Douglas Beasley Photography

ART, WRITING & THE CREATIVE PROCESS
RECOMMENDED MEDIA LIST

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BOOKS:
• Art and Fear, by Bayles and Orland, The Image Continuum
• Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon, Workman Publishing
• The War of Art: Break Through Blocks and Win Inner Creative Battles, Stephen Pressfield

RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON CREATIVITY:
• 101 Things To Learn in Art School, Kit White, MIT Press
• Catching the Big Fish, by filmmaker David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks…)
• The Creative Habit, by choreographer Twila Tharpe
• Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, Leonard Koren, Stone Bridge
• Zen In the Art of Making A Living, Daido John Loori
• Marry Your Muse, Jan Phillips
• The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron
• The Artist’s Tao, Sean Starr
• Zen Brush, Tao Words, Gene Lavon Porter, MA
• The Widening Stream: Seven Stages of Creativity, David Ulrich
• Just Kids, Patti Smith, wonderful book on her tenacity and time with Robert Mapplethorp

RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY:
• The Photographer’s Eye John Szarkowski
• The Mind’s Eye Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs Ansel Adams
• Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilem Flusser
• Why People Photograph, Robert Adams
• On Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams
• On Photography, Susan Sontag
• Letting Go of the Camera, Brooks Jensen, LensWork Publishing
• Ping Pong Conversations, Alec Soth with Francesco Zanot, Contasto

RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON WRITING:
• If You Want To Write, by Brenda Ueland
• Writing Down the Bones, by Zen practitioner Natalie Goldberg

RECOMMENDED PERIODICALS
• The Sun (literary magazine)
• Orion (progressive nature magazine)