PHOTO:BOX

Taking photographs started as a hobby more than 20 years ago when I bought my first SLR. After some years the hobby faded away until it was revitalized 7 years ago when I got my first DSLR - after that the hobby was as much about editing photos as it was about taking them. But again it faded away until 2-3 years ago when I began to get really interested i looking at photographs - and of cause looking at the masters is a lot more interesting than looking at my own mediocre family snapshots.

Photography is fantastic! It spans documentary, journalism and many kinds of art. It has an intense history of less than 200 years. It both shows something of the real world and something of the photographer, and sometimes even magically of many other things. We all know photographs, and look at them as a natural thing even though they are always a strange two dimensional and distorted slice of some time ago. Most photographs are understandably immediately but the good ones have many subtle mechanisms that make them work.

The book PHOTO:BOX, edited by Roberto Koch is a book that at the same time

• Shows 250 fantastic photographs that you can spend hours looking at
• Tells about the history of photographs and also some about the history of many great photographers
• Learns you something about looking a photographs - mostly just by the selection in the book, but also from the many comments about the photographs in the book

The book is organized in themes like War, Portraits, Travel, etc. This organization does not matter at all. What matters is that the layout is a repetition of one page of text about the photographer and about the photograph that is shown full on the opposing page. The print quality is so-so, but that is not what matters in this book