Walter Isaacson's Book Review: A Balanced Approach to Understanding Steve Jobs' Success

In his book on Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson takes an interesting approach to understanding the life and times of this iconic figure. While the book provides a comprehensive biography, many readers felt that it lacked depth in certain areas. To make up for this, Isaacson aims to provide a more nuanced look at what made Steve Jobs tick by sharing insights from those who knew him best - his family members, early friends, colleagues at Apple, Pixar, and Disney.

Isaacson's approach is indeed refreshing, as he delves into the personal stories of those closest to Jobs, providing a glimpse into the events that shaped him into the person he became. By exploring these relationships, we gain a more well-rounded understanding of Jobs' personality, values, and motivations. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in learning more about Steve Jobs beyond his public persona.

Free Audiobook Offer: Listen to Walter Isaacson's Book for Free

Audible has made available a special offer for readers who want to explore Walter Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs. With an Audible membership, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial and enjoy the first book absolutely free. No commitment required - if you don't like it, simply cancel your subscription. To take advantage of this offer, visit audiblepodcast.com/sapie.

Tom Burrell: A Master of Compositional Photography

For many photographers, Tom Burrell is a huge inspiration. This renowned photographer has mastered both the compositional and technical aspects of photography. Burrell's work showcases his exceptional skill in creating images that are both visually stunning and intellectually engaging. Whether he's photographing landscapes, still-life compositions, or people, Burrell brings his unique perspective to each image.

As a printer and craftsman, Burrell is also an inspiration to many. He has worked extensively with various mediums, from traditional darkroom techniques to digital printing. His dedication to his craft is evident in the high-quality prints that he produces. A personal anecdote of mine involves my attempt to start a photography magazine in the 1990s. I reached out to Tom Burrell for an interview, and while nervous about speaking with one of my heroes, our conversation was enlightening.

Tom Burrell's work spans a range of genres, including location shooting using collodion processes and alternative methods. His experience working in wet plate photography is truly impressive, as he develops these negatives on-site, often with limited equipment. Another fascinating aspect of his work is the way he approaches digital printing, which marks a departure from traditional analog techniques.

The Evolution of Tom Burrell's Work

In our conversation, I asked Tom Burrell about his approach to photography and how it has evolved over time. At that point in 2002, he was working on various projects, including location work using collodion processes. While this may seem like a traditional technique, it is actually quite advanced.

Tom Burrell's ability to create stunning images using wet plate photography was an inspiration for me at the time. He also shared insights into his future work, discussing his frustration with available materials and his exploration of digital techniques. This marked a significant shift in his approach, as he began working with digital printing methods.

A Visit to Tom Burrell's Website

For those interested in learning more about Tom Burrell's photography and crafts, I invite you to visit his website. There, you can find examples of his work, insights into his creative process, and information on upcoming projects. This is a great resource for anyone looking to learn from one of the masters of compositional photography.

A Pinterest Board: Exploring Tom Burrell's Work

To give you a better sense of Tom Burrell's diverse body of work, I've created a Pinterest board showcasing some of his most striking images. From landscapes and still-life compositions to portraits and street photography, this collection highlights the breadth of his creative vision.

