We have selected the best of photographer monographs, biographies and artist series. Select a letter to discover our A to Z glossary of must-read monographs and art books:
Stay up-to-date with call for entries, deadlines and other news about exhibitions, galleries, publications, & special events.
1655The transformation of Dior’s mythic Parisian headquarters at 30 Avenue Montaigne as seen through the eyes of Robert Polidori.
Following the reopening of 30 Avenue Montaigne in 2022, this exquisite volume offers a unique look into the metamorphosis of the House of Dior’s legendary Parisian headquarters via images captured by acclaimed photographer Robert Polidori.
For over two years, the iconic hôtel particulierunderwent a radical transformation, during which Polidori was granted exclusive access to the site for the entire duration of the restoration—documenting the original state, the demolition phase, and the reconstruction of Dior’s home. Registering the past, present, and future of the spaces within a single frame, Polidori’s images capture layers of history in extraordinary detail. This impressive iconography offers an extraordinary visual experience recorded in one of the finest pieces of bookmaking, featuring neon printing, hand-tipped images on crystal paper, and a beautiful hemstitched cloth cover for an oversized book with a slipcase.
778Southern wetlands, with their moss-draped trees and dark water obscuring mysteries below, are eerily beautiful places, home to ghost stories and haunting, ethereal light. The newest collection from award-winning photographer Keith Carter, Ghostlight captures the otherwordly spirits of swamps, marshes, bogs, baygalls, bayous, and fens in more than a hundred photographs.
From Ossabaw Island, Georgia, to his home ground of East Texas, Carter seeks “the secretive and mysterious” of this often-overlooked landscape: wisps of fog drifting between tree branches; faceless figures contemplating a bog; owls staring directly at the camera lens; infinite paths leading to unknown parts. Similarly, spectral images are evoked in the original short story that opens this book. Ghostlight, writes best-selling author Bret Anthony Johnston, “hovers, darts, disappears. It can be as mean as a cottonmouth, as mischievous aes a child. The closer you get, the farther the light recedes.” A masterpiece of “Bayou Gothic,” Ghostlight challenges our perceptions and invites us to experience the beauty of this elusive world.
1616enowned portrait photographer Mark Mann documents an impressive host of dancers—their eloquent bodies in posed tranquility and vibrant motion—representing years of excellence and varied disciplines of the art form.
A celebration of the strength and emotive ability of dancers, this book is a collection of images that captures the dynamism and energy of the mediums of both dance and photography. In homage to Mann’s hero Irving Penn, he installed a backdrop of old monochromatic muslin. Dancers from many genres—ballet, jazz, African, tap, Broadway theater, hip-hop, ballroom—perform and discuss their passions about the art form in this stark environment.
Mann captures the humanity and spontaneity of principal and lead dancers from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, Martha Graham Dance Company, New York City Ballet, and many other troupes. Subjects include dance personalities Misty Copeland, Carmen de Lavallade, Tiler Peck, Chita Rivera, James Whiteside, Omari Wiles, Xin Ying, and many others.
As a photographer, Mann is used to working hard at making something happen in his images; here, he has taken a slightly more passive role, witnessing and capturing the expressive and talented subjects that take control of each frame. This book is a testament to the emotional and physical power of each dancer, in stillness and in motion.
1613A poetical portrait of the world of professional sumo wrestling.
The Polish photographer and filmmaker Tomasz Gudzowaty (born 1971) is known for the strong sense of perfection in his work―clear compositions, precisely chosen image frames, carefully considered down to the last detail. In Sumo, a photographic tribute to the Japanese national sport, Gudzowaty confronts his subject with the rebellious aesthetic of are-bure-bokeh, which means “rough, blurred, out of focus.” This visual style developed in Japan in the 1960s as a countercurrent to the prevailing aesthetic norm of photojournalism. In this latest series, Gudzowaty photographs not only the wrestlers in the throes of combat, but also life within the training stables where these young men live, eat and sleep together. The result is an extension of Gudzowaty’s previous documentary work, and a stunning black-and-white portrait of a remarkable sport within a society strongly shaped by both tradition and modernity.
1584The street life and political tensions of Tod Papageorge’s late 1960s New York, in a two-volume clothbound presentation.
This publication comprises two books of pictures Papageorge made after moving to Manhattan as a young man. As different as they are from one another―each book advances a distinct argument supporting Papageorge’s belief in photographic “fiction-making”―together they amount to a comprehensive portrait of an uneasy city during a grim, fevered time.
Down to the City follows (and ironically twists) the first sentences of Plato’s Republic, threading phrases from Socrates’ description of a religious festival through a stream of pictures seized in Manhattan’s secular streets. This novel-like flow builds the sense of a place haunted by dystopian disorder, which is amplified late in the book when the war in Vietnam takes center stage, clarifying the tensions leading to that moment.
The Dear Common Round traces a softer arc. Here the actions and exchanges that a city’s people make in the streets thousands of times a day are photographically honored simply and directly, as if the style of picture-making, at least initially in the book, had reverted to the first days of hand-camera photography. This changes as the sequence progresses, but for all its increasing visual and narrative complexity, The Dear Common Round holds true to the promise of its opening: this is a city sweet, if serious, at its heart, built to belong to and cherish.
Weird, weirder, weirdest. New works from the sports universe of Sol Neelman.
In this third volume of his series Weird Sports, Sol Neelman revisits the joy and community surrounding people’s love of nontraditional sports. They include surreal competitions like: Barbie Jeep racing, log riding, redneck shing, medieval rugby, cheese rolling, lightsaber fencing, mochi lifting, and live monster wrestling. Many of these events are more performance art than competitive sport, a celebration where a participation trophy is the ultimate medal of excellence. All Weird Sports aim to achieve the same goal: bring together like-minded, creative, and active humans, often in costume and usually with cheap beer in hand.
As it so happens, this photo collection wraps up right at the very start of the pandemic, creating an unintentional time capsule of life and laughter before the world came to a halt.
Belgian photographer Bastiaan van Aarle (born 1988) captures the ever-changing landscape of mountains, transformed by light, time and the planet’s constant rotation. Experimenting with different techniques, van Aarle explores the boundaries of photography, its medium-specific properties and how they relate to the perception of reality.
A cinematic meditation on how physical settings and realities are shaped by fictional and popular narratives.
Spanish photographer Mikel Bastida (born 1982) makes staged photographs inspired by cinema and history. In this latest photobook he constructs a new vision of the United States through cinematic references such as the ghost town in Archer County, Texas, from Bogdanovich’s film adaptation of The Last Picture Show by McMurtry.
By Michael Kenna, Chantal Colleu-Dumond, Françoise Reynaud
Publisher : Skira Paris
2023 | 176 pages
51Ethereal black-and-white treescapes from a master of long-exposure photography.
