It would seem that the best photography owes it's power to the ability to represent something which portrait artists, working in traditional media, accomplish much more naturally.

A sensibility, an opinion, opens up the possibility of a conversation. Photographs are always about more that what they show.

“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in photographs. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”

A man jumps over his own reflection, a passerby is caught in irony or contradiction in front of a street sign. The foreground comments on the background. The shadows betray the figure.

Ever since its inception photography has suffered from an identity crisis: not knowing if it was an art, and if it was an art, incapable of locating the nexus of artistic genius …

To this day, one of the most influential photobooks ever made is Irving Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room. It is noted for the photographs … but it is equally monumental for the profound way in which the photographer attempts to engage the world.

This is the essence of JR’s work: flyposting photographic portraits (with neither official permission, nor corporate endorsement) on a large scale, in the public space.

Tragedy can befall books just as it does people.

Charles Jones, the son of a master butcher, was born in England in 1866. He trained as a gardener and took various positions on private estates in England. It is thought that a number of the prints featured in the book were probably made between 1895-1905.

If Rembrandt were a photographer instead of a painter, and if he were drawn to the margins of society rather than to himself, he might have produced works very much like those of Pierre Gonnord.

A portrait almost always carries the weight of a story behind it. That is, I think, what separates the successful portrait from the failure. A successful portrait has a story and a voice that speaks through the image, wanting to tell it.

The Photobook is a pivotal work for it defines explicitly something understood but never stated: there are photographs conceived for a gallery space, and there are photographs which have their natural expression in the pages of a book.

Eldon’s journals have proved influential for photographers, artists, and graphic designers. For those who admire its graphic sensibilities, this book would seem to encourage more time spent with the computer unplugged, working directly with materials.

The found photo is a strange beast. It is a photo with one foot in the grave; redeemed (if that is the right word) through someone’s interest in it.