Errata Editions x 3 new releases

Errata Editions have just released three new titles in their Books on Books series to add to an already impressive list. Nineteen titles to date. The Errata Editions Books on Books series is an on-going publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to students and photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints nor facsimiles but comprehensive studies of rare books. Each in this series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or prohibitively expensive for most to experience. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series spans the breadth of photographic practice as it has appeared on the printed page, enabling further study into the creation and meanings of these great works of art.

  
Martin Parr's Bad Weather is the debut book from Britain's most world-renown and prolific photographers. Armed with wry humor (and a water-proof camera), Parr captured the social landscape of the UK during downpours, snow storms and the most challenging elements. Published in 1982, Bad Weather has been long out of print and is one of Parr's most sought after books. Books on Books # 17 offers an in-depth study of this important photobook including a new essay by Thomas Weski called Even the Queen Gets Wet.

Richard Billingham's Ray's a Laugh is considered one of the most important contemporary photobooks from Britain. Centered around Billingham's working-class family who live in a cramped Birmingham high-rise tenement apartment and his father Ray - a chronic alcoholic - these candid snapshots describe their daily lives in a visual diary that is raw, intimate, touching and often uncomfortably humorous. Books on Books #18 contains every page spread from this classic book including a contemporary essay by Charlotte Cotton.

Donigan Cumming's The Stage is one of the most challenging photobooks published in the last century. Collaborating with his subjects to explore a kind of psychological portraiture, Cumming created a theatre of domestic and institutional interiors peopled by the strange and eccentric. Books on Books #19 presents an in-depth study of this remarkable and little known Canadian photobook with an essay by Richard Enright called The Overwhelming Quotidian: Donigan Cumming and The Stage.

You can see the complete Books on Books series on the Errata Editions site HERE.

Thanks to my friends for their birthday wishes!

It was a special day on Sunday, so many birthday wishes from so many friends, thank you all. Emilie Hallard, Werner Amann, Lynn Alleva Lilley, Bob Bisscat, Sheila Newbery, Syd Hargis, Eliane Pickermann, Natasha Beckman, Alessandro Calandra, Carolle Benitah, Nicolas Dusart, Christer Ek, Robin Loves Paris, Wolfgang Zurborn, Simon Kossoff, Jens Sundheim, Terri Weifenbach, Lydia Panas, Katarzyna Dubik, Isabelle Pateer, Winfried Heininger, Andreas Schmidt, Pedro Alfacinha, Christian Patterson, Victor Sira, Roy Kahmann, Michael Ast, Norbert Goertz, Vincent Cianni, Priska Pasquer, John Baker, Suzi Jowsey, Rosa Verhoeve, Stephan Zaubitzer, Martina Schilling, Gabriele Harhoff, Rolf Philips, Sudhanshu Malhotra, Mark Page, Sebastian Arthur Hau, Julia Thorne, Oliver Schmidt, Bert Teunissen, Patrizia Serra, Tom Griggs, Clare Strand, Thorsten Vieth, Allan Smith, Pete Bossley, Elena Schwarz, Eve de Castro-Robinson, Linda Tyler, David Cowlard, David Kregenow, Hubert Schober, Becky Nunes, Christine Rose Divito, Chris Helcermanas-Benge, Bertie Plaatsman, Uwe Bedenbecker, Carmen Castaño Méndez, Bruce Connew, Klaus Kehrer, Aline Smithson, Majlinda Hoxha, Bruno Zhu, Linn Phyllis Seeger, Bruce Hopkins, Curt Holtz, Anita Totha, Bruce Foster, Kate De Goldi, Parisa Taghizadeh, Hannah Holm, Raewyn Kitching, Werner Mansholt, Hubert Schober, Tony Fisher, Frederic Fornini, Laurent Barban, Charly Artmann, Jeroen Kummer, Kazuhiko Washio, Sam Sampson, Warwick Lee, Rowena Yalland, Lucy de Castro, Nick Morgan, Michael Draper, Mirium van Vassel, Rina van Bohemen and my dear family - Josh, Kyla, Sam, Emily, Arlo, Lucy, Alex and Zoe.

William Eggleston - Happy 75th

It was a pleasure to be reminded that William Eggleston has a birthday tomorrow, he turns seventyfive. Extra special for me as we share the same birthday. I'm not as old as Eggleston but catching up fast. The New Yorker reports that Eggleston plans to spend part of his birthday playing Bach sonatas on his recently installed Bösendorfer piano, looking out on Overton Park, in Memphis. And they suspect he will never be far from a glass of bourbon.
Happy Birthday Bill!

