Arts & Culture

Bringing home a stack of books from the library has been a joy for me since I was a child in North Bay, Ontario, fifty years ago. When I moved to Toronto in my twenties I didn't feel I was participating in the life of the city until I had my own library card.

I brought this lovely pile of library books home for a good look this weekend. 

I picked Gerry Badger's The Pleasures of Good Photographs off the top and opened it to this unforgetable Richard Avedon portrait of Marilyn Monroe.

In a long and absorbing essay about the controversy that accompanied Avedon's movement from fashion to art photographer, Badger writes of this portrait: "Taken toward the end of a long, and clearly exhausing photo session, Avedon portrays her as a woman rather than a movie star. She looks tired and drawn, but this is a sympathetic portrait, one of the finest, if not the finest ever taken of this American icon."

Badger is a discovery for me — an entertaining critic — and Pleasures collects his readable criticism of 20th Century photographers: Walker Evans, Eugene Atget, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Martin Parr and many others.

The Genius of Photography: How Photography Has Changed Our Lives, also by Gerry Badger, surprised me by teaching me something new about photographic history on practically every page.

For example I had no idea that Robert Frank was taking the pictures for his masterpiece The Americans at the same time that William Klein was perfecting his "in your face" style of street photography for Life is Good and Good for You in New York. The two styles seem to belong to different eras. But the pictures were all taken in the 50s.