Published to accompany the eponymous exhibition at Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire in France, this catalog gathers a stunning selection of photographs of trees by English-born, Seattle-based photographer Michael Kenna (born 1954). For over 40 years, Kenna has been traveling around the world with his camera immortalizing trees and forests in his signature ethereal lighting, which he achieves by working in the early morning and late-night hours, and through his use of extremely long exposure times, often lasting up to 10 hours. Captured exclusively in black and white, these idyllic images are divorced from both seasonal and geographical context, emphasizing the diversity and plurality of the photographed specimens. On rare occasions, the existence of human civilizations peeks through in his work: some road sections, buildings, fences and stakes or, more surprisingly, slippers, constitute the only traces of human presence.
This flattening of setting and simplification of subject allows us to reimagine the colors that are traditionally associated with trees and focus on the interaction between the opaque, delicate black of their branches and the fleecy light that filters through them, generating the wonderful atmospheric effect so distinctive to Kenna’s photography.
By Edward Burtynsky, Deborah Bräutigam, Raffi Khatchadourian, Christopher Littlewood, Marc Mayer, Azu Nwagbogu
Publisher : Steidl
2023 | 208 pages
62An unsettling seven-year chronicle of severe resource depletion across Africa.
In Edward Burtynsky’s recent photographs, produced across the African continent, the patterns and scars of human-altered landscapes initially appear to form an abstract painterly language; they reference the sublime and often surreal qualities of human mark-making. While chronicling the major themes of terraforming and extraction, urbanization and deforestation, African Studies conveys the unsettling reality of sweeping resource depletion on both a human and industrial scale.
From natural landscapes to artisanal mining and mechanized extraction, several distinct chapters culminate with China in Africa: a series depicting the economic inroads being made by China, including the interiors of gigantic newly built manufacturing plants. This project brings together the work of seven years, the latest installment in Burtynsky’s ongoing oeuvre.
By Sarah Moon, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Olivier Saillard
Publisher : Delpire & Co
2023 | 240 pages
50An epic visual history of Dior by one of France’s most iconic fashion photographers.
This three-volume publication explores three distinct phases in the history of the legendary French fashion house founded in 1946. The first volume presents 33 black-and-white images of Dior’s original designs, staged by French photographer Sarah Moon at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris during the summer of 2021. It interweaves almost abstract photographs of the Fondation with vivid portrayals of the models. The second volume contains 43 images documenting a selection of garments designed by the various artistic directors of Dior between 1958 and 2015: Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano and Raf Simons. The third and final volume presents 38 photographs taken since the arrival of Dior’s current artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri.
Sarah Moon (born 1941) grew up between France and England. As a young woman, she started working as a model which plunged her into the world of fashion, a world that would later propel her toward photography, which became her ultimate passion. By 1970, she had devoted herself exclusively to photography and her work was published in numerous magazines. Robert Delpire hired her to make photographs for his advertising agency and they subsequently became lifelong romantic partners. Moon is famous for her blurred aesthetic, use of Polaroids, halftone photos and erasure of faces.
770Separated into four parts, Ballenesque takes readers on a visual, chronological journey through Roger Ballen’s entire oeuvre, including both iconic images and previously unpublished photographs. Part I explores his formative artistic influences and his later rediscovery of boyhood through photography, culminating in his first published monograph, Boyhood, in 1979. Part II then charts the period between 1980 and 2000, during which time his deeper search for the elemental self found its way into the ‘Dorps’, or small towns, of South Africa and concluding with the release of his seminal monograph Outland. Part III covers the years 2000–2013, when Ballen achieved global recogition with Shadow Chamber and Boarding House and his work began to veer away from portraiture altogether. Finally, in Part IV, Ballen reflects upon his career in its entirety.
With over 300 photographs and an introduction by eminent academic Robert J. C. Young, this book provides both an entirely new way of seeing Ballen’s work for those who already follow his career and a comprehensive introduction for those encountering his photographs for the first time.
1645In 1943, Roy Stryker, the head of the Department of Defense's Office of War Information sent Esther Bubley on a series of bus trips throughout the Midwest and South. Her assignment? To document the role that the nation's bus lines played not only in mobilizing troops and war workers, but also in providing transportation between cities for individuals who could not do so under wartime rationing.
Bubley would go on to contribute 40 photo essays to Life, and in her first major assignment, her skill at capturing the wide range of human experience is already on display.
This book features over 140 photographs by Bubley arranged into three chapters.
1629Byker is an intimate portrait of a community faced with redevelopment.
When Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen came to the North East of England in 1969 as a founder member of Amber, she set up home in Byker, a working class part of Newcastle upon Tyne. As she began to document the terraced community, she became aware of the plans for its demolition, to make way for the building of the Byker Wall, designed by architect Ralph Erskine.
This lent urgency to her work, which continued over until the early 1980s and the completion of the new estate.
In 1981 Amber began work on the film. Drawing on Sirkka’s images and interviews, on documentary footage and dramatisation, it evokes an entire era in British working class life.
1238Bruce Gilden has never taken a break from his photography... Except once, in that miserable spring of 2020 when the first Covid attack took us prisoners. Stuck upstate New York with no assistant, and left with his Leica, his wife and a car, ‘lockdowned’ Bruce was going nuts. Late May, after the death of George Floyd, History came to the rescue with the massive protests springing out all over New York City. Bruce went to explore, driving back and forth to war zone Brooklyn and walking miles and miles on the street in pursuit of the rallies. Until one special day in early June at Barclays Center when the story of Bruce and the Bikers took off. Bruce found himself caught right in the middle of a loud and spectacular crowd of bikers, predominantly Black. He had just landed in a ride-out prayer for George Floyd called by the mysterious ‘Circuit’, as New York’s Black motorbike community nickname their huge network and its numerous social affairs. After that, Bruce had only one idea in mind: “Find the Bikers...” And so began a relationship that continues to this day. Determined to explore the real ‘Bike life’ of this unknown and often feared community, Bruce embarked on the social itinerary of the MC ‘Circuit”, photographing tirelessly in and out and beyond New York at the events where the family of riders meet. By the end of the summer, the Bikers had a nickname for Bruce – they called him ‘Everywhere’. Now that he’s a regular on the Circuit, with many good friends within the community, that’s changed to ‘OG’ (Old Guard) or simply ‘Bro’.