Martin Parr - Here's one for you...

As this coming Sunday happens to be my birthday, one with a nought on the end (fuck!) a dear friend has given me a very special present in the form of a photobook called the Sporting Life Guide To Wrestling. The book is packed with photographs of hefty wrestling stars and holds like the Indian Death Lock that I just can't wait to try out. The book heralds a whole new genre, you could call it The Guide Book category, a certainty for inclusion in The Photobook: A History Volume 4. And I bet this opens a gaping hole in the Parr collection!

 

Copeland Book Market, London this weekend

If you're in London this weekend, July 25 - 27th, get on down to the Copeland Book Market. It's an art book market in a unique location with over forty publishers from across the world. Including an events programme of talks, screenings and performances, the Copeland Book Market offers publishers and artists an opportunity to showcase the best of their recent work. The Copeland Book Market was founded by Guy Robertson and Tom Saunderson in 2011 and takes its name from the yard in which their gallery, Son Gallery, was located in Peckham. This year Copeland is organised by Guy Robertson, Kat Black, Lewis Chaplin and Oliver Griffin. Copeland Book Market is funded and supported by Bold Tendencies.

BLIND SPOT - Issue 48

 

BLIND SPOT issue 48 is now available. The issue features - Sam Contis, Tim Davis & Joe Hagan, Jason Lazarus, Mara McKevitt, Ye Rin Mok, Jack Pierson, David Benjamin Sherry, Stephen Shore, Michael Vahrenwald, and others.

BLIND SPOT has published some of today’s most renowned artists working in the medium of photography as they were building their careers--Adam Fuss, Vik Muniz, Doug & Mike Starn and James Welling appeared in the first issue--and since its launch in 1993, the magazine has featured more than 400 living artists, including Robert Adams, Francis Alÿs, John Baldessari, William Eggleston, Rachel Harrison, Zoe Leonard and Ed Ruscha, as well as younger artists like Walead Beshty, Peter Coffin, Anne Collier, Seth Price, Michael Queenland and Amanda Ross-Ho. Printed in the United States by Meridian Printing, Blind Spot is known for its commitment to the highest quality reproductions. Features are often designed in collaboration with the artists, and recent issues have been guest-edited by contemporary artists, providing a visual exploration of specific ideas and approaches to photography-based image-making. 

Guess edited by Doug Aitken, Paperback, 9" x 10.5", 80 pages. 

You can get it direct from BLIND SPOT HERE.

Elisabeth Tonnard makes artist's books

Elisabeth Tonnard is a Dutch artist and poet working in artists’ books, photography and literature. Printed Matter Inc. NYC recent mailing featured her work. Tonnard has published thirty books that are included in international collections and exhibited widely. Much of her work involves responding to existing books, texts and images, reworking them into poetry, and creating photographic visual narratives.
Several of Tonnard’s books appropriate the physical form of the novel. Traditionally printed and bound with unassuming covers, books like THE STORY OF A YOUNG GENTLEMAN, TWO OF US and IN THIS DARK WOOD do not announce themselves as artists’ books, disguising them just as their contents challenge the divide between artists’ book and literature.
THE STORY OF A YOUNG GENTLEMAN includes the entirety of War and Peace, written in miniscule type and couched within a minimalist narrative of Tonnard’s own devising.
TWO OF US constructs a visual narrative from street photographs of pairs of people walking, combining the images with a poem by Baudelaire in a reflection on the concept of the double described by Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Freud.
IN THIS DARK WOOD, similarly novel-like in size and bearing, opens to reveal Tonnard’s haunting meditation on urban alienation in America: 90 unique English translations of the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno are each accompanied by a different photograph of a person walking alone in a city at night, resituating their modern solitude, with Dante’s words, into an ancient narrative of human isolation.

You can see more of Elisabeth Tonnard's work on her website HERE.

PARIS PHOTO 2014 - participating Publishers and Booksellers

 

PARIS PHOTO 2014, 13 - 16 November in the Grand Palais. Here is the list of the 23 participating international publishers and booksellers.