The Art of Photography: Subscribe for More Content

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody Ted Forbes welcome back to the art of photography in this video we're gonna look at the work of Tom Burrell and I think Tom more than anyone else in the world of photography has had the most influence on me personally the first time I saw his work I was really blown away and really drawn to the fact that Tom approaches photography not only as a photographer and as somebody who's making compositions and working in camera but also in the craft that goes into his work in the printing techniques that he uses and Tom was at the forefront of the revival in the late 90s that was going on with a lot of the popularity or resurgence of alternative process photography and he was working in collodion did this beautiful series of work at the Bethlehem Steel mill in Pennsylvania and he's worked in fotografia and he does some amazing outstanding stuff and he's really inspirational to me from those two fronts the simplicity with composition and this beauty of what he's capturing mostly with still lifes or outdoor architectural types of things but bringing that with this sense of craft into actually having this huge range of what he does with printmaking is just stunning and that's what I want to look at today so without further ado we're gonna go over and check out the first book that he did which is just called Tom Borel which was for a long time my holy grail book and I finally found a copy of it a couple years ago and it's still one of my favorites to this day Tom was born in Connecticut went to the School of Visual Arts in New York and spent years as Robert Mapplethorpe sprinter and the two have a similarity and that they both shoot flowers as a subject quite often but that's about where it ends I think they fit really nicely together but you know Tom spent years printing for Mapplethorpe and eventually after maple who passed away went on and to become have a career of his own as a photographer so without further ado let's go check out the work of Tom Burrell before we get too far into this I want to talk a little bit about this book for a minute this is the first monograph of two that have been published on Burrell's work and this one was extremely rare it was done in a limited run of 2,500 copies it was extremely well made and I want to talk about that a little bit because I think it reflects the kind of craftsmanship and quality that Tom has in his own work and I think it's a really special book in that regard this was published by 4ad which was also a record labels most people know that's still around they don't do books anymore I think they did too one of the founders of 480 was a huge photography fan and for whatever reason he really loved Tom Burrell and and this was one of the first books they did it was extremely expensive to make and anyway that's probably why 480 aren't in the book publishing business anymore I finally found my copy after looking for this for several years at an art gallery here in Dallas and this was a display copy that they would use to sell prints to prospective buyers this particular copy had a bent front cover and considering I only had to pay about $40 for it not a big deal for me you can see that the book is cloth bound and which is really nice and then the front cover has an embossed rectangle in the middle that is inlaid with a reproduction of one of Tom's prints and I want to talk about the process and we'll get specific when we get into images in here but you're not going to see any of the collodion work really what this book focuses on is a series of work that Tom did using Polaroid type 55 film and for those of you who are not familiar with type 55 it was one of the one of the more beautiful and interesting films that Polaroid made and it is no longer in production you can still find it used but considering that you can't refrigerate or freeze Polaroid film and and make it last like you can with standard film it's a crapshoot so for all intents and purposes this is a technique that's for the most part instinct right now which is too bad the way Polaroid type 55 worked it was rated at an ISO of 55 so it was very low speed and it came in this pack and I want to talk about because you're gonna see some of these in the images and this is how you can tell it's polar in type 55 it came in a pack you had a special holder that went in the back of the large-format camera and this is about the size of the negative two so that it was a large format four by five and what you would do is you'd put the sleeve into the holder and you pull the sleeve up which would expose the film you would take the picture put the sleeve back down and then this holder had a series of rollers that you would pin down and then you rip it out and what that would do is break the packet that held the chemicals and it would coat the image and you know after a couple minutes you would peel it apart and then you could rinse and fix and it was instant film the interesting thing also about polar head type 55 is it had a positive print and a negative inside that pack so when you would peel it apart it would develop both the prints were okay good to just check your exposure and stuff but the negatives were absolutely gorgeous and the tonality that this film was capable of even at slow speeds I mean it was just really beautiful I used to shoot a lot of type 55 it was not cheap and like I said you can still find out on eBay and stuff I it's a little bit of a gamble and it's gonna be really expensive if you can find it now I just don't think it's worth it anymore I think it's just gone it also had a frame in here and you can usually see some artifacts from the frame and then also sometimes the chemicals would bleed around where the print would stick to the negative and you know it was a contact print is essentially what it made with instant films so it has this kind of it adds to the charm and the vibe of it but you have these these imperfections in the image around the frame borders and that's usually how you can tell it's type 55 and the front here absolutely beautiful picture with this soft focus of the smokestacks of this Factory and I want to get into this a little bit and share with you why this this is so special to me and the forward here explains a little bit of the process of how they did the book and essentially what they did is they made what they call tritone negatives that were created from Tom's prints now Tom's prints are usually tone with T just like you know instant drinking tea and who would make the print actually soak it in tea for you know maybe a minute or two or longer I've done it before it's it's and it adds this beautiful sepia toning to your print and it's just interesting it's done with an organic thing like tea but anyway the way they reproduce this is they made what they call tritone negatives and so typically when you're