I like looking at the work of other photographers almost as much as I like taking photographs. It’s a great way to get inspiration, perhaps try something a little different.

There are lots of different ways to seek out photographers’ work. There’s social media, of course, but sometimes it’s hard to find good work amongst all the clutter in your feed and you can’t really appreciate the image looking at a tiny version of it on your phone.

In any case I am a big fan of printed work, its physicality against the ephemeral nature of a digital image briefly seen on Instagram or similar. This is especially the case if the original was a print, created from a negative in a dark room.

If, like me, you’re lucky enough to live in a place with galleries and museums, you might be able to see prints of photographs in exhibitions. If not, there is an alternative which is not as expensive as you might think.

Buy second hand photo books. Sometimes you can find an eclectic mix of books of photographs in second hand and charity bookshops. It offers a very much less expensive way of buying photobooks.

I am an inveterate browser of second hand and charity bookshops. There is nothing I like more than spending half an hour so looking along the shelves and finding new discoveries.

So here a few of the books I have purchased over the last few years. Each of them were discovered by chance. In some cases I had heard of the photographer but sometimes they were new to me. The key things that drew me to a book were did I like the photographs and did the subject matter resonate. Oh, and was it cheap? None of the books listed here were more than a tenner!

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Linda Connor 1994

Linda Connor is a landscape photographer, active since the 1970s. She has also appeared in another book I have; “Darkroom”, interviews with photographers about their processing and printing techniques, published in 1977.

The photographs in “Luminance” were taken with a 10×8” view camera described by Rebecca Solnit in her introduction, as a “temple of light”. As the title of the book would suggest the photographs are all on the subject of light – daylight, the sun, candlelight – and how it falls on objects, illuminating them, defining them and sometimes hiding them. It is fitting, therefore, that the prints reproduced in the book were themselves created with sunlight, using printing out paper exposed directly to the sun.

This is one of several books I bought in my favourite charity bookshop – the Oxfam shop on Upper Street, Islington. There is a tiny section upstairs devoted to photographic books which I always head to when I have the chance.

I chose this book simply because I loved the beauty of the photographs – the play of light and shade. In her photographs the light falls across deserts, through windows and deep into caverns. I linger over each page and I marvel at the process used to create these images.

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Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, 1981

This is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Arnolfini Art Gallery in Bristol in 1981.

New Topographics was a new way of looking at the landscape. The photographers took a long cool look at their surroundings and created images with neutral tones, in contrast to the work of earlier landscape photographers such as Ansel Adams. The photographers were particularly interested in the human interaction with the landscape and how development was radically altering it. The photographs show empty space save for a trailer park or a half-finished housing development.

The original exhibition had taken place in the mid-1970s at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. New Topographics was the name given to the exhibition, but it became the name of a photographic movement which still has resonances to this day – some of my landscape photographs tip their hat to this particular style.

This purchase has double memories for me. I remember when I bought it in a charity shop in Bristol in the summer of 2025. I was there with family and friends to see a photograph of mine (the Shoeburyness Boom), party of a travelling exhibition organised by the Landscape Group of the Royal Photographic Society. Afterwards we went for a walk around the city and that was when I found the book.

And I remember when I bought it for the first time. It was when I saw that exhibition at the Arnolfini all those years ago. My brother was at the University of Bristol and I was visiting him. This was when I first became interested in photography and I think this might have been one of the first photographic exhibitions I ever went to. Somewhere along the line my earlier copy of the catalogue disappeared so I was so pleased to find it in the Oxfam bookshop in Bristol.

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This is a short collection of the works of the Hungarian photographer, Andre Kertesz, and an essay on his life and career as a photographer. It was published by the Arts Council on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition of his work in 1979.

He was born in 1894 in Budapest and, from an early age, he became interested in photography. For a long time he did not actually have a camera but his time visualising images, composing them in his mind. This method helped him become one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, creating striking images.

My favourite photographs are those taken from overhead of people walking in the street. It is almost as if they are actors on their first mark. The most striking one for me was taken in Japan and shows a line of people walking in the rain with their umbrellas up. Their reflections run ahead of them along the wet road merging with an arrow painted on the street. It is a perfect combination of the objects and lighting, creating a dramatic and dynamic image.

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This is the first of a series of posts on some of the second hand photobooks I have purchased. I hope that you have found it interesting and it encourages you to seek out photographers’ printed work in your local second hand and charity bookshops.

If you discover any interesting ones let me know in the comments below.