ACTES SUD, Arles
ANDRE FRERE, Marseille
ANTICUARIA POEMA 20, Buenos Aires
APERTURE, New York
BOOKSHOP M, Tokyo
CHLOE ET DENIS OZANNE, Paris
DAMIANI, Bologna
DIRK K. BAKKER BOEKEN, Amsterdam
FILIGRANES, Paris
HARPER’S, East Hampton
HATJE CANTZ, Ostfildern
KEHRER VERLAG, Heidelberg
LIBRAIRIE 213, Paris
MACK, London
MÖREL, London
ONLY PHOTOGRAPHY, Berlin
RADIUS, Santa Fe
RM, Mexico City
STEIDL, Göttingen
SUPER LABO, Kanagawa
TASCHEN, Paris/London
TISSATO NAKAHARA, Paris
XAVIER BARRAL, Paris

Hans Ulrich Obrist talks to Walther König

Wolfgang Tillmans, Walther König, 2009

A recent post on the edgy 032c website has the influential curator Hans Ulrich Obrist talking with bookseller and publisher extraordinaire Walther König. It is no exaggeration that the König flagship bookstore in Cologne is probably the worlds best bookshop for art and artist's books. I always head there when in Cologne and in fact, König's shop alone is worth the trip to Cologne.

The legendary business was founded in Cologne in 1969 by WALTHER KÖNIG (b.1939), soon to become one of the world’s pre-eminent addresses for art-related literature and a hotbed of intellectual exchange (apart from the parent location, the bookstore now maintains branches across Germany, in Vienna, and in London). Around the same time, with his brother Kasper, König also started a publishing house. Today, the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König is home to many artists, including Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Hans Peter Feldmann. Obrist, who has known the bookseller and publisher since he was a young student and has collaborated with him on a series of books, speaks of König with wonder-filled enthusiasm. He points out the publisher’s “incredible generosity,” and is fascinated by the “Borgesian infinity” of the original bookshop’s physical space. “Whenever you think you’ve seen it, there is another hidden room. Little by little, one discovers, floor by floor, more and more secret spaces – and I am sure I still have not seen all of them, filled with books upon books. It’s almost paradise. I’ve always thought of the König bookshop as a sort of paradise.” It is amid this inner architectural complexity, in König’s office, that the two men sat down to talk about what Obrist sees as a one unified entity: “It’s him – his bookshop, his building, all the books, his publishing – it’s a beautiful, holistic thing.” 

You can read the complete interview on 032c HERE. And visit the Walther König bookstore website HERE.

In 2006 I made a photograph of Walther König outside his shop in Cologne and he made a photograph of me, this was for my book project I LOOK AT YOU, YOU LOOK AT ME.

Harvey Benge, Walther König, 2006

Walther König, Harvey Benge, 2006

Newsprint Award 2014

In 2013 bookdummypress an independent bookstore & a publisher in New York and Reminders Photography Stronghold, a gallery in Tokyo, joined forces to launch an international photography publication award to celebrate newsprint’s contribution to the evolving creativity of self-publishing.
Newsprint is not only an economical medium that allow a range of experimentation, but also has the potential of reaching a diverse audience wider and faster. Keeping this award open to photographers / artists without any entry fee, it is intended to stimulate to take a renew approach towards this format and to introduce photographers to a way to self-publish and self-distribute their work.

The 2014 winner, Noi Satirat Damampai (Thailand) with her project The War Within, has portrayed the struggles of the Karen ethnic group, involved in what is considered to be the longest civil war in the world. The project is comprised of perceptive portraits and desolate landscapes that show the intensity of those lives that have been through 60 years of fighting and fear.

You can show your support for Noi Satirat Damampai's publication and for the newsprint medium by contributing to the INDIEGOGO crowd funding campaign HERE.
 

David Kregenow shoots photographers

I'm pleased to be included in German photographer David Kregenow's line-up of photographers. Kregenow's hard-edge black and white pictures are a superb record of who is out there in the photo-world right now. Here are just a few of the portraits, more on David's website HERE. And his other projects too, which are worth checking out.

Paul Graham

Thomas Demand

Ed Ruscha

Antoine d'Adata

Daido Moriyama

Lewis Baltz

Wim Wenders

Paul Graham at the Winogrand retrospective, The Met, NYC

Garry Winogrand - New York, circa 1962

Writer Nicholas Dawidoff talked to New York resident Paul Graham at The Met's Winogrand show and penned a piece in The NEW YORKER Photo Booth section.

