The most recommended books about photographers

As with my own Lily Wong novels, Lies We Bury is an exciting blend of thriller, mystery, and cultural family dynamics. Elle Marr hooked me from the start and kept me binge-reading through twists and heart-wrenching emotions to a finish that took away my breath. Although no fighting, per se, the action and suspense kept me on edge. It’s always refreshing to read a novel with an empowered, fully-dimensional female Asian protagonist. 

Boyd experienced an iconic era of rock n roll first hand by being a 1960s model who  married George Harrison after meeting on the set of “A Hard Day’s Night.” The stories of her marriage to Harrison and the A-list rock stars she socialized with, surely would make her the best dinner party guest ever. But if that’s not enough, the second part of the book chronicles her tumultuous marriage to Eric Clapton and ultimately ends with her learning to stand on her own. A truly moving story of strength.

Mention the name ‘Lewis Carroll’ and most people will immediately think of the two Alice books. Very few would equate the name to Charles Dodgson, the photographer. This, however, is the aspect of the multi-talented Oxford don which Gernsheim, a professional photographer himself, appraised in his 1949 first edition for the very first time, concluding that Dodgson was ‘the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century. Many of the black and white plates substantiate this claim, but equally, Dodgson’s mastery of this new invention enabled him to meet and photograph (sometimes uniquely) numerous famous writers and artists, as well as many Oxford contemporaries. As an aside, Edward Wakeling’s 2015 Catalogue Raisonné is a comprehensive listing of every one of Dodgson’s hundreds of known photographs.

This book rocked my world with a stunning disclosure at the end.

I remember staring at its pages, befuddled and eager to find someone to discuss it with. The Double Bind is perfect for book clubs, with a rich story that draws you in from the first pages.

I would call it “unforgettable.”

This might be my all-time favorite memoir. Every time I sit down to write, I tend to read a few pages of it to absorb the rhythm of Patti Smith’s unadorned, lyrical writing.

Like Taylor Swift, Patti Smith is a music icon, a poet, and a genius wordsmith. For me, this book totally captured the radiant nostalgia of a bygone era and a romantic love that evolves into something more permanent and transcendent.

I’m fascinated by historical fiction that sticks to the “facts” of a person’s life but imagines and richly describes that person’s inner world—in this case Georgia O’Keefe’s. The novel focuses on the young painter’s love affair with Alfred Stieglitz, an established photographer and art dealer. Before the art world knows Georgia O’Keefe as a ground-breaking artist in her own right, she is introduced as the female nude in Stieglitz’s photographs. Does her art gain notice in part because of this scandalous introduction, or does it merely eroticize her and her work? And while she learns much from Stieglitz, what does this relationship cost her? This book is masterfully “painted” with O’Keefe-like brush strokes that assemble a tantalizing picture and still leave much to the imagination.

I became interested in Dorothea Lange last year when I picked up a compilation of her photographs documenting the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. These images had been censored by the US government for decades, kept under wraps.

One of them depicts a young boy seated on the stoop of his barracks, engrossed in a comic book, one that happens to have been published by my great-uncle, the subject of my recent book!

Driven to learn all I could about the circumstances of this photograph, I read Linda Gordon’s wonderful biography of Lange. A master of the form, Gordon uses the pathbreaking photographer’s life to illuminate 20th-century American social history.  

Naga’s beautiful, poetic prose is pervaded with an overwhelming sense that things will end very badly.

An Arab-American woman meets a “boy from Shobrakheit,” and the two begin a damaged, damaging romance in a book that’s been described as a “postcolonial novel for the twenty-first century.”

Desire mixes up with more complicated feelings, such as pity and resentment, feelings that stem from their cultural and class differences, and their relationship, told in alternating points-of-view, is soon touched with a threat of violence—and then more than a threat—of violence. 

Hold Still by Sally Mann – another memoir by an intriguing, strong-willed, fascinating woman. I became interested in Sally Mann when I first saw her book of amazing photographs of her children, Immediate Family. Since then I kept up with her photography and was thrilled to read her memoir. She writes of her childhood in the south, her parents, her relationship with her husband and children, the controversy surrounding those early stages photographs, her career, and beyond in absolutely lovely prose accompanied by many photos. She’s an impressive, talented woman, and her success is well deserved.

The cover shows a woman peering into her camera. She holds the camera carefully, gently and with purpose. Inside, the attractive illustrations show Dorothea Lange who, as a child, was sick leaving her feeling invisible. But the world wasn’t invisible to her. She surprised everyone when she announced one day that she was going to be a photographer. Was it unladylike? What did that even mean? It didn’t matter to Dorothea, who refused to look away from the suffering of people. She used her photos to show that each person is special. Without Dorothea, the images she captured would remain invisible, when they all deserved to be visible. Actual photographs and timeline at the end of this book make it even more fascinating.