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Title: The Photograph: Composition & Color Design
ISBN: 1933952261
Author:
Harald Mante
Publicate Date: 2008-03-15
Publish: 2008-03-15
List Price: $49.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $25.00
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $35.46
Amazon Merchant Price: $32.97
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| Customer Review: |
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1: A five-star book on photography, but two-star for the English language
Another wonderful book on photography by Harald Mante, but the English translation is too poor to read with ease - I wonder how it got passed the editorial review.
The book has many new pictures if one has read the previous "Color Design". Despite the poor translation, I still highly recommended it to anyone who wants to learn at detailed serious technical level.
Five-star for content, two for the English translation.
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2: Excellent text on fundamentals
If you have read Michael Freeman's book, the Photographer's Eye, and liked it and you have patience for a bit denser treatment, you should like this one. Just be prepared for a lot of flipping back and forth to look at examples. Like Freeman, Mante, builds the concepts from points up though colors and then veers off a bit to cover more general topics such as creative unsharpness. As with Freeman's book I'll be reding it more than once.
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3: Not good for amateurs
When I picked up "The Photograph: Composition & Color Design", it felt and looked like a textbook (and it was shrink-wrapped like one). But the title sounded good, and the author is well known in Europe as an author and instructor for many years. These inferences led me to make a bad conclusion as to the worth of this book to me.
I should have focused on the term "color design" in the title. This book is very technically oriented. While it does have over 600 photos and 160 diagrams (all very well done mind you), it was difficult for me to make sense of much of it. I get the full impression now that this book is geared for students of design and not a budding amateur. In reality, the concepts are just too much for the average layman (and I am not an uneducated person). It felt like I was being told, in very technical terms, why I like the color interaction or composition of certain pictures. I really don't need to know why, in my opinion. If I like something, I like it - simple as that.
If you are a student of design or photography, this book would make sense to you. It is unfortunate though that "The Photograph: Composition & Color Design" is the first book I cannot recommend for an amateur like myself.
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4: Harald Mante is one of the most renowned teachers of photography
Harald Mante is one of the most renowned teachers of photography in Germany: here he explains elements of visual design in photographs for intermediate students and practicing photographers who want to add artistic elements to their results. Chapters cover what strengthens photos, where 'art' comes into play, and how design affects how a viewer sees an image. A text suitable for college-level art and photography collections as well as for classroom assignment.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
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5: Thoght-provoking challenge to conventional approaches
Mante's "The Photograph" joins Freeman's "The Photographer's Eye" as a must read for anyone who takes a serious interest in photographic composition. Though it probably won't be an easy read -- Mante does occasionally make considerable demands on the brain and the eye -- it will almost certainly be a rewarding read. You will likely find yourself taking, looking at, and thinking about photographs differently.
Mante organizes his book around five basic concepts, each of them the subject of a separate chapter: point, line, shape, universal contrast, and color contrast. His discussion of these concepts is enhanced by numerous diagrams and photos. Understanding the text requires studying the diagrams and photos, sometimes including putting the book down for a while and then coming back to it. Mante wants photographers to think differently about their craft, which means shaking off their usual ways of seeing what's in front of their cameras. The final chapter demonstrates how the five concepts might work together, using Mante's own work (the photos are his throughout the book).
There is something in Mante's approach that I find quite challenging but am unable to express precisely. Conventional photography books tend to take the subject as a given to which conventional rules (e.g., the rule of thirds, placement of the horizon, shooting early or late in the day) can be applied more or less effectively. Mante wants to pull the photographer out of this often basically reactive mode by instead taking the subject as something in which the photographer is far more actively, creatively involved. This means challenging pre-existing ideas about what our "subjects" may be. It means genuinely internalizing the notion that we don't find or dis-cover subjects already out there, but instead have a more direct role in creating those subjects by the very act of taking photographs. Our subjects, in a way, need no longer also be objects.
It's obvious that I'm still trying to work through the implications of Mante's book, but that in itself convinces me the book is worth reading. Whether or not it makes me a better photographer remains to be seen, but it has made me re-examine my ideas about what "better photographer" means in the first place.
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