I have just started reading The Life of a Photograph by Sam Abell and it’s an amazing photo book. Sam Abell has done more than three decades worth of fieldwork for National Geographic and is an excellent visual storyteller.

In this post I wrote about taking your time to explore different viewpoints. The Life of a Photograph illustrates this point beautifully. The book displays many side-by-side images where Sam Abell points out how subtle differences in point of view, framing, timing and perspective lead to significant photographs.

To give you a little teaser of the great text that accompanies the many excellent photographs let me quote this part of a paragraph from the first chapter “Seeking the Picture”:

Once again something had stopped me. I’d taken it in, composed and waited, then photographed. These small sequential acts amount to a transaction between two lives – the external life of encountered experience and the imaginative inner life of the individual photographer. It is at this intersection of the inner and outer worlds that the life of a photograph begins.

It was these remarkable couple of lines of words that captivated me straight away along with the photography and print quality of the book. I can highly recommend this book as an addition to your photo book shelf.

To view more details about The Life of a Photograph click here.

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