560Misr is the Arabic name for Egypt. Since 1992, Denis Dailleux has been tirelessly photographing this country, taking an interest in both the bustle of Cairo and the tranquility of Upper and Lower Egypt. His total immersion - he lived in Cairo for many years - allowed him to have access to scenes of daily life, in the street, in cafes or on the banks of the Nile, at family or religious celebrations, but also in the intimate sphere of the Egyptians that he was able to capture with a powerful and generous aesthetic. This book brings together Denis Dailleux's most emblematic photographs of Egypt and unpublished images rediscovered for the occasion. A valuable account of popular Egyptian culture, it is accompanied by texts by Christian Caujolle and Ahmed Naji.
1245"Since 2014, Alessandra Sanguinetti has been returning to the small town of Black River Falls in Wisconsin, creating the photographs that would come to form the stark and elliptical series Some Say Ice. The same town is the subject of Wisconsin Death Trip, a book of photographs taken by Charles Van Schaick in the late 1800s documenting the bleak hardships of the lives and deaths of its inhabitants. Sanguinetti first came across this book as a child, and the experience is engraved into her memory as her first reckoning with mortality. This encounter eventually led her to explore the strange relationship of photography and death, and ultimately to make her own visits to Black River Falls. The austere, sculptural scenes and ambiguous, uneasy portraits that make up Some Say Ice depict a place almost outside of time. Presented unadorned by text or explication, the photographs are touched with the spirit of the gothic as well as the unmistakable tenderness familiar from Sanguinetti’s series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda. By bringing undercurrents of doubt and darkness to the surface of her images, Sanguinetti alludes to things absent or invisible, playing on atmospheres both real and imagined, as well as the ghostly possibility of undoing death through the act of photography. With its title inspired by Robert Frost’s famous poem equivocating on how best one’s inevitable death might be met, Some Say Ice is a humane look at the melancholic realities underpinning our lives, seen with glacial clarity by one of the world’s foremost photographers."
9In 1973, Michael Lesy was a young scholar whose first book had just been published. In the soon-legendary Wisconsin Death Trip he combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a devastatingly tragic epoch, the real-world antithesis of the fanciful "Gay Nineties." It startled readers then and remains a touchstone of modern photographic interpretation.
That year Lesy met and became close friends with the great photographer Walker Evans, who in the 1930s had collaborated with writer James Agee to create another towering landmark in the American photo-essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Old, frail, with just two years left to live, Evans was still urgently and obsessively photographing. "Outside the rooms he inhabited," Lesy writes, "the world was scattered with objects on their way to oblivion. He photographed them in their passage." Brief as their friendship was, it was intense and rewarding. Each admired the other; each saw himself reflected in the other: aesthetic visionaries who shared a radical belief that photographs were not flat and static documents—that "the plain truth of the images . . . wasn’t as plain as it seemed," Lesy explains. "Meanings, beliefs, and emotions lay crisscrossed under the surface of the most plainspoken photographs." Throughout his career in the classroom and in more than a dozen books, Lesy has continually inspired us to open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to those many layers of meaning and feeling in photos, from seemingly ordinary snapshots to majestic landscapes.
In this unconventional, lyrical biography, Lesy traces Evans’s intimate, idiosyncratic relationships with men and women—the circle of friends who made Walker Evans who he was. "Wonder and scrutiny produced the portraits Walker made in his prime," Lesy writes. Evans’s photographs of Agee, Berenice Abbott, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Lesy’s telling of Evans’s life stories.
877
Father and son collaborate on a photographic panorama of humanity
Famed photojournalist Steve Schapiro (1934–2022) and his son Theophilus Donoghue (born 1982) have collaborated on a photo project that is 70% Schapiro, 30% Donoghue. Seventy Thirty depicts the various faces and expressions of humanity, from metropolitans to migrants, homeless people to conspicuous celebrities such as Alec Guinness, Allen Ginsberg, Muhammad Ali, Robert De Niro, René Magritte, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol. Schapiro photographs early New York skateboarders while Donoghue documents current Colombian breakdancers. Schapiro includes his classic photograph Man on Iceberg, which was the opening spread of a Life story on existentialism. Similarly, Donoghue contributes his contemplative photograph Hindsight Intersection, recently featured in ARTSY’s 20 21 Artists in Support of Human Rights Watch benefit auction. Shooting in monochrome with an occasional dash of color, Schapiro and Donoghue portray the proud and lofty as well as the humble and humorous.
1614Fifty years of portraying American lives and landscapes, from the New Topographics veteran and author of The Brown Sisters.
American photographer Nicholas Nixon (born 1947) is famed internationally for his large-format black-and-white photographs of intimate everyday moments. His first solo exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski, was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. Nixon’s early depictions of Boston and New York in the mid-1970s were featured in one of the most influential exhibitions of that decade, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in Rochester. He is also famed for his series People with AIDS, begun in 1987. For his most iconic series, The Brown Sisters, he created an annual portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters, consistently posed in the same left to right order, as they grew and aged over nearly a half century. His oeuvre, however, encompasses a much broader spectrum, from his documentation of life in the American South to his landscape portraits of the rough industrial terrains around Detroit. Nicholas Nixon: Closing the Distance takes us on a journey through the artist’s life and work―at once distant and intimate and close―and features new, previously unpublished photographs.
By Martín Chambi, Jan Mulder, Horacio Fernández, Andrés Garay
Publisher : RM
2022 | 192 pages
1611Chambi’s chronicles of Andean life and Inca ruins highlight Peru’s emerging Indigenous discourse.
Of Indigenous origin, Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi (1891–1973) dedicated a large part of his life to photographing the Peruvian Andes, reclaiming the pre-Hispanic past through images of Inca ruins and portraits of life in Andean communities in the early 20th century. Chambi’s work brings a new perspective to photography of the time, highlighting the emerging Indigenous discourse that was starting to gain force in South America. While he was not the first to photograph Machu Picchu, Chambi was among the first Peruvian chroniclers of the Inca citadel. Drawing on Machu Picchu’s geometric forms, Chambi’s work entered a new phase in which shape, space and texture build toward more complex compositions and starker contrasts, making him an emblem of contemporary documentary photography in Peru and Latin America. This gorgeous clothbound volume compiles 170 of Chambi’s black-and-white images.
1608Like 17th-century Dutch painters who made otherwise ordinary interior scenes appear charged with meaning, Pennsylvania-based photographer Jessica Todd Harper (born 1975) looks for the value in everyday moments. The characters in her imagery are the people around her―friends, herself, family―but it is not so much they who are important as the way in which they are organized and lit by Harper. A woman helping her child practice the piano is not a particularly sacred moment, but as in a Vermeer painting, the way the composition and lighting influence the content suggests that perhaps it is.
This collection of photographs presented in Harper's third monograph makes use of what is right in front of the artist, what is here, a place that many of us came to contemplate especially during the pandemic. Beauty, goodness and truth can reveal themselves in daily life, as in the Dutch paintings of everyday domestic scenes that are somehow lit up with mysterious import. Harper shows how our unexamined or even seemingly dull surroundings can sometimes be illuminating.
