This book could not have been called anything else. Stephen Shore takes photographs and very simply talks about just that—the nature of it, without looking into the content of it. In fact, everything in the book is fairly obvious and straightforward, which is why it’s surprising why may never have thought of photographs in such a manner.

For me, this is the best book of photographic composition ever written. Stephen Shore leaves my photography permanently changed.

The title of this entry really should be “If Only I’d Known.” I’m not certain when the first edition of this book was published, but if it was before the winter of 1986, and I had read it along with Shore’s Uncommon Places and American Surfaces at the tender age of 17 while planning the next four years of my life, I think it would have changed the direction of the rest of my life.

Or maybe not. Maybe I would have been too young to appreciate it. But I hope not.

At any rate, I now know so much more about what photography means to me than I did before, and the kind of photography that speaks to me, and the photographs that I am looking to capture from the world around me.