going to reproduce something they would take the original print and they would make a tritone negative so that meant a three-color negative to make sure you got you know more more richness and more gradiation in the tones and what-have-you and then this was in turn printed on very high quality paper and I mean this book is just stunningly beautiful you're probably not going to pick up on these nuances in the video here but it is absolutely gorgeous the paper is outstanding and the prints look amazing this is more of a handmade feel in some ways then I mean sure there are a lot of well printed books to go to this effort on it is extra-special so I want to get into some of the images now and I'll start with the calla lilies here and I've shown Tom's work on the show before and you may have seen some of these images but what I find interesting too is this is a pretty clean pull on the Polaroid 55 film it doesn't have a lot of imperfections but you do have the borders here and I think it adds to a little making it a little more organic what's interesting too is that Burrell also used a technique of solarization and when you start to have you know Man Ray was really well known for this and several other photographers but you know you have these kind of hard contrast edges and it almost looks like it's starting to be a negative the tones become softer in the midsection as you go to the highlights and this is achieved by exposing the negative to light as it's being developed and I've never done it with type 55 so I don't know exactly how he went out about it but you know you can do this with any film you know the kind of the the speculation is is it was you know invented in the darkroom and somebody accidentally turned on the light before the film was developed and so there's there's techniques it's actually really hard to control it's a little bit random but it has a beautiful effect once you get it going on right and I think that a lot of these images are outstanding that that show off a ball out of that solarization technique you can see it with the with the poppy flower here and also you're gonna see too because flowers are in these still lifes are an important subject to Burrell that you know I'll talk about in a second we get to that section but the influence of Mapplethorpe you know when I talked to Tom once he told me that you know it was strictly a business relationship and he liked Mapplethorpe work but he didn't felt he didn't feel that it influenced him at all I would actually beg to differ a little bit I think that between Carl bloss felt who he does claim as an influence and Mapplethorpe and Burrell sitting somewhere in the middle I think his his pictures have a place and that may not have been a direct influence in the sense that he copies it or tries to look like Mapplethorpe but it I think knowing where Mapplethorpe was with the with the floral shots that he did I think Burrell has created a place in the middle and certainly being very aware of that being his printer you know this is the same image from the cover and again you'll notice that the tones vary a little bit and a lot of that is allowing parts of the process whether it's the toning with tea in some cases of solarization you know there's a little bit of that random organic type thing that comes into image making that I think gives it a lot of character and a lot of soul I think you know in the modern day we're so obsessed with recreating images you know being able to print consistently that we lose a little bit of that soul in that character I've shown this image on the show before but he did a whole bunch of images in New York but a beautiful picture of the Chrysler Building is taken from an empty office you know across the way some beautiful shots that he did in New York of course living up in the Northeast and seeing have stickers in here sold out that was from the printer anyway another shot of the Chrysler Building that's that's gorgeous I love the sky in there in the way it works and Burrell has a beautiful sense for composition and I think what I like the most about his work is that he has a way using composition that starts to bring personality out in the subject that he's shooting you know and I think a case in point would be these sunflowers there's a whole series of these these enormous sunflowers and the way that it really takes up most of the frame and the way to that between you know this one is the the solarization is evident here but it's it's very mild you see it mainly on the on the petals on the bottom right-hand side but again you can kind of see the preparation seam and where the where the frame attached to the 55 and and it really bringing the subject that's that simple just the head of a sunflower and letting it fill the composition like that and take use of the solarization and the tones and a lot of the kind of the analog effects that are applied I think is just outstanding also like this one I've showed some of these sunflowers on the show before but doing you know things that are unconventional like shooting these flowers from behind I think in some ways that Burrell starts to bring in of this one that's wilting they're almost like portraits because there is kind of a personality of the gesture in the flower that he's shooting that comes through and is evident here's one that's a little bit Messier you can see where the sir where was it these roses you can see where the chemicals popped and kind of bled into the picture I love a lot of that I think it just really adds you know kind of a nice throwback feel to it to more of the 19th century techniques but done with you know late 20th century techniques these are great too and we start to see pinholes in here and these are some of my favorites where you know Burrell would do these what he called tabletop pinhole images and they were done on a very basic camera and these pairs it's almost like a group portrait of people or animals or something in the way that he brings that personality through and the beautiful soft focus that the pinhole gives you I think is just outstanding and you don't see something like that you know tabletop photography done with a pinhole and I think it's just very unusual just a gorgeous look to the soft focus and you know the subject matter I think the way he approaches it it's it's meditative in a sense that you know this is I wouldn't consider be minimalism but its minimalist type subjects like a group of pears or flowers or in this case some roll paper that that you know just playing with those compositions and working with those you sent some work with some seashells and of course these also bring back you know to mind some of the work that people like Steichen were doing or edward weston there's a little bit of that influence here as well but but beautiful work and then also there's a bit of an homage in here when you start getting into some of these types of things that