I was looking for some creative inspiration. Dan Winters' description of his photographic journey provided. ( )

I confess that I am completely at a loss to understand why this book has received so many gushing reviews. For instance on Amazon you can read reviews that say it “is not so much a book as it a mentorship,” that it “will become a benchmark in the field of photography literature” and that it is an “illuminating and important contribution to photography.” Most of the reviews give the book 5 stars. I’m baffled.

Let me start by saying that Dan Winters is a gifted photographer and I greatly admire some of his work, particularly his portraits. I’m not totally sold though and one of the things I noticed in seeing so many of his photographs in one volume is that he nearly always puts his subjects, animate or inanimate, right in the middle of the frame. It gets a bit tedious after a while.

As for the text, it is pretty dire. A lot of it reads like something you’d see in a bad self-help book with many uninspiring sentences repeated in capitals as though written by an internet newbie. As for the rest there’s a complete ragbag of seldom connected pieces. One minute he’s being autobiographical, the next he’s telling us about the setup of some of his famous sitters before inserting random articles of things that interest him. There’s also a section on the history of photography which has been written about a million times before and he has nothing new to add. The two sections I did really enjoy were about photographing the space shuttle and a section towards the end on street photography which were actually inspiring. Overall though the book is a mess.

Clearly I’m never going to be as good a photographer as Dan Winters but even if I aspired to be so then this book would be no help whatsoever to me. The philosophy is embarrassingly twee and the book is really a series of essays, some good, some bad. There’s more mentorship, illumination and inspiration on any one page of The Art of Photography by Bruce Barnbaum than there is in this entire book. ( )