I be trying to guess how he took certain shots? -the lighting?
Any tips would be helpful as I love his style and I love street photography and would love to be able to learn from this book rather than simply appreciate the beautiful photos… or maybe that’s just part of it?
Start by understanding the formal elements of art. Use those to analyze composition.
Then go beyond that and try to understand what makes each photo elicit the emotionally reactions they do.
With Leiter, colors are a huge component. Look up color theory if you need to have better tools to analyze that.
Lighting is also important to understand, to get a better technical understanding of how the results were achieved.
All of it will influence your work one way or another. But make sure you don’t get in too deep with only one artist. Try to diversify the art you’re exposed to, in order to diversify your influences.
Thank you for this, any other photographers you’d like to suggest please do. I’m trying to be a sponge here.
There are… a lot of them.
In no particular order… Paul Strand, Ralph Gibson, Diane Arbus, Sebastião Salgado, Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Marvin Newman, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Robert Frank, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Eduardo Gageiro, William Klein, Richard Avedon, William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Anton Corbijn, Fan Ho, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Michael Kenna…
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Look those up and others will come up.
The example at the end of that document, recomposing the photograph with rule of thirds, produces a worse photograph, in my opinion.
Of course. Don’t think of composition rules as rules at all. I should have mentioned that.
These are just the formal elements of art and should be studied, but when it comes to practice, they should only be sensibly applied at the discretion of the artist. Not taken as a prescription for what “correct” art ought to be.