Blas belt shot and Karl Blas felt I did show on a long time ago and I'll link it up in the show notes and there certainly was that influence as well of course Blas fell being a botanist and would use these for school another interesting series in here and these are probably some of the more controversial into Burrell's work this is a series called Aviva which I assume is this woman's name but these are series of nudes that he did and what I like about this and what I find interesting about it is that it relates to some of the organic subjects like the flowers or fruits or you know the the tabletop photography but these are done with let's just say a a plus-sized woman and the other thing that I find interesting about this is that you know when you look historically not only in fine art but in commercial work of figure studies and nudes and that's not something we've ever talked about on the show before you know we have kind of this representation particularly well I would say you know you see it the most with females but you get it with men as well where the body becomes objectified and especially with commercial work and fashion it becomes this you know idolized figure that you know for whatever reason sets the standard of what beauty is and I love the fact that Burrell has chosen something that is the opposite of that and created he calls these abstracts but creates these studies out of it that are completely the opposite I guess they do objectifying a sense because at first glance er you don't realize that this is a human figure but it's not the same objectification that we traditionally associate with nude photography anyway there's a whole series of these in here and I think they're they're they're they're beautiful another shot that just a simple shot but I love we're gonna get into the seascapes that Burrell did here and this one is a butterfly on the beach and it's just a simple pinhole image I when I talked to Tom the one time I had an opportunity to do that I did ask him about some of these and you know they they bring to mind some of the seascapes that Sugimoto did but they're much different they're toned differently just the composition is very similar but it's a very different feel to what Burrell was doing with these and you know he said that they're really easy to shoot he did them with a pinhole wanted really long exposures so with a pinhole you have a small aperture this is not type 55 to my knowledge this is kind of a break from what we've been talking about but probably a low film speed and then he said he also used an orange filter and his exposures came out to be about 25 minutes and he said that these were not exactly I think the one I was referring to was this one these were not abandoned beaches he said they were actually people out here but when your exposures that long as long as people are moving and not sitting and walking through some people walking along the beach they're not gonna show up in the exposure but I love because you have this long exposure and the beautiful gradient in the sky there and this becomes so simple you know when we talked about our composition series of episodes then we talked about the use of line and shape and these are just perfect studies for this with this beautiful line and this small shape that comes in with the highlight off of the wave as it's coming in you know as a 25 minute exposure you're going to lose the details and things like water any kind of cloud movement this looks like it was done on a pretty clear day clouds move pretty slow so they'll generally blur out in a composition like that and he's got some beautiful stuff and then like this one's visually nice study to where you have you know similar feel with the beach a little bit of clouds over here and a pole that breaks up the composition it very experimental in some ways but also very minimal and the fact that these elements because of the long exposure are a little bit blurred out and softened in in their feel it becomes just kind of these shape studies or these almost abstracts anyway this is a beautiful book as I said it was limited to about 2,500 copies you can still find it if you look around of course Amazon stuff like that you're gonna find used copies and they're gonna cost a fortune but if you keep your eyes that you'd probably run across it but I did want to share this book with you guys today because it's just one of my favorites this was done with large format camera with with obviously a strong depth of field so everything from pinhole to straight-up photography different manipulations to type 55 the solarization techniques range of subject matter and the way he would incorporate personalities into very simple shapes and organic things like flowers and all I think his work is just outstanding and which is why he is one of my favorite photographers I want to take a second give a shout-out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at audible podcast.com if you're not familiar with audible they are the world's leading provider of audiobooks with over 150,000 titles across all types of literature including fiction nonfiction and periodicals if you go over to their website you will see they have an amazing selection and I'm gonna show you how you can get your first book absolutely free now I've been looking through here lately for some new stuff to read myself this is an excellent way to pass time when you're at the gym or you're commuting and one of the trends that they're you're seeing a lot of these days are kind of these inspirational entrepreneurial type books and of course we had the Walter Isaacson biography on Steve Jobs that came out about a year or two ago and there's a new one that's come out called becoming Steve Jobs the evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader now the Walter Isaacson's book was a pretty much straight up biography and a lot of people felt it was a little bit shallow in some of the hi in the scenes looks at you know what made Steve Jobs Steve Jobs and what made him so successful and what drove him and this book kind of aims to do that by talking to family members you know the inside circle early on at Apple Pixar Disney and there's supposed to be amazing this is on my list if you want to get this book absolutely free I have a special URL for you and if you go over to that URL what you want to do is sign up for the service and you have 30 days to decide if it's right for you or not and if it's not cancel your subscription no hard feelings the first book is yours to keep absolutely free you pay nothing so what you want to do is head over to audible podcast.com slash a opie that is audible podcast.com slash AOP that lets them know I sent you and you're gonna get that first book with your with your trial membership absolutely free and I want to give another special shout out and thanks to the folks at audible for once again sponsoring another episode of the art