TBW Books is pleased to present River’s Dream, the latest monograph by Curran Hatleberg and a complete realization of the series exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Hatleberg is known for traveling America, guided by intuition, to create scenes of American life and landscape. Working collaboratively with the people he meets, he recounts intimate stories of family and community. Here, in the follow-up to his first monograph Lost Coast (TBW Books, 2016), Hatleberg centers his narrative on the dog days of summer. Sweltering heat, dripping humidity, lush vegetation, and screaming insects– River’s Dream is a pulsing and episodic hallucination of life lived outdoors. In these sixty-five photographs, we move through swamps and groves, front yards and junkyards, encountering moments of haunting mystery and beautiful impermanence. Heightened by formal repetition, echo, and refrain, everyday scenes take on surreal, allegorical qualities. In the end, Hatleberg leaves us with the impression of memory, where the past is never gone, but appears and reappears endlessly, as in the flickering of a dream. This book includes new texts by Natasaha Trethewey and Joy Williams commissioned for the publication.
770An expanded edition of Ballen’s debut photobook―a charming homage to the spirit of boyhood around the world.
This new and expanded edition of Roger Ballen’s (born 1950) widely acclaimed 1979 debut photobook Boyhood, admired by André Kertesz, Bruce Davidson and Elliott Erwitt, features new and unpublished images taken by the photographer in the 1970s.
In photographs and stories, Ballen leads us across the continents of Europe, Asia and North America in search of boyhood: boyhood as it is lived in the Himalayas of Nepal, the islands of Indonesia, the provinces of China, the streets of America. Each stunning black-and-white photograph―culled from 15,000 images shot during Ballen’s four-year quest―depicts the magic of boys revealed in their games, their adventures, their dreams, their mischief.
More of an ode than a documentary work, Ballen’s first book is as powerful and current today as it was 43 years ago―a stunning series of timeless images that transcend social and cultural particularities.
1596A visual homage to Nantucket, photos blk / white.Square format. 1st printing, limited edition to 1000 copies, stated.
"When I look about Nantucket I see everywhere photographs already half made. It is the nature of this island to be kind to photographers, especially those making black and white photographs like the ones in this book that I have made over almost a quarter century. Returning whalers called Nantucket “The Little Grey Lady of the Sea,” no doubt because of the combination of frequent fog and the ubiquitous grey cedar shingles. Often she appears to the eye with little or no color, like a monochromatic photograph waiting to happen.
In making the photographs in this book I have been inspired by the unique architectural tradition of Nantucket. Although I have not documented each style of architecture represented on the island, I have use elements of those styles as the building blocks for these photographs. Taken as a whole, the architecture of Nantucket is simple and geometric. Even the more flamboyant styles of the past, like the Victorian vernacular and Second Empire, take on a reserved quality on Nantucket. This may be the ongoing influence on the island of one hundred years of Quaker severity and emphasis on simple utility. The spareness -- even austerity -- in some of these photographs is my attempt to evoke that tradition and use it expressively. Today the traditional spareness of Nantucket architecture is being “dressed up.” There are more trees, more gardens, more sculpted privet hedges than ever before. Houses are being lovingly and lavishly restored and maintained. Sometimes this “dressing up” goes too far, becoming sentimental or ostentatious. Yet the spare geometry of Nantucket architecture endures, in part, because of an enlightened building code that is preserving much of the authenticity of the island, and because of a general awareness that Nantucket is a place like no other and therefore one well worth protecting." -- Gregory Spaid
1585LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint Is Family in Three Acts chronicles the ongoing manmade water crisis in Flint, Michigan, from the perspective of those who live and fight for their right to access free, clean water. Featuring photographs, texts, poems and interviews made in collaboration with Flint’s residents, this five-year body of work, begun in 2016, serves as an intervention and alternative to mass media accounts of this political, economic and racial injustice.
In 2014, as a cost-cutting measure, the Flint City Council switched the town’s water supply from a Detroit treatment facility to the industrial-waste-filled Flint River. Forced to use water contaminated with lead at 27 times the government’s maximum threshold, Flint’s citizens―predominantly Black and overwhelmingly poor―fell ill almost immediately and many battle chronic medical conditions as a result.
Frazier first traveled to Flint in 2016, as part of a magazine commission to create a photo essay about the water crisis. During that trip she met Shea Cobb, a Flint poet, activist and mother who became Frazier’s collaborator. Divided into three acts, the book follows Cobb as she fights for her family’s and community’s health and well-being. Act I introduces Cobb, her family and their community. Act II follows Cobb and her daughter Zion to Newton, Mississippi, where they move in with Cobb’s father, Douglas R. Smiley, and learn to take care of family-owned land and horses. Act III documents the arrival of an atmospheric water generator to Flint that Frazier, Cobb and her best friend, Amber Hasan, helped set up and operate in their neighborhood.
Spurred by the lack of mass-media interest in this ongoing crisis, Frazier’s approach ensures that the lives and voices of Flint’s residents are seen and heard. Flint Is Family in Three Acts is a 21st-century survey of the American landscape that reveals the persistent segregation and racism which haunts it. It is also a story of a community’s strength, pride and resilience in the face of a crisis that continues.
850German photographer Ilse Bing (1899-1998) has secured her place as one of the major photographers of the 20th century. Her pioneering images during the inter-war era reveal a modern vision influenced by the impact of both the Bauhaus and Surrealism. Alongside her personal work she produced images in the fields of photojournalism, architectural photography, advertising and fashion, and her work was published in the major magazines of the period and exhibited in France and Germany. She moved from Frankfurt to Paris in 1931 but when the city was taken by the Germans during World War II she and her husband, who were both Jews, were expelled and interned in the South of France. They emigrated to New York in 1941 and she lived there until her death in 1998. Since the 1970s when she first exhibited at MOMA, New York, there has been a burgeoning interest in her work and, more generally, in European photography of the 1920s and 1930s. As one of the key creative forces of the period, Bing becam
On January 9, 1974, Joseph Beuys (1921–86), together with Klaus Staeck and Gerhard Steidl, traveled for the first time to America. This trip was a carefully planned performance that took place in airplanes, taxis, hotels, universities and galleries, and was comprehensively documented in photographs and video. The tour began with a lecture at New York’s New School, visited by artists including Claes Oldenburg, Lil Picard and Al Hansen; the next stop was Chicago, the site of more controversial lectures and an unexpected performance reenacting the death of John Dillinger; then Minneapolis, with more conferences and discussions.
Upon returning to Germany, the hundreds of photographs and many hours of videotape were assembled, but it was only in October 1985, shortly before his death, that Beuys finalized the sequence for the book. Originally published in 1987, this new Steidl edition has been wholly reconceived by Klaus Staeck and Gerhard Steidl.
