The book gathers close readings of some of the books that made the history of the medium: titles, authors and ideas that are always current and that point to new ways of seeing, opening onto new discoveries. Seven essential classics are presented by special readers — scholars and practitioners who took part in a cycle of meetings organised by the Fondazione Forma in Milan. In a series of impassioned conversations, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag and László Moholy-Nagy are read and discussed; Henri Cartier-Bresson and his Images à la sauvette, like William Klein with New York, are taken up by Ferdinando Scianna, while Giovanni Chiaramonte tells of his revealing, startling encounter with Minor White and Mirrors Messages Manifestations. These are books made to be read and read again. What is offered is not a set of formal lectures but a path through ideas, impressions and the recollection of the first time that particular volume was discovered, picked up and leafed through — that mysterious and decisive object which is the book.