of photography as I mentioned earlier Tom Burrell is probably my biggest influence and the reason is is because I think he comes out from two sides there's the compositional side and what he's doing with the camera with not minimalism but but creating images where you have a personality and a minimal style of maybe it's a tabletop still life or maybe it's a seascape or something like that that brings your attention in and brings personality out of what he's shooting and that's the first thing I was loved about his work the second thing is his craftsmanship as a printer is extremely inspirational he has an enormous range to what he does he works really in any medium I'll tell you an interesting story about Burrell about 12 years ago I was hell-bent on starting a photography magazine I wanted to do a print publication it's trying to do this myself I was doing freelance design work and photography stuff on the side and this was my passion I want to do this is way before YouTube and all that and of course this is what I'm doing today where did the wise don't try to start a publication in the 21st century you will drive yourself mad but anyway what I was preparing is I wanted to have an initial prototype issue of this magazine to work with that I could use to try to get advertising interest and things like that and so I went ahead and did a couple interviews and I contacted Tom Burrell and I asked him if I could do an interview with him over the phone I took the type up for print and he obliged and I mean I was so nervous on the phone call because this is one of my heroes that I'm talking to and we were talking about the range of stuff that he does and you know as I mentioned in the 90s he was doing a lot of collodion work and a lot of these alternative process things and I mentioned I said you know you're doing location work in collodion which we really didn't look at today we can do that another time but he had done these images of the Bethlehem Steel mill and they were just gorgeous and you know these these just beautiful wet plate process images and I said well how are you doing these because you have to develop those negatives in the field you can't let them dry and he said oh well I have a horse trailer that has a hundred gallon wash water tank in the top and has red windows and it was amazing I mean he's definitely a modern-day Roger Fenton and it's also interesting too because at that time I asked him what he was going to be working on in the future and he seems actually breaking away from a lot of the traditional analog process and he was trying to work with digital and a lot of it was frustration of the materials that were available at that time and so I that's kind of some of the work he's doing now which is a lot different similar in style but but much different than what we're seeing with with the images I showed you today and with some of these other things too but anyway I think the world of Tom I will link up to his website and some other resources below if you're interested in more I'll build a Pinterest board and I'll put all those links below in the show notes and as always if you enjoyed this video please remember to like it and as always share it with your friends and subscribe for more videos because we're doing a ton of videos these days and you'll always be up on the latest and greatest hit the subscribe button it helps the channel anyway once again guys this has been another episode of the art of photography I'll see you guys in the next video laterhey everybody Ted Forbes welcome back to the art of photography in this video we're gonna look at the work of Tom Burrell and I think Tom more than anyone else in the world of photography has had the most influence on me personally the first time I saw his work I was really blown away and really drawn to the fact that Tom approaches photography not only as a photographer and as somebody who's making compositions and working in camera but also in the craft that goes into his work in the printing techniques that he uses and Tom was at the forefront of the revival in the late 90s that was going on with a lot of the popularity or resurgence of alternative process photography and he was working in collodion did this beautiful series of work at the Bethlehem Steel mill in Pennsylvania and he's worked in fotografia and he does some amazing outstanding stuff and he's really inspirational to me from those two fronts the simplicity with composition and this beauty of what he's capturing mostly with still lifes or outdoor architectural types of things but bringing that with this sense of craft into actually having this huge range of what he does with printmaking is just stunning and that's what I want to look at today so without further ado we're gonna go over and check out the first book that he did which is just called Tom Borel which was for a long time my holy grail book and I finally found a copy of it a couple years ago and it's still one of my favorites to this day Tom was born in Connecticut went to the School of Visual Arts in New York and spent years as Robert Mapplethorpe sprinter and the two have a similarity and that they both shoot flowers as a subject quite often but that's about where it ends I think they fit really nicely together but you know Tom spent years printing for Mapplethorpe and eventually after maple who passed away went on and to become have a career of his own as a photographer so without further ado let's go check out the work of Tom Burrell before we get too far into this I want to talk a little bit about this book for a minute this is the first monograph of two that have been published on Burrell's work and this one was extremely rare it was done in a limited run of 2,500 copies it was extremely well made and I want to talk about that a little bit because I think it reflects the kind of craftsmanship and quality that Tom has in his own work and I think it's a really special book in that regard this was published by 4ad which was also a record labels most people know that's still around they don't do books anymore I think they did too one of the founders of 480 was a huge photography fan and for whatever reason he really loved Tom Burrell and and this was one of the first books they did it was extremely expensive to make and anyway that's probably why 480 aren't in the book publishing business anymore I finally found my copy after looking for this for several years at an art gallery here in Dallas and this was a display copy that they would use to sell prints to prospective buyers this particular copy had a bent front cover and considering I only had to pay about $40 for it not a big deal for me you can see that the book is cloth bound and which is really nice and then the front cover has an embossed rectangle in the middle that is inlaid with a reproduction of one of Tom's prints and I want to talk about the process and we'll get specific when we get into