Teshima is one of the 28 islands of the Shiwaku Islands in Japan. In former times the island has been famous for its navy, and the island’s shipbuilding and ship handling skills were valued and played a major role in maritime distribution.
Today, there are only a dozen or so islanders living on Teshima. The terraced fields that once covered the mountains have been swallowed up by bamboo forest, including the stone walls that had been left. The island’s last fisherman passed away at the end of last year, and his fishing boat remains tied up in the harbor, swaying in the waves. Listening to the island’s quiet sleep without disturbing it will lead us to face the present situation of Japan as an island nation.
Kentaro Kumon (b. 1981) is active in a wide range of fields, including magazines, books, and advertising. In 2012, he was awarded the Photographic Society of Japan’s Newcomer’s Award.
1627In a visual journey of poetic images, the photographer examines how living with Parkinson’s disease has changed her view of the world. Through the process, she commits to a more optimistic perspective.
After discovering that she had Parkinson’s disease, Torrance York focused her camera on the challenge to integrate this life-altering information into her sense of self. In Semaphore, York presents photographs of nature, the human body, medical images, details from daily life, and of light, to speak metaphorically about her shift in perspective post diagnosis. Plunged into an experience often described as dark or isolating, York surfaces with quiet, generous and luminous images that bare human vulnerability, while inspiring optimism and connection. Over ten million people worldwide are living with Parkinson’s disease. While this book is relevant to the Parkinson’s community, it connects with others whose journeys require growth, patience, and perseverance to move forward.
By Jamel Shabazz, Peter W Kunhardt Jr, Michal Raz-Russo
Publisher : Steidl
2022 | 240 pages
Photo albums from the archives of the iconic chronicler of New York's 1980s rap, hip-hop and Black culture.
The influential Brooklyn-based photographer Jamel Shabazz has been making portraits of New Yorkers for more than 40 years, creating an archive of cultural shifts and struggles across the city. His portraits of different communities underscore the street as a space for self-presentation, whether through fashion or pose. In every instance Shabazz aims, in his words, to represent individuals and communities with “honor and dignity.” This book―awarded the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize―presents, for the first time, Shabazz’s work from the 1970s to ’90s as it exists in his archive: small prints thematically grouped and sequenced in traditional family photo albums that function as portable portfolios.
Shabazz began making portraits in the mid-1970s in Brooklyn, Queens, the West Village and Harlem. His camera was also at his side while working as an officer at Rikers Island in the 1980s, where he took portraits of inmates. This book features selections from over a dozen albums, many previously unseen, and includes his earliest photographs as well as images taken inside Rikers Island, all accompanied by essays that situate Shabazz’s work within the broader history of photography.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Jamel Shabazz (born 1960) picked up his first camera at the age of 15 and began documenting his communities, inspired by photographers such as Leonard Freed, James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including those at the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Shabazz is the author of Back in the Days (2001) and Sights in the City (2017).
An unprecedented picture of Egyptian society through the eyes of a longtime Cairo resident.
Nigerian-Iraqi photographer Yasser Alwan (born 1964) has lived in Cairo for over 25 years. This volume presents a comprehensive selection of his work documenting the city’s landscape, as well as his portraits of Cairo residents, from the deeply impoverished to the comfortably middle class.
Sumptuous photograms and more investigating the formal properties of the natural world.
This fourth monograph on the New York– and Costa Rica–based photographer, sculptor and video artist Ann Mandelbaum (born 1945) presents both analog black-and-white work from 1990 to 2000 and also digital color images from 2007 to the present. None of the 100 works published here have been exhibited or published previously.
The 35-year span of the volume reveals Mandelbaum’s consistent obsession with the organic world, processed at first through the depths of the darkroom and subsequently on the digital screen. Her techniques draw on the history of photographic innovation, including the photogram and multiple printing. Throughout, Surrealist photographic vocabularies deploying sculpture, collage and the language of drawing can be detected.
1584A New York idyll: Papageorge’s portrait of Central Park as modern Arcadia, back in print.
Tod Papageorge (born 1940) started photographing intensely in New York’s Central Park in the late 1970s and continued working there until he moved from the city in the early 1990s. More than ten years later, he edited these pictures into a book which, in its marriage of the sensual and poetic, evokes the prelapsarian Eden suggested by its title.
This reissue of Passing Through Eden duplicates the first 2007 edition in its entirety, including Papageorge’s thoughtful essay on the evolution of his photography and its basis in his early attempts to write poetry. His essay further describes how the first half of the book follows the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, from the Creation through the (metaphorical) generations that follow Cain, suggesting how, even in the heart of a modern city, we might find echoes of elemental Biblical tales being acted out around us by those drawn into the park and its promise of beauty and peace. This section of Passing Through Eden then leads to a run of pictures confirming that the human comedy is equally alive and well in the park, even as its landscape―delightful and wild―retakes center stage to end the book.
1584A new edition of Papageorge’s 2017 photobook with enlarged images and a fresh layout.
Tod Papageorge (born 1940) produced the photographs for Dr. Blankman’s New York in 1966–67, on the heels of moving into the city. Photographer friends persuaded him that he could help pay the rent by landing some magazine assignments, and that a carousel tray of slides would be the best way of convincing art directors to take a chance on him. So, often after spending a day in the streets photographing in black and white, he would put a roll of Kodachrome film in his camera on his walk home and make color pictures, in many cases of shop windows.
This reissue of Dr. Blankman’s New York, first published by Steidl in 2017, has enlarged the size of the plates and, with one exception, condensed the original design to a series of double spreads, intensifying the sense that what Papageorge was doing in these photographs was elaborating, on a parallel track, the portrayal of Manhattan presented in the black-and-white work of Down to the City, the first volume of his War and Peace in New York (also published by Steidl).
1346A legendary musician’s intimate vision of a great photographer’s profound, exquisitely somber oeuvre.
Bringing together the sensibilities of two remarkable artists, Peter Hujar Curated by Elton John provides striking proof of how one artist’s eye can shed light on another. Though known worldwide as one of the most revered performers of our era, Elton John is also a seasoned collector of photographs, with an acute and personal understanding of Hujar’s achievement.
Through a selection of 50 photographs, the book presents a wide-ranging survey of Hujar's career. John writes: “Hujar's humanity, depth and sensual insights aren't for everyone, and don't need to be, but once his pictures get into your bloodstream they are impossible to shake.” The publication includes works spanning nearly two decades, featuring portraits of Hujar's eclectic circle of friends, his landmark nudes, atmospheric landscapes, portraits of performers (Stevie Wonder, Peggy Lee and Edgar Winter) and a moving image of the artist with his mother.