Inside the exhibition, Graham wandered until something snapped him into focus. He paused at a photograph of a muscular young man hoisting a woman aloft and wrestling her toward the surf, from 1952. “The thing about these early ones, they strike me as the work of someone who hasn’t found his voice. They’re of that era of Time-Life photojournalism—someone trying to unshackle himself from popular journalism’s obligatory good cheer, the clanking boxcars of magazine narrative.” A little further on, he admired photographs of elderly people with much seemingly on their minds, none of it optimistic, standing on street corners sometime around 1960. “We’ve charged ahead ten years, and it’s already much richer,” Graham said. “It’s him photographing on his own gambit. He’s gone rogue! It’s haphazard, disorienting.”

You can read the full story HERE. 

Photography Workshop - Cologne in November

 

Harvey Benge - Tokyo Girl No 1, 2007

I will be conducting a workshop in Cologne at galerie Lichtblick over the weekend of November 22 and 23rd. I've called the workshop - So You Want to Make Better Photographs? - knowing that we all want to do that. Among other things I will share my approach to evaluating images. And what makes a photograph work. Of course this will lead to idea generation and how to move a series of photographs forward, ultimately to a show or a photobook. I've had a lot of photobooks published and I'll be telling participants all I know in that area. I'm looking forward to getting back to Cologne and doing this workshop, it's going to be fun.

The Lichtblick School have this to say:
Paris and Auckland based photographer Harvey Benge will return to Lichtblick School this November for an intensive 2 day workshop. Harvey will share his wealth of experience giving special attention to idea generation, how to evaluate photographs, what makes one image work and another not, editing and sequencing plus photobook design, production and an overview of print-on-demand technology. The workshop will include constructive reviews of participants work and suggestions on ways to move work forward.
Known for his evocative and unsettling images, Harvey Benge’s focus is on picture series realised through the photo-book. With over forty titles to date, his work has been published in Britain, France, Germany, Japan and New Zealand. His photographs have also been shown in public and dealer galleries in New Zealand, Britain and throughout Europe including France, Holland, Germany, Poland and Italy.
Harvey has conducted workshops with: photographers Antoine d’Agata, Peter Bialobrzeski, Louis Baltz, Slavica Perkovic, Alec Soth, John Gossage, Rineke Dijkstra, Paul Graham, Todd Hido, Pieter Hugo and curators Quentin Bajac and Sandra Phillips. His bookworks have included collaborations with J H Engstrom, Roe Ethridge, Bertien van Manen, Christian Patterson and Daido Moriyama among others.

Some unsolicited comments from past workshop participants:
Thanks for a very pleasant and eye-opening workshop, I’m glad I attended - Michael Irmscher. Thanks for your workshop, it was great and brought me a huge step forward - Charly Artmann. Thank you for a great workshop, it was good fun and helped me very much - Torsten Schumann.

You can find out more at the Lichblick School website HERE. Or if you wish you could email me direct at, harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz

Israel Ariño - Le nom qui efface la couleur

 

Israel Ariño is a Barcelona based photographer who makes pictures that are spare yet loaded and have a profound beauty. Once in a while I see work that I wish I had made, here is such an occasion. 
Ariño's new bookwork - Le nom qui efface la couleur - revolves around what is possible, around the possibility of being one thing or another, of falling or flying, of remaining or vanishing, and in general, around man’s intrinsic freedom, which places him in a world full of options, forcing him to choose between one or another.
The work borders on abstraction, a state of mind in which to explore the limits of photography, a threshold from which to witness a new type of place coming into being, more indistinct and ambiguous but at the same time more involved in a territory rich in sentiment, metaphor and language.
The series was produced while Ariño was artist-in-residence in Nature Humaine, in the Centre region of France.

The book itself is a beautiful object. Published by Ediciones Anomalas the book feels good in the hands and the production values are superb. Printed on a luscious satin paper with intense blacks and subtle highlights. What's more, Israel Ariño not only knows how to make stunning photographs his edit and sequencing is masterful. 

Le nom qui efface la couleur, 24x20cm. 104 pages. Hardcover. A bargain at 25€
You can purchase HERE. 

 

Arles 2014 - A Disaster?

The Paris based L'Oeil de la Photographie pulled no punches in its take on Arles 2014.