images in here but you're not going to see any of the collodion work really what this book focuses on is a series of work that Tom did using Polaroid type 55 film and for those of you who are not familiar with type 55 it was one of the one of the more beautiful and interesting films that Polaroid made and it is no longer in production you can still find it used but considering that you can't refrigerate or freeze Polaroid film and and make it last like you can with standard film it's a crapshoot so for all intents and purposes this is a technique that's for the most part instinct right now which is too bad the way Polaroid type 55 worked it was rated at an ISO of 55 so it was very low speed and it came in this pack and I want to talk about because you're gonna see some of these in the images and this is how you can tell it's polar in type 55 it came in a pack you had a special holder that went in the back of the large-format camera and this is about the size of the negative two so that it was a large format four by five and what you would do is you'd put the sleeve into the holder and you pull the sleeve up which would expose the film you would take the picture put the sleeve back down and then this holder had a series of rollers that you would pin down and then you rip it out and what that would do is break the packet that held the chemicals and it would coat the image and you know after a couple minutes you would peel it apart and then you could rinse and fix and it was instant film the interesting thing also about polar head type 55 is it had a positive print and a negative inside that pack so when you would peel it apart it would develop both the prints were okay good to just check your exposure and stuff but the negatives were absolutely gorgeous and the tonality that this film was capable of even at slow speeds I mean it was just really beautiful I used to shoot a lot of type 55 it was not cheap and like I said you can still find out on eBay and stuff I it's a little bit of a gamble and it's gonna be really expensive if you can find it now I just don't think it's worth it anymore I think it's just gone it also had a frame in here and you can usually see some artifacts from the frame and then also sometimes the chemicals would bleed around where the print would stick to the negative and you know it was a contact print is essentially what it made with instant films so it has this kind of it adds to the charm and the vibe of it but you have these these imperfections in the image around the frame borders and that's usually how you can tell it's type 55 and the front here absolutely beautiful picture with this soft focus of the smokestacks of this Factory and I want to get into this a little bit and share with you why this this is so special to me and the forward here explains a little bit of the process of how they did the book and essentially what they did is they made what they call tritone negatives that were created from Tom's prints now Tom's prints are usually tone with T just like you know instant drinking tea and who would make the print actually soak it in tea for you know maybe a minute or two or longer I've done it before it's it's and it adds this beautiful sepia toning to your print and it's just interesting it's done with an organic thing like tea but anyway the way they reproduce this is they made what they call tritone negatives and so typically when you're going to reproduce something they would take the original print and they would make a tritone negative so that meant a three-color negative to make sure you got you know more more richness and more gradiation in the tones and what-have-you and then this was in turn printed on very high quality paper and I mean this book is just stunningly beautiful you're probably not going to pick up on these nuances in the video here but it is absolutely gorgeous the paper is outstanding and the prints look amazing this is more of a handmade feel in some ways then I mean sure there are a lot of well printed books to go to this effort on it is extra-special so I want to get into some of the images now and I'll start with the calla lilies here and I've shown Tom's work on the show before and you may have seen some of these images but what I find interesting too is this is a pretty clean pull on the Polaroid 55 film it doesn't have a lot of imperfections but you do have the borders here and I think it adds to a little making it a little more organic what's interesting too is that Burrell also used a technique of solarization and when you start to have you know Man Ray was really well known for this and several other photographers but you know you have these kind of hard contrast edges and it almost looks like it's starting to be a negative the tones become softer in the midsection as you go to the highlights and this is achieved by exposing the negative to light as it's being developed and I've never done it with type 55 so I don't know exactly how he went out about it but you know you can do this with any film you know the kind of the the speculation is is it was you know invented in the darkroom and somebody accidentally turned on the light before the film was developed and so there's there's techniques it's actually really hard to control it's a little bit random but it has a beautiful effect once you get it going on right and I think that a lot of these images are outstanding that that show off a ball out of that solarization technique you can see it with the with the poppy flower here and also you're gonna see too because flowers are in these still lifes are an important subject to Burrell that you know I'll talk about in a second we get to that section but the influence of Mapplethorpe you know when I talked to Tom once he told me that you know it was strictly a business relationship and he liked Mapplethorpe work but he didn't felt he didn't feel that it influenced him at all I would actually beg to differ a little bit I think that between Carl bloss felt who he does claim as an influence and Mapplethorpe and Burrell sitting somewhere in the middle I think his his pictures have a place and that may not have been a direct influence in the sense that he copies it or tries to look like Mapplethorpe but it I think knowing where Mapplethorpe was with the with the floral shots that he did I think Burrell has created a place in the middle and certainly being very aware of that being his printer you know this is the same image from the cover and again you'll notice that the tones vary a little bit and a lot of that is allowing parts of the process whether it's the toning with tea in some cases of solarization you know there's a little bit of that random organic type thing that comes into image making that I think gives it a lot of character and a lot of soul I think you know in the modern day we're so obsessed with recreating images you know being able to print consistently that we lose a little