Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Harald Mante

Let me highly recommend Harald Mante's Photography Unplugged. This is a beautiful book superbly printed, 193 photographs on their own page, or occasionally a group of four photographs. All the work is in colour and the book is a celebration of colour.

I met Harald at Photokina 2008 - he was still running around with his ancient film Minolta and Kodachrome. You can see from his photographs that he was trained in the graphic arts, that he came out of the Bauhaus tradition of Germany and was both taught and influenced by Kandinsky.

This book can teach a lot about design to all photographers and even black and white photographers will find his colour enjoyable.

You can see many of the images at his website
although the images are unfortunately watermarked - still, it will whet your appetite to have the book.

The price is an incredible $50 list - a huge bargain.

5 comments:

Markus Spring said...

Ok - your recommendation made me order it. I had seen only the cover, but in that bookshop it was shrink-wrapped so I had no opportunity to browse through

Unknown said...

I read one of his books and I found it very uncomfortable to read. You have to flip pages back and forth. The text is almost never on the same page as the picture he talks about.

I thought somebody knowning how to composite a great picture is able to composite also a great book.

George Barr said...

I confess that I did not enjoy Harald's writing. I have his book on composition and you can learn a lot from looking at the images. Mind you I'm reading it in translation, but found the writing very dense, complex, hard slogging - but then I'm not a sophisticated reader.

George

George Barr said...

Photography Unplugged is all images and only the usual introduction and foreword. Wonderful book.

George

Michael Ryan said...

Its interesting that most people feel the book hard or uncomfortable to read, and yes I do too. Bearing in mind that it is a literal translation of a native german speaker and thinker, it goes someway to explain the lack of flow of the english language.

Yes it would benefit being tidied up by an astute editor, but that’s being a tad disingenuous to both the Author and the translator., who translated it for altruistic rather than commercial reasons.

No it is not an easy ready, but it is a worthy ready. In fact in this age of sound bytes and wiki garnered information, the slow flow is an asset. It makes the book a very deliberate but involved learning tool for those not too lazy to invest some time into it.

Buy it, Savour it, Learn from it.

All the best

Michael