Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph

by Jason Fulford (Editor)

At turns humorous and absurd, heartfelt and searching, Photo No-Nos is for photographers of all levels wishing to avoid easy metaphors and to sharpen their visual communication skills.

Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, sometimes even arbitrary. Photo No-Nos features ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world’s most talented photographers and photography professionals, along with an encyclopedic list of more than a thousand taboo subjects compiled from and with pictures by contributors.

Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility. At a time when societies are reckoning with what and how to communicate through media and who has the right to do so, this book is a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.

Genres: Photography, Art, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 13, 2021

About the author

Jason Fulford (born in Atlanta, 1973) is a photographer and cofounder of the non-profit publisher J&L Books. Fulford’s photographs have been featured in Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, Blind Spot, and Aperture magazine. He has published many books of his work, including Raising Frogs for $$$ (2006), The Mushroom Collector (2010), Hotel Oracle (2013), and Picture Summer on Kodak Film (2020), as well as coedited The Photographer’s Playbook (with Gregory Halpern, Aperture, 2014). He is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.

Reviews

[Ben Chant · Rating 5 out of 5]

will be reading this forever, thank u john gossage

[Kevin Bjorke]

should be a mandatory first-year read

suggested. method: select random passages, i-ching style, discuss each in class. Identify the most embarrassed student, ask for new work next session.

[dv · Rating 3 out of 5]

L'idea è speculativamente interessante, il libro non troppo riuscito (copertina a parte). Gli elenchi non approfonditi di cose da non fare non dicono molto, le note commentate spesso sì, ma lo spazio dedicato a ogni artista è troppo poco per rendere la riflessione un materiale di apprendimento (come avviene per esempio in PhotoWork del 2019 e in buona parte anche in The Photographer’s Playbook, sempre curato da Fulford con Halpern - i tre libri insieme compongono una "collana informale" di Aperture). E le foto messe in due blocchi in mezzo al libro, disconnesse dal testo, rendendo scomodo riassociare immagine e spezzone di riferimento.

[Thomas Kyhn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Found this a little disappointing. 1) Rules with no context or explanation (most of the rules in the book, that is) are more or less meaningless. 2) Many of the explanations border on anecdotal chit-chat. 3) The dominance of US issues/perspectives is perhaps to be expected, but less of it would no doubt have resulted in a more interesting book for non-Americans.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was interesting but not what I expected. More of a philosophical approach through brief writings by photographers about things they won't photograph. Many are about why they break their self imposed rules. I expected more how to or examples of bad photos.

[Donald Kratt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the written contributions are a little obscure, but, hey, they are artists. However, I appreciated the shared sentiment of many of them that they have evolved away from certain early constraints they imposed on their photography.

[Jordan Hundelt · Rating 4 out of 5]

hate the title love the contents. feel much less alone as a photographer now