bit of that soul in that character I've shown this image on the show before but he did a whole bunch of images in New York but a beautiful picture of the Chrysler Building is taken from an empty office you know across the way some beautiful shots that he did in New York of course living up in the Northeast and seeing have stickers in here sold out that was from the printer anyway another shot of the Chrysler Building that's that's gorgeous I love the sky in there in the way it works and Burrell has a beautiful sense for composition and I think what I like the most about his work is that he has a way using composition that starts to bring personality out in the subject that he's shooting you know and I think a case in point would be these sunflowers there's a whole series of these these enormous sunflowers and the way that it really takes up most of the frame and the way to that between you know this one is the the solarization is evident here but it's it's very mild you see it mainly on the on the petals on the bottom right-hand side but again you can kind of see the preparation seam and where the where the frame attached to the 55 and and it really bringing the subject that's that simple just the head of a sunflower and letting it fill the composition like that and take use of the solarization and the tones and a lot of the kind of the analog effects that are applied I think is just outstanding also like this one I've showed some of these sunflowers on the show before but doing you know things that are unconventional like shooting these flowers from behind I think in some ways that Burrell starts to bring in of this one that's wilting they're almost like portraits because there is kind of a personality of the gesture in the flower that he's shooting that comes through and is evident here's one that's a little bit Messier you can see where the sir where was it these roses you can see where the chemicals popped and kind of bled into the picture I love a lot of that I think it just really adds you know kind of a nice throwback feel to it to more of the 19th century techniques but done with you know late 20th century techniques these are great too and we start to see pinholes in here and these are some of my favorites where you know Burrell would do these what he called tabletop pinhole images and they were done on a very basic camera and these pairs it's almost like a group portrait of people or animals or something in the way that he brings that personality through and the beautiful soft focus that the pinhole gives you I think is just outstanding and you don't see something like that you know tabletop photography done with a pinhole and I think it's just very unusual just a gorgeous look to the soft focus and you know the subject matter I think the way he approaches it it's it's meditative in a sense that you know this is I wouldn't consider be minimalism but its minimalist type subjects like a group of pears or flowers or in this case some roll paper that that you know just playing with those compositions and working with those you sent some work with some seashells and of course these also bring back you know to mind some of the work that people like Steichen were doing or edward weston there's a little bit of that influence here as well but but beautiful work and then also there's a bit of an homage in here when you start getting into some of these types of things that Blas belt shot and Karl Blas felt I did show on a long time ago and I'll link it up in the show notes and there certainly was that influence as well of course Blas fell being a botanist and would use these for school another interesting series in here and these are probably some of the more controversial into Burrell's work this is a series called Aviva which I assume is this woman's name but these are series of nudes that he did and what I like about this and what I find interesting about it is that it relates to some of the organic subjects like the flowers or fruits or you know the the tabletop photography but these are done with let's just say a a plus-sized woman and the other thing that I find interesting about this is that you know when you look historically not only in fine art but in commercial work of figure studies and nudes and that's not something we've ever talked about on the show before you know we have kind of this representation particularly well I would say you know you see it the most with females but you get it with men as well where the body becomes objectified and especially with commercial work and fashion it becomes this you know idolized figure that you know for whatever reason sets the standard of what beauty is and I love the fact that Burrell has chosen something that is the opposite of that and created he calls these abstracts but creates these studies out of it that are completely the opposite I guess they do objectifying a sense because at first glance er you don't realize that this is a human figure but it's not the same objectification that we traditionally associate with nude photography anyway there's a whole series of these in here and I think they're they're they're they're beautiful another shot that just a simple shot but I love we're gonna get into the seascapes that Burrell did here and this one is a butterfly on the beach and it's just a simple pinhole image I when I talked to Tom the one time I had an opportunity to do that I did ask him about some of these and you know they they bring to mind some of the seascapes that Sugimoto did but they're much different they're toned differently just the composition is very similar but it's a very different feel to what Burrell was doing with these and you know he said that they're really easy to shoot he did them with a pinhole wanted really long exposures so with a pinhole you have a small aperture this is not type 55 to my knowledge this is kind of a break from what we've been talking about but probably a low film speed and then he said he also used an orange filter and his exposures came out to be about 25 minutes and he said that these were not exactly I think the one I was referring to was this one these were not abandoned beaches he said they were actually people out here but when your exposures that long as long as people are moving and not sitting and walking through some people walking along the beach they're not gonna show up in the exposure but I love because you have this long exposure and the beautiful gradient in the sky there and this becomes so simple you know when we talked about our composition series of episodes then we talked about the use of line and shape and these are just perfect studies for this with this beautiful line and this small shape that comes in with the highlight off of the wave as it's coming in you know as a 25 minute exposure you're going to lose the details and things like water any kind of cloud movement this looks like it was done on a pretty clear