In no particular order: 100 influences

Loose Associations no. 1, The Photographers Gallery, 2015

In 2004 a little gallery in Los Angeles asked me for a list of 100 works of culture that I felt had ‘influenced’ my interest in photography. Influence is a spurious idea. More often than not we don’t really know our influences, but there can be moments of profound recognition or feelings of affinity. Anyway, the 100 list has been republished in Loose Associations no. 1, the journal of The Photographer’s Gallery, London. I haven’t added anything to it since 2004.

In no particular order:

 

1. American Photographs by Walker Evans

2. Mouchette (Dir. Robert Bresson)

3. Betty by Gerhard Richter

4. Kopfe Des Alltags by Helmar Lerski

5. The Long Goodbye (Dir. Robert Altman)

6. The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy Decarava and Langston Hughes

7. Between by Victor Burgin

8. The Thin Red Line (Dir. Terence Malik)

9. Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère by Eduard Manet

10. A Night In London by Bill Brandt

11. Poetics of Cinema by Raul Ruiz

12. La Jetée (Dir. Chris Marker)

13. Hissing of Summer Lawns by Joni Mitchell

14. If I Was Your Girlfriend by Prince

15. Ravel’s (only) String Quartet

16. Film by Samuel Beckett

17. Playtime (Dir. Jacques Tati)

18. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

19. Sound and Vision by David Bowie

20. The Idea of North by Glenn Gould

21. Subversion des Images by Paul Nougé

22. Vertigo (Dir. Alfred Hitchcok)

23. Le Musée Imaginaire de la Sculpture Mondiale by André Malraux

24. Breath on Piano by Gabriel Orozco

25. His Girl Friday (Dir. Howard Hawkes)

26. On Longing by Susan Stewart

27. Dust Breeding by Man Ray And Marcel Duchamp

28. Drowning by Numbers (Dir. Peter Greenaway)

29. A Brighter Summer’s Day (Dir. Edward Yang)

30. Fish Story by Allan Sekula

31. Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

32. Songs to Remember by Scritti Politti

33. Wavelength by Michael Snow

34. Miss America by Mary Margaret O’Hara

35. Revolver by The Beatles

36. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

37. Walkabout (Dir. Nicolas Roeg)

38. Optic Parable by Manuel Álvarez Bravo

39. South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

40. One Way Street by Walter Benjamin

41. Rome by William Klein

42. Fawlty Towers (TV)

43. 8 1/2 (Dir. Federico Fellini)

44. October, issue no. 5., photography special

45. Couldn’t Call it Unexpected No. 4 by Elvis Costello

46. The Look of Love sung by Dusty Springfield

47. Singin’ In The Rain (Dir. Stanley Donen)

48. 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields

49. Cronica Da Casa Assassinada by Tom Jobim

50. Southend Pier

51. Portrait of Peter Exline by Lee Friedlander

52. Local Hero (Dir. Bill Forsythe)

53. Chinatown (Dir. Roman Polanski)

54. 11.02 by Shomei Tomatsu

55. One From the Heart (Dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

56. Some Like It Hot (Dir. Billy Wilder)

57. Barry Lyndon (Dir. Stanley Kubrick)

58. Circles Of Confusion by Hollis Frampton

59. The Dubliners by James Joyce

60. Autobahn by Kraftwerk

61. Desire by Bob Dylan

62. Safe (Dir. Todd Haynes)

63. Sunrise (Dir. Murnau)

64. A Woman Under the Influence (Dir. John Casavettes)

65. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolff

66. Sonatine (Dir. Takeshi Kitano)

67. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

68. A Visit with Magritte by Duane Michals

69. McCabe and Mrs Miller (Dir. Robert Altman)

70. The World Viewed by Stanley Cavell

71. The Flooded Grave by Jeff Wall

72. The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot

73. Repérages by Alain Resnais

74. Untitled Film Stills by Cindy Sherman

75. Portfolio, issues 1, 2 & 3, designed by Alexey Brodovitch

76. Every Building on the Sunset Strip by Edward Ruscha

77. A Matter of Life and Death (Dir. Michael Powell)

78. Man with a Movie Camera (Dir. Dziga Vertov)

79. Capital by Karl Marx

80. London (Dir. Patrick Keiller)

81. Strangers on a Train (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

82. The Optical Unconscious by Rosalind Krauss

83. On Leaving The Movie Theatre by Roland Barthes

84. Charon by James Coleman

85. Photographs of ghost sets by Edward Weston at MGM Studios

86. Scene of the Crime by Ralph Rugoff (Ed.)

87. American Prospects by Joel Sternfeld

88. Women’s Time by Julia Kristeva

89. A Little Knowledge by Scritti Politti

90. Evidence by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel

91. Coldness and Cruelty by Gilles Deleuze

92. Blasted Allegories by Wallis And Tucker (Ed.)

93. Hitchcock: A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut

94. The Temptation to Exist by E.M. Cioran

95. The Red Balloon (Dir. Albert Lamorisse)

96. Issues 3 and 4 of Minotaure magazine

97. Rock Bottom by Robert Wyatt

98. The Day of the Dying Rabbit by John Updike

99. Aperture, issue 10:4 by Frederick Sommer

100. Immemory CD-Rom by Chris Marker

 

This list can be found in Vol.1 of Loose Associations, a new quarterly publication from The Photographers’ Gallery, available from its online bookshop.