Peter Hujar (1934–87) was born in Trenton, New Jersey and moved to Manhattan to work in the magazine, advertising and fashion industries. He documented the vibrant cultural scene in downtown New York throughout the 1970s and 1980s, photographing artists, musicians, writers and performers. Hujar died of AIDS in 1987.
Elton John (born 1947) is one of the most enduringly successful solo artists of all time. In 1992 he founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which funds programs to end the AIDS epidemic. Since the 1990s he has avidly collected photography. In 2016, Tate Modern organized the exhibition The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection.
By Gabriele Basilico, Filippo Maggia, Luca Molinari
Publisher : Skira
2022 | 159 pages
312Previously unpublished city scenes from the postwar Italian photographer.
This beautiful photobook collects 131 photographs produced by Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico (1944–2013) over the course of his career, from the late 1980s to the 2000s―most previously unpublished. It focuses on Basilico’s depictions of architectural space.
Alpine and architectural depictions from the revered Italian photographer.
This book covers the last 20 years of work by the leading Italian photographer Walter Niedermayr (born 1952). In the recurring themes of his work, such as Alpine landscapes, architecture and the relationship between public and private spaces, the artist’s interest in the geographical and the social is highlighted.
By Mario Testino, Carolina Herrera, Riccardo Lanza
Publisher : Taschen
2022 | 248 pages
153In I Love You, Mario Testino presents a celebration of weddings. A beginning in life ―that is also a culmination and a public promise – captured by a unique photographic point of view which shows beauty not only in emotion and tradition, but in the complete intimacy of shared joy.
Featuring essays by the illustrious fashion designer Carolina Herrera and party expert Riccardo Lanza, the book traces Testino’s memories of many iconic moments and many unknown ones, captured in the privacy of close friendship and family. Unparalleled access unveils the secret, the tender, the wild and the festive of such celebrations, some of which can be considered the most talked-about unions of the past four decades.
I Love You is a homage to weddings and to everything they comprise. A love declaration and a glimpse into the heart of brides getting ready, special rites among friends, the zest of extraordinary parties. Every image showing the unique fantasies of a life to start anew.
Courtney-Clarke’s three-volume photographic research into the creative spirit and harsh lives of women in modern-day Africa, with a fourth volume of commentary on the acclaimed series.
This collection summarizes Margaret Courtney-Clarke’s (born 1949) 15-year journey, from 1979 to 1994, across South, West and North Africa to capture the artistic traditions of rural women through photographs, sketches and written observations.
Originally published in three separate books between 1986 and 1996, these photographs have been widely exhibited, becoming influential for their nuanced treatment of identities shaped by both tradition and colonization. The Art of African Women presents the books Ndebele, African Canvas and Imazighen, reedited by Courtney-Clarke and redesigned, alongside a fourth volume of writings by Maya Angelou, Geraldine Brooks, David Goldblatt and Sean O’Toole, encompassing history, politics, sociology, anthropology and art history, as well as pages from Courtney-Clarke’s travel journals, her book layouts and snapshots.
1579Paris’ photographic chronicle of a 1980s factory remains one of her foremost accomplishments.
In 1984, the German photographer Helga Paris (born 1938) spent several weeks at a state-owned clothing factory, during which time she shot more than 1,500 photographs. From these she selected the 49 powerful images that make up the series Women at the Clothing Factory VEB Treff-Modelle Berlin. These photographs capture her subjects engaged in their work or taking cigarette breaks, conveying the serenity and beauty of the sitters in their brief moments of tranquility amid the factory environment.
Helga Paris: Women at Work collects the entire series and gathers it in a format that is affordable to a wider audience. This beautifully designed volume features a linen-bound printed cover with embossed text.
A photographic encyclopedia of Western female hairstyles across the ages.
In The Hunt, London-based French photographer Céline Bodin (born 1990) creates a concise survey of female hairstyles across various periods in time, within the framework of Western culture. The series reflects upon the pictorial qualities of hair: studying its materiality and its ability to convey identity, while also recalling the Victorian “hair medallion”―a small, decorative keepsake made from an ornate curl of a loved one's hair, a pre-photographic memento that draws connections between portraiture, identity and memory.
The figures appear as ornate statues, each characterized by the aesthetic associations and revisited stereotypes of their hairstyle. The anonymity of the images presented in The Hunt activates the mind's associative aptitude, drawing upon one's own fantasies and projections of sensuality, innocence, order, freedom, frivolity and social rank. Echoing classical art, these images refer to a mystical icon rather than presenting a portrait of an individual.
252Portraits of uncommon beauty from the author of the acclaimed La Cucaracha.
In Solus Volume I, South African photographer Pieter Hugo (born 1976) reflects on the values implied by the fashion industry’s shifting aesthetics through portraits of street-cast models found in diverse locations such as London, Paris, New York and South Africa. Hugo found himself captivated by sitters with unconventional and atypical looks, particularly before they underwent the machinations of wardrobe, makeup and hair.
Drawn to this uniqueness and recalling the sense of not-belonging that is part of the intense experience of youth, Hugo’s invitation to the models was: “simply present yourself.” The resulting photographs embrace vulnerability and frailty as much as they do the agency and idealism of their subjects. Hugo’s typological study questions fashion’s commodification of youth and the “outsider,” while embracing the beauty of peculiarity worn with acute awareness and the paradox of craving both difference and conformity.
Double-exposed nude photography from a master of self-portraiture.
The work of Swedish photographer Lina Scheynius (born 1981) captures quiet moments of intimacy and hidden beauty, as if ripped from the pages of her diary. Raw sexuality and naked bodies populate her photographs, which often feature her close friends and lovers, and herself, as models.
In this latest project, Scheynius works with analog photography, double-exposing the film―first with images of centuries-old statues, then with her own nude body―using self-portraiture as a bridge across millennia. Both subtle and raw, Scheynius offers here a groundbreaking photobook for the 21st century.
An unusually intimate, close-quarters account of daily life in postwar communist countries.
For most people in the West, the realities of life behind the Iron Curtain have faded into caricatures of police state repression and bread lines. With the world seemingly again divided between democracies and authoritarian regimes, it is essential that we understand the reality of life in the Soviet Bloc. American photojournalist Arthur Grace (born 1947) was uniquely placed to provide that context.
During the 1970s and 1980s Grace traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain, working primarily for news magazines. One of only a small corps of Western photographers with ongoing access, he was able to delve into the most ordinary corners of people’s daily lives, while also covering significant events. Many of the photographs in this remarkable book are effectively psychological portraits that leave the viewer with a sense of the gamut of emotions in that era.
