Good Pictures tracks stylistic changes in popular photography from the nineteenth century until today.  

While Instagram has made it easy to see how quickly trends come and go in photography (I’m looking at you #duckface), photography has always been faddish. The rules for making “good pictures” change rapidly, just as they have ever since the earliest days of the medium. Sometimes a new style saturates the market and people get sick of it, inspiring a backlash, like the #nofilter movement. Sometimes styles return or effects that were once considered accidents of the medium are repurposed as artistic effects, such as motion blur, lens flare, or vignetting.

Good Pictures identifies 50 of these trends that have been popular among photographers of all kinds, whether amateurs or professionals. The book’s 200 full-color illustrations include snapshots, commercial and art photographs, as well as material from vintage how-to manuals. Organized chronologically, each of the short chapters addresses a different stylistic trend, explaining its original appeal and how it was accomplished, as well as the reasons for its eventual decline in popularity. Everyone is a photographer now, making this book not only a comprehensive history of the practice, but also a source of inspiration.

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Watch a talk about Good Pictures, which concentrates on contemporary trends.

Watch another talk about Good Pictures, focusing on 19th-century photographs.

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