Description
This is a signed copy, direct from the author.
More reviews here.
$50.00
REVIEW
As the author of the Strobist blog, books just show up in the mailbox and doorstep several times a week. To be honest, far more often than I would like — as Strobist is generally not a book review blog. Luckily for me, one of this week’s crop was an advance copy of Steve Simon’s The Passionate Photographer: Ten Steps Toward Becoming Great. Simon’s experience in his genre (documentary photography) rivals McNally’s as a lighting photographer. But what makes this book special is Simon’s ability to get his tenets across to the reader with clarity as well as passion. The bullet points in the promotional copy above give you a sense of what the book contains, and I won’t repeat them here. But they really do not give the book justice. This book is very hard to describe in a single sentence. The best I can do is this: Passionate Photographer is to the fieldcraft and compass point of being a photographer as Joe McNally’s books are to small-flash lighting. And that is saying a lot. Suffice to say that “The Passionate Photographer” is one of the most inspirational books I have ever read. I give it five stars because Amazon won’t let me give it six. I think it is destined to become a classic.”
David Hobby
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From the Publisher
This coming December 1st is World AIDS Day, and it is also, not coincidentally, the official launch date of Canadian photographer Steve Simon’s new book of photographs, Heroines and Heroes: Hope, HIV, and Africa. The softcover book, which includes 98 mostly color pictures, is the product of four trips to Africa that Simon has taken since 2002. The photographer is donating all of his royalties to organizations fighting AIDS in Africa, and one of his hopes for the book is that the pictures will motivate readers to make donations themselves. To that end, a list of worthy candidate organizations is provided towards the end of the book.Heroines and Heroes, says Simon, represents a look at one particular slice of the AIDS situation in Africa, not an attempt at a comprehensive view of the entire story, if that would even be possible in one book. Like any book on AIDS must, Simon’s work contains difficult pictures of sickness and loss, but it is not just a relentless catalog of suffering, shot in stark black and white, as the traditions of documentary photojournalism might prescribe.
“I didn’t want to ignore the harsh realities of the scourge of AIDS,” says Simon, “but at the same time, I wanted to show some of the positive things that were going on in the fight against AIDS. I wanted to show daily life. I wanted to show the beauty of the landscape, and that not everybody is always miserable.”
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Marianne Fulton, Author, Curator and Photographic Scholar
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