Illustrated with over 120 black-and-white images―nearly all previously unpublished―Communism(s) gives an unprecedented glimpse behind the veil of a not-so-distant time filled with harsh realities unseen by nearly all but those that lived through it. Shot in the USSR, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic, here are portraits of factory workers, farmers, churchgoers, vacationers and loitering teens juxtaposed with the GDR’s imposing Social Realist–designed apartment blocks, annual May Day Parades, Poland’s Solidarity movement (and the subsequent imposition of martial law) and the vastness of Moscow’s Red Square.
412This debut monograph from the Los Angeles–based photographer Alex Stoddard explores the parallels between metamorphosis in the natural world and human coming-of-age. Through staged, highly stylized images, Stoddard invites viewers into his magical, colorfully dark world of budding sexuality and crawling insects. Each detailed scene features a youthful subject―often Stoddard himself―in a state of change or paired with a many-legged counterpart. The previously unreleased series of 70 images paints a surreal picture of adolescence and young adulthood in a glorious frenzy of buzzing hormones and sprouting wings.
Insex marks the artist’s first cohesive collection of work, a departure from the stand-alone self-portraits for which he is known. Drawing on his childhood in rural Georgia, Stoddard sets his photographs in a fecund but menacing natural world, where bodies and flora and fauna become interchangeable symbols. Stoddard calls the unbridled metamorphosis in this volume his “love letter to change.”
Alex Stoddard (born 1993) was raised in rural Georgia. He is represented by Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles and has worked for select clients and publications such as Universal Republic Records, Warner Music Group, Refinery29 and Juxtapoz, among others. Additionally, Stoddard has exhibited his work at numerous international venues, including galleries in Paris, New York City, Brussels and Luxembourg City. Insex travels as a solo exhibition in spring 2022.
414A meditative portrayal of land and sea along an Oregon trail, from the leading figure of the New Topographics.
For more than 50 years, ever since his landmark photobook The New West, Robert Adams (born 1937) has numbered among America’s foremost modern photographers and chroniclers. Here, he returns to the landscape near his home on the Oregon coast, presenting photographs largely made on Nehalem Spit, a four-mile stretch of sand, seagrass and pines that divides the Pacific Ocean from Nehalem Bay. Recording changing light on the land and the sea, the black-and-white photographs, made between 2008 and 2019, and beautifully reproduced in this large-format volume, suggest questions to which Adams has often returned, about the meaning of our relationship to nature, and the precarity and brevity of our place in it.
1248A pandemic logbook in words and images, with gorgeous Cape Cod panoramas and poetical meditations.
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, this collaborative project brings together the work of creative partners Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. This intimate collection serves as a pandemic logbook in words and images, created while the couple was largely sequestered on Cape Cod from March 2020 through May 2021. Rebecca provides original, handwritten poetry that punctuates her lyrical photographs and Alex’s panoramic seascapes. Their images serve as poignant meditations on what it means to be both deeply connected to the world around us and profoundly isolated from much that we hold dear.
Alex Webb (born 1952) has published more than 15 photography books, including the survey The Suffering of Light. His most recent books include La Calle: Photographs from Mexico and the collaboration Brooklyn: The City Within, with Rebecca Norris Webb.
Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb (born 1956) often interweaves her text and photographs in her nine books, most notably with her monograph, My Dakota. Her most recent book, Night Calls, was published by Radius Books in 2020.
An up-close portrayal of late-’90s London’s many music scenes, from the pages of Sleazenation and beyond.
In the late 1990s, as a graduate from art school, the British photographer Ewen Spencer began making pictures for Sleazenation, in particular for the infamous listing pages at the rear of the magazine that were called "Savoir Vivre." The images were made in both black and white and color, and were immensely candid and full of characters that seemed to be everywhere at that time.
London was at the epicenter of a cultural boom in this period. Small clubs, parties and discos were plentiful in venues from North to South, and Spencer was in a minicab and night bus taking in all the scenes―from Northern Soul, Acid House, Jungle and Garage to Nu Metal, South London blackout clubs and more. Spencer captures an era filled with love, lust and messy authenticity.
Ewen Spencer (born 1971) graduated from the University of Brighton in 1997 and began shooting for style magazines such as Sleazenation and The Face, with an emphasis on youth culture. In 2004 his series Teenagers was shortlisted for the Project Assistance award at Rencontres D’Arles, curated that year by Martin Parr, who tipped Spencer as “one to watch.” In 2013 he began self-publishing a biannual photo-zine, Guapamente focusing on global youth subcultures. Spencer has also made documentaries on Britain’s Garage and Grime scenes. His monograph Young Love was published by Stanley Barker in 2017.
An exhilarating homage to the surf and van culture of the California coast, from the author of Les Danseurs.
The second monograph by New York– and Paris-based photographer Matthew Brookes, Into the Wild is a vibrant celebration of surf life. For this project, Brookes followed a group of young surfers from Venice Beach on their adventures up and down the coast. The result is a story of van culture along the California coast―a story of youth choosing to follow their dreams, living out of vans, existing for surf and travel and freedom, and always chasing the best waves. The documentary-style photographs are typical of Brookes’ work, with ethereal shots punctuating more naturalistic photos. The book includes interviews with the surfers done by Zack Raffin from the major surf magazine Stab Magazine. Raffin is a young surfer himself and grew up surrounded by van culture, positioning him as an insider voice as much as a journalist.
Matthew Brookes is a photographer known for his editorial projects and his natural and simplistic style. Born in England and raised in South Africa, Brookes’ photographs have been featured in major magazines such as GQ Style, Vogue and L'Uomo Vogue. In addition to his work with models and celebrities, Brookes is fascinated by the dynamism of the human form in motion and enjoys photographing athletes and dancers. In 2015 Brookes published his first monograph with Damiani, Les Danseurs, a portrait of the ballet dancers of the Paris Opera.
Fire Island’s gay communities, documented in a nocturnal erotic fever-dream by Matthew Leifheit.
Featuring 77 color photographs and a faux leather cover, To Die Alive portrays Fire Island’s world of desire and its layers of history: the Ice Palace bar’s infamous underwear party; the men-only Belvedere Guesthouse; clandestine encounters in the Meat Rack; and landscapes in all seasons of the island’s delicate maritime forest. The wide-ranging subjects of Matthew Leifheit’s portraits reflect the intergenerational community who come to the island for refuge or employment, ranging from weekend visitors to sugar daddies to bartenders and sex workers. Tinged with sadness, the book's climax mixes feelings of pleasure with desperation and loss. As homosexuality gains mainstream acceptance, many queer Americans no longer need to go to geographic extremes like Fire Island, Provincetown, Palm Springs or Key West to express themselves. But what is the cost of assimilation? To Die Alive is both romantic and grotesque, challenging the sun-bleached history of homoerotic representation on this fragile island, which itself is under constant threat of erosion by the sea.
