Albert Watson: Creating Photographs (Masters of Photography)

Albert Watson: Creating Photographs is a soft cover book that is hardly a coffee table book. Most, if not all, prospective readers will immediately be clamoring for Watson’s glorious fashion photographs and ad campaigns, but this is not a book written to display those facets of his work.

Albert Watson: Creating Photographs is a sort of manual, an insight into the mindset of this brilliant photographer. As the title states, it is about creating photographs and not so much about the photograph itself. Watson writes about his tools of the trade, his methodology, the way his mind works when he is prepping for a shoot, and almost anything you might imagine except the finished product, which, of course, he expects to be on par with all his previous works.

It's a bit of dry reading when he discusses lenses, cameras, papers, and the technical side of photography, but that’s only if you’re interested in the finished product and not the art of photography. It is only after thoughtful consideration that he employs the actual photography that achieves his show-stopping finished product.

The book is instructional, insightful, and technical, rather than a catalog of Watson’s oeuvre. He discusses how the photos came to be—and not just that image you see in a magazine as editorial or advertisement. This diminutive book contains the intellectual and cerebral sides of the artist that are the ingredients to the recipe that in the end become an unforgettable image.