Customer Reviews

How to Look At Photographs: Reflections on the Art of Seeing

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David Finn touches on many key points with looking at photographs. He works with you in the book to try to create your own vision in looking at photographs. The book is very diverse, he pulls many peoples insights in this book which i enjoyed. As you read you find youself "seeing" not just looking...you grow as you read on. You will start understanding images as a form of art. Finn's information is far from boring..or dry( in which i was afraid of) The reading is very enjoyable. At the end you are places with a tool you use in your viewing of images which you can forever use and improve.

Too amorphous and self-referential to be helpful. The author emphasizes extreme subjectivity instead of a more useful, systematic framework for reading photographic text.

There's no room for aesthetics here. Finn implies that the act of looking is so highly personal as to preclude the use of any criteria in evaluating art. Not only an intellectual dead-end, but also a justification for mediocrity. And, no offense to Mr. Finn, but his own work appears just that: amateurish compared to the included "masters."

Skip this one and check out "Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images" by Terry Barrett.

I see no connection at all between the content of this book and how to look at photographs. It includes timeless historic photographs and Finn's own less than remarkable examples of the craft. What it does not include is any framework whatsoever as a guide to looking at photographs. Where was the editor? Is this vanity press? Jeez.

Ghastly, just ghastly.

By inclination, I am not a book reviewer. In fact, this is my first and quite likely my only review that I will contribute to Amazon. What I am, however, is a photographer - a photographer who felt compelled to warn others about David Finn's "How to Look at Photographs".

I picked up the book based on the title, the presence of some recognizably great photographs, and what initially appeared to be appropriate accompanying text. Oh, how I wish I had spent 5 more minutes with the book before adding to my stack.

Remember the central idea of the film, "Amadeus": Antonio Salieri was aware of the greatness of the music of Mozart, and in the comparison, he was also painfully aware of the mediocrity of is own work. Similarly, Finn is able to recognize the genius in images from the likes of Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, Philippe Halsman and others. But - and it's a big but - the similarity ends there as Finn embarrassingly places 120 of his own astoundingly inferior works (?) adjacent to some of the greatest photographs history has made.

This happens on every single page, so to pick one at random: on page 91 Finn presents his photograph, "Eggplant" - a shot which is poorly lit with a single source. It is improperly cropped into a square which cuts off the top the and bottom of the subject. The colors of both the subject and the background are unappealing, and further the colors don't work well together. Yet Finn chooses to put this photograph on the same page as Edward Weston's "Pepper No. 30", as though they were peers.

As awful as the photography is the text is equally unreadable. He meanders from subject to subject without ever addressing the topic put forward in the title, specifically, How to Look at Photographs. Never in the book is there any mention of critique methodology or technique.

There was, however, some fun to be had in reading the book: I quickly devised a game where I would flip to the next page and avoid looking at the photographers credit. Then I would try to guess - based on a photographer's competence alone - whether the image was Finns or someone else's. I ended up being right about 95% of the time.

I'm ashamed to say I paid full price for this book. That's $16 that I'll never see again. The current used price is $3.46 which is about $100 more than what the book is actually worth.

Avoid at all costs.

Finn has nothing to say. This is a terrible book. In no way does the author provide any insight to analyzing the content of a photograph aiding the viewer to appreciate and understand the artist's work. I cannot believe the publisher allowed this material to be published.

I found the book nothing more than a forum for a mediocre photographer to convince an unsuspecting reader that his less than acceptable photography be considered alongside the work of great photographers like Siskind, etc. What a rambling. I forced myself to read the entire book expecting to eventually stumble on something of value. Wow...What a waste of time. I found the inane use of poetry offensive. I think an appropriate title for the book would be, "How to Get People to Look at My Photographs." What a dirty trick.

This book so thoroughly misses the mark that it's laughable. After a while, I gave up reading the author's inane babble and thumbed through the pages in search of an image that actually had text referring to it with a critical eye. Alas, it was not to be found.

Once I'd seen what other titles this author had produced, the penny dropped. Finn is taking his zest for the beautiful things in life and trying to give it different titles, all the while failing to actually address the topic in an even remotely considered or generally plausible manner.