The name of this year’s festival was “Parade.” The fatal mistake is right there in the title. A parade is festive, friendly, flamboyant. But this parade was a motley commemoration of a few nostalgic veterans celebrating a soldier whose name isn’t even unknown: François Hébel.
And, really, we’ve had enough of these veterans: enough Martin Parr, enough Raymond Depardon, enough Christian Lacroix, enough Erik Kessels. They’re all great, but their ubiquity has become unbearable. At this rate, if Hébel and the festival weren’t parting ways, then next year’s edition would have featured Martin Parr’s cookbook, Raymond Depardon’s garden gnomes and Christian Lacroix’s children’s toys.

You can read the full story HERE.

And a last word from Sean O'Hagan writing in The Observer. You can read his complete review HERE.

Again, though, it is photography's former functions that are at the heart of this exhibition. The archival shot, the found photograph and the vernacular image continue to exert a hold on our imagination at a time when, as the Discovery award selection shows, much contemporary photography has become obsessed with the conceptual process. François Hébel departs for new ground at an interesting time for the discipline of curation as well as photography. I wish him luck, and hope the festival that he did so much to reinvent and revitalise continues to flourish.

Finally, the British Journal of Photography has their say - the highs and lows - HERE.

François Hébel's last stand

GOST Books - Maidan - Portraits from the Black Square

If you are in London on Thursday July 24th don't miss the launch of GOST books new title, Maidan - Portraits from the Black Square by Anastasia Taylor-Lind.
The bookwork is a remarkable series of portraits of anti-government protestors and mourners made in a makeshift photographic studio at the barricades in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), Kiev during February 2014.

The launch event will take place at London's Frontline Club, 13 Norfolk Place, London, W2 1QJ in the 2nd floor function room.

GOST Books is a photography and visual arts publishers founded by Gordon MacDonald and Stuart Smith, and based in London. You can see more of their titles on their website HERE.  

GOST Books current titles

 

Les Rencontre d'Arles - its 45th edition

The 45th edition of Les Rencontre d'Arles is in in full swing as I write. What I wouldn't give to be in the Place du Forum with a beer and amongst friends. Instead here in Auckland with rain and gale force winds. Yuk. You can go to the festivals program HERE.

Auckland - Viaduct Harbour this a.m. via webcam

Arles - Place du Forum

Garry Winogrand at The Met

Garry Winogrand - Albuquerque, 1957

Following its successful run at SF MoMA the block-buster Garry Winogrand retrospective is now showing at The Met NYC. Until September 21st.

The first retrospective in twenty-five years of work by Garry Winogrand (1928–1984)—the renowned photographer of New York City and of American life from the 1950s through the early 1980s—this exhibition brings together more than 175 of the artist's most iconic images, a trove of unseen prints, and even Winogrand's famed series of photos made at the Metropolitan Museum in 1969 when the Museum celebrated its centennial. It offers a rigorous overview of Winogrand's complete working life and reveals for the first time the full sweep of his career.
Born in the Bronx, Winogrand did much of his best-known work in Manhattan during the 1960s, and in both the content of his photographs and his artistic style he became one of the principal voices of that eruptive decade. Known primarily as a street photographer, Winogrand, who is often associated with famed contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, photographed with dazzling energy and incessant appetite, exposing some twenty thousand rolls of film in his short lifetime. He photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos, rodeos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police. Daily life in postwar America—rich with new possibility and yet equally anxious, threatening to spin out of control—seemed to unfold for him in a continuous stream.
While Winogrand is widely considered one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, his overall body of work and influence on the field remain incompletely explored. He was enormously prolific but largely postponed the editing and printing of his work. The act of taking pictures was far more fulfilling to Winogrand than making prints or editing for books and exhibitions; he often allowed others to perform these tasks for him. Dying suddenly at the age of 56, he left behind proof sheets from his earlier years that he had marked but never printed, as well as approximately 6,600 rolls of film (some 250,000 images) that he had never seen, more than one-third of which he had never developed at all; these rolls of film were developed after his death.

Garry Winogrand - El Morocco, New York, 1955

Jim Goldberg - Rich and Poor

Sean O'Hagan writes in his excellent On Photography column in the quardian on Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor series which looks at both sides of America's social divide.

Recently, Goldberg has been digitising his huge analog archive, a process that has prompted him to re-edit his older series with the benefit of hindsight. A reworked version of Raised By Wolves, now an expensive collector's item, is promised, but the first fruit of this process is a new version of Rich and Poor (1977-85), which has been out of print since 1985.
Rich and Poor looks at the social divide in 1970s and 80s America in Goldberg's now characteristic style – black-and-white portraits accompanied by handwritten texts from the subjects. The use of ephemera is central to his way of working. "There's a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness," he told me in 2009. "The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them. I'm not a politically radical person. In fact, I'm much more interested in being radical aesthetically."