day clouds move pretty slow so they'll generally blur out in a composition like that and he's got some beautiful stuff and then like this one's visually nice study to where you have you know similar feel with the beach a little bit of clouds over here and a pole that breaks up the composition it very experimental in some ways but also very minimal and the fact that these elements because of the long exposure are a little bit blurred out and softened in in their feel it becomes just kind of these shape studies or these almost abstracts anyway this is a beautiful book as I said it was limited to about 2,500 copies you can still find it if you look around of course Amazon stuff like that you're gonna find used copies and they're gonna cost a fortune but if you keep your eyes that you'd probably run across it but I did want to share this book with you guys today because it's just one of my favorites this was done with large format camera with with obviously a strong depth of field so everything from pinhole to straight-up photography different manipulations to type 55 the solarization techniques range of subject matter and the way he would incorporate personalities into very simple shapes and organic things like flowers and all I think his work is just outstanding and which is why he is one of my favorite photographers I want to take a second give a shout-out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at audible podcast.com if you're not familiar with audible they are the world's leading provider of audiobooks with over 150,000 titles across all types of literature including fiction nonfiction and periodicals if you go over to their website you will see they have an amazing selection and I'm gonna show you how you can get your first book absolutely free now I've been looking through here lately for some new stuff to read myself this is an excellent way to pass time when you're at the gym or you're commuting and one of the trends that they're you're seeing a lot of these days are kind of these inspirational entrepreneurial type books and of course we had the Walter Isaacson biography on Steve Jobs that came out about a year or two ago and there's a new one that's come out called becoming Steve Jobs the evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader now the Walter Isaacson's book was a pretty much straight up biography and a lot of people felt it was a little bit shallow in some of the hi in the scenes looks at you know what made Steve Jobs Steve Jobs and what made him so successful and what drove him and this book kind of aims to do that by talking to family members you know the inside circle early on at Apple Pixar Disney and there's supposed to be amazing this is on my list if you want to get this book absolutely free I have a special URL for you and if you go over to that URL what you want to do is sign up for the service and you have 30 days to decide if it's right for you or not and if it's not cancel your subscription no hard feelings the first book is yours to keep absolutely free you pay nothing so what you want to do is head over to audible podcast.com slash a opie that is audible podcast.com slash AOP that lets them know I sent you and you're gonna get that first book with your with your trial membership absolutely free and I want to give another special shout out and thanks to the folks at audible for once again sponsoring another episode of the art of photography as I mentioned earlier Tom Burrell is probably my biggest influence and the reason is is because I think he comes out from two sides there's the compositional side and what he's doing with the camera with not minimalism but but creating images where you have a personality and a minimal style of maybe it's a tabletop still life or maybe it's a seascape or something like that that brings your attention in and brings personality out of what he's shooting and that's the first thing I was loved about his work the second thing is his craftsmanship as a printer is extremely inspirational he has an enormous range to what he does he works really in any medium I'll tell you an interesting story about Burrell about 12 years ago I was hell-bent on starting a photography magazine I wanted to do a print publication it's trying to do this myself I was doing freelance design work and photography stuff on the side and this was my passion I want to do this is way before YouTube and all that and of course this is what I'm doing today where did the wise don't try to start a publication in the 21st century you will drive yourself mad but anyway what I was preparing is I wanted to have an initial prototype issue of this magazine to work with that I could use to try to get advertising interest and things like that and so I went ahead and did a couple interviews and I contacted Tom Burrell and I asked him if I could do an interview with him over the phone I took the type up for print and he obliged and I mean I was so nervous on the phone call because this is one of my heroes that I'm talking to and we were talking about the range of stuff that he does and you know as I mentioned in the 90s he was doing a lot of collodion work and a lot of these alternative process things and I mentioned I said you know you're doing location work in collodion which we really didn't look at today we can do that another time but he had done these images of the Bethlehem Steel mill and they were just gorgeous and you know these these just beautiful wet plate process images and I said well how are you doing these because you have to develop those negatives in the field you can't let them dry and he said oh well I have a horse trailer that has a hundred gallon wash water tank in the top and has red windows and it was amazing I mean he's definitely a modern-day Roger Fenton and it's also interesting too because at that time I asked him what he was going to be working on in the future and he seems actually breaking away from a lot of the traditional analog process and he was trying to work with digital and a lot of it was frustration of the materials that were available at that time and so I that's kind of some of the work he's doing now which is a lot different similar in style but but much different than what we're seeing with with the images I showed you today and with some of these other things too but anyway I think the world of Tom I will link up to his website and some other resources below if you're interested in more I'll build a Pinterest board and I'll put all those links below in the show notes and as always if you enjoyed this video please remember to like it and as always share it with your friends and subscribe for more videos because we're doing a ton of videos these days and you'll always be up on the latest and greatest hit the subscribe button it helps the channel anyway once again guys this has been another episode of the art of photography I'll see you guys in the next video later\n"