More Photography: Some How, Some Why and Some What

More photography books today, and three interesting and unusual ones at that.

A Delicate Balance: Six Israeli Photographers is the companion volume to a 1996-97 exhibition organized by the Israel/North Carolina Cultural Exchange. The works presented are of contemporary Israeli life as interpreted by the photographers. A second show, in 1997, featured the work of four North Carolina photographers taken during residencies in Israel.

The photographers represented in this elegant volume- printed in English and Hebrew- are Barry Frydlender, Judith Guetta, Gilad Ophir, Michal Rovner, Simcha Shirman and Oded Yedaya. This is a rare and unusual collection by artists how, in the nearly twenty years since, have gone from strength to strength in the international photography world.

If Leonardo had dashed off a DIY guide called How I Paint, legendary photographer Ansel Adams' Camera and Lens: The Creative Approach would be its equivalent in modern times. The book takes a step-by-step approach to every aspect of photography, and Adams presents his own work as the case studies.  The book is an expanded version of the first of his five book Basic Photo Series published some forty years ago.

Horror and suspense writer Stephen King found his first face-to-grimace encounter with a gargoyle, the grotesque waterspouts that have carried water away from the sides of stone buildings since ancient times. Seeing one up close, King writes, is like "having a nightmare awake."

The avant-gardishly named avant-garde photographer, f-stop Fitzgerald, shares King's fascination, and the two collaborated on what became a 1988 best-seller, Nightmares in the Sky: Gargoyles and Grotesques. 100 duotones and 24 full-color images menace and confront the reader in a fascinating, up-close-and-personal encounter with an art form we rarely notice at ground level.

Details:

-A Delicate Balance: Six Israeli Photographers (The Light Factory, 1996; softcover, 60 pp, ISBN 0-9642772-1-2, 10" x 7.5", very good condition). Your price: US $100.

-Ansel Adams, Camera and Lens: The Creative Approach (Morgan & Morgan, 1970, 5th printing, revised ed./two-impression lithography; hardcover w/price clipped dust jacket, 304 pp, 147 photographs and 25 diagrams, ISBN 0-87100-056-3, 10" x 7.5", very good condition). Your price: US $20.

-Stephen King and f-stop Fitzgerald, Nightmares in the Sky: Gargoyles and Grotesques (Viking Studio Books, 1988; hardcover, 128 pp, ISBN 0-670-82307-4; 1st ed., hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, 10" x 11.25", very good condition). Your price: US $75.

Contact Henry Bemis Books at henrybemisbookseller@gmail.com, or by phone at 704. 277. 3562.