You can read the full story HERE. Well worth a read, in particular given the current debate about the perils of income and wealth inequality.

China Stories in Arles

Harvey Benge - Shanghai September 2007

Cologne based curator Tina Schelhorn from galerie lichtblick presents at the Rencontres d'Arles, which opens July 7, her China Stories exhibition. The show features work from 29 photographers from a host of countries.

Harvey Benge, Auckland, New Zealand – China Story
Steven Benson, Daytona Beach – The Cost of Power in China
Chili, Beijing – Red Star Hotel
Stefen Chow, Singapore – Ai Weiwei Portrait - The Poverty Line
Nathalie Daoust, Bejing/ Berlin – Mao Impersonator
Sanne de Wilde, Amsterdam – The Dwarf Empire
James Whitlow Delano, Tokyo – China: Dystopa/ Utopia
Luis Delgado, San Francisco - Cuentos Chinos
Giulio Di Sturco, Bangkok – China Hollywood
Antonio Julio Duarte, Lisbon – Macao Casino
Joakim Eneroth, Stockholm – Without End
Katharina Hesse, Beijing – Human Negotiations
Oyvind Hjelmen, Stord, Norway - Journey Elsewhere
Ore Huiying, Singapore – The Promised Land
Liu Jin, Beijing – Fallen Angel
Pok Chi Lau, Lawrence/Hongkong - Flow China 1979-82
Elaine Ling, Toronto – Mongolia – Neon Buddhas
Sherman Ong, Singapore - HanoiHaiku
Chris Rauschenberg, Portland - China 1985
Michael Rhoades, New York – China Town NY
Yuan Shun, Beijing/ Berlin - Mindscape
Matthew Sleeth, Melbourne – Red China
Zsolt Szamódy, Budapest – The Back Alleys of Globalization
Homer Sykes, London – Shanghai Odyssey
Ian Teh, London – Traces - Dark Clouds
Kurt Tong, Hongkong – In Case it Rains in Heaven
Unity Art Nabiha + Thom, Würzburg – Yellow Chain Dance
Robert Welsh, San Francisco – Grandma
Wolfgang Zurborn, Cologne - China! Which China?

July 6-13, 2014. Daily 1 pm to midnight
Opening: Sunday, July 6 at 6 pm
in cooperation with Corinne Dumas-micaleff, Max Pam, Edition Bessard

l'atelier cinq / lieu de l'écrit & galerie / Place Voltaire, 5 rue tardieu / 13200 Arles / France

Wim Wenders - 50 rules of filmmaking with some that apply to photography

Wim Wenders is known for his poetic and emotional film direction, like 1984’s Palme d’Or-winning Paris, Texas and 1987’s Wings of Desire – the latter netting him Best Director at Cannes. Wenders’ films are filled with a lyricism and romance borne of unforgettable cinematography – unsurprisingly, he is also a prolific still photographer and artist as well as moviemaker.

A post on today's edition of Open Culture reveals Wenders' Rules of Cinema Perfection.
Following the link to MovieMaker I discovered that many of the rules also apply to still photography. Here they are, enjoy:

2. If you have nothing to say, don’t feel obliged to pretend you do.

3. If you do have something to say, you’d better stick to it.

11. Rain only shows on the screen when you back-light it.

13. Think twice before you write a scene with babies or infants.

15. Mistakes never get fixed in post.

16. Final cut is overrated. Only fools keep insisting on always having the final word.

17. Other people have great ideas, too.

18. The more money you have the more you can do with it, sure. But the less you can say with it.

24. It’s always good to make up for a lack of (financial) means with an increase in imagination.

25. Having a tight schedule can be difficult. But having too much time is worse.

26. Alright, so you’re shooting with a storyboard. Make sure you’re willing to override it at any given moment.

30. Film can reveal the invisible, but you must be willing to let it show.

31. The more you know about moviemaking, the tougher it gets to leave that knowledge behind. As soon as you do things “because you know how to do them,” you’re fucked.

32. Don’t tell a story that you think somebody else could tell better.

33. A “beautiful image” can very well be the worst thing that can happen to a scene.

37. Be ready to get rid of your favorite shot during editing.

40. You need a good title from the beginning.  

47. There are 10,000 other rules like these 50.

49. There are no rules.

50. None of the above is necessarily correct.