Matthew Leifheit (born 1988) is an American photographer, magazine editor and professor born in Chicago and based in Brooklyn. A graduate of the Yale School of Art, he was formerly photo editor of Vice and is currently on faculty at Pratt Institute. Leifheit’s photographic work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public collections. His photographs have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Aperture, Time and Artforum. Leifheit is editor-in-chief of Matte Magazine, a journal of emerging photography that he has edited and published since 2010.
251An expanded edition of Meyerowitz’s acclaimed study of the many shades and styles of red hair.
Photographer Joel Meyerowitz (born 1938) began photographing redheads in 1978 against the contrasting blue backdrop of Cape Cod. The portraits from this period are collected in this new edition of Meyerowitz's 1991 photobook Redheads, featuring 16 additional images. After running an ad in the Provincetown Advocate, Meyerowitz began collecting the experiences of people who grew up with red hair, in addition to photographing them. Making up only two or three percent of the world’s population, their stories of schoolyard bullying and self-acceptance illustrate a broader narrative of growth and beauty.
Despite cultural and racial distinctions between redheads, the phenotypic association between the subjects brings a sense of familiality to the collection of portraits.
Meyerowitz describes how red hair and its reaction to light evokes a sense of the color film process. He is known for his transition to color film during a period of resistance to color photography. “My way of making portraits is not by getting down on my hands and knees, nor climbing high on a ladder, nor getting into bed with a celebrity,” Meyerowitz writes, “but simply standing eye to eye with anyone who has found their way to me, young or old. I need only one or two sheets of film and the patience to see it through.” This hardcover edition includes previously unseen portraits.
137Classic and previously unseen photographs and archival materials by a genius of staged photography, with a new essay by Chris Kraus.
This elegant volume presents more than 40 vintage photographs by the pioneering American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958–81), many of which have never before been seen. These photographs span the creative arc of the artist’s life, focusing on the varied thought processes, interests and influences that inspired her work.
Clustered thematically, Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories highlights previously unexplored relational contexts, drawing deeply on Woodman's formative years in Providence, Rhode Island, and Italy, and featuring previously unpublished photographs and archival materials.
In the newly commissioned essay “Impure Alchemy,” critic and novelist Chris Kraus explores Francesca Woodman’s life via her work, drawing upon her journals and letters as primary source materials, and exploring the technical means and literary strategies that animate Woodman's works.
Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories portrays the artist’s lasting impact on generations of artists, and offers a compendium of images, which, as Kraus writes, still “inspire new mysteries and questions.”
362An expanded edition of Parks’ classic account of race relations in America, with previously unpublished images and texts.
This expanded edition of Gordon Parks: Segregation Story includes around 30 previously unpublished photographs, as well as enhanced reproductions created from Parks’ original color transparencies; newly discovered descriptions Parks wrote for the photographs; a manuscript of film-developing instructions and captions Parks authored with Samuel F. Yette; previously published texts by the late art historian Maurice Berger and the esteemed journalist and civil rights activist Charlayne Hunter-Gault; and a new essay by artist Dawoud Bey.
After the photographs were first presented in a 1956 issue of Life magazine, the bulk of Parks’ assignment was thought to be lost. In 2011, five years after Parks’ death, the Gordon Parks Foundation found more than 200 color transparencies belonging to the series. In 2014 the series was first published as a book, and since then new photographs have been uncovered.
In the summer of 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to Alabama to document the daily realities of African Americans living under Jim Crow laws in the rural South. The resulting color photographs are among Parks’ most powerful images, and, in the decades since, have become emblematic representations of race relations in America. Pursued at grave danger to the photographer himself, the project was an important chapter in Parks’ career-long endeavor to use the camera as a weapon for social change.
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant laborer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. He evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. The first African American director to helm a major motion picture, he helped launch the blaxploitation genre with his film Shaft (1971). Parks died in 2006.
A sumptuous visual index of built works by the leading Iraqi architect.
The prolific and prominent architect Rifat Chadirji (1926–2020) launched his office Iraq Consult in Baghdad in the late 1950s. In less than 20 years, his design output comprised almost 100 buildings, ranging from monuments and private residences to governmental and industrial buildings in Iraq and the Gulf Region. An avid photographer, Chadirji extensively documented his own architectural projects and the shifting image of Baghdad. Despite his fame, in the climate of suspicion that dominated a heavily policed Iraq, Chadirji was jailed in 1978. He was released two years later and eventually left Iraq in 1983 to devote himself to writing and to cataloging his works. Chadirji’s photographs appear on the sheets that form his building index―published for the first time in this book. The index is both a scrupulous inventory of his building career and a testimony to its sudden end.
In 1983, Baldwin Lee (born 1951) left his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his 4 × 5 view camera and set out on the first of a series of road trips to photograph the American South. The subject of his pictures was Black Americans: at home, at work and at play, in the street and in nature. This project would consume Lee―a first-generation Chinese American―for the remainder of that decade, and it would forever transform his perception of his country, its people and himself.
The resulting archive from this seven-year period contains nearly 10,000 black-and-white negatives. This monograph, Baldwin Lee, presents a selection of 88 images edited by the photographer Barney Kulok, accompanied by an interview with Lee by the curator Jessica Bell Brown and an essay by the writer Casey Gerald. Arriving almost four decades after Lee began his journey, this publication reveals the artist’s unique commitment to picturing life in America.
Bergemann chronicled the changing face of postwar Germany in numerous classic portraiture series for Die Zeit and the New York Times Magazine.
In a career spanning more than four decades, Berlin-born photographer Sibylle Bergemann (1941–2010) created an extraordinary oeuvre ranging from fashion and portrait photographs to literary reportage and other series. In the GDR, Bergemann worked both freelance and for various art and culture magazines. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she cofounded the photographer’s agency Ostkreuz and worked for leading German as well as international magazines such as GEO, Die Zeit, Stern and the New York Times Magazine. This catalog, accompanying the exhibition at Berlinische Galerie, approaches the unique visual universe of one Germany’s most famous photographers on several narrative levels. Including more than 200 photographs from the museum’s own collection as well as from the photographer’s estate, it shows selected images from her early work for the first time.
An artist's book of augmented portraiture, documenting the symbolism and material culture of the Bíilukaa (Apsáalooke).
Wendy Red Star (born 1981) made her first big move off the Crow reservation to attend Montana State University in Bozeman. During one of her study sessions she discovered an image of Medicine Crow, an Apsáalooke chief, in a random book in the university library. Enamored by his image, she made a xerox copy and kept the chief’s image in her sketchbook. A decade later, in 2014, she revisited this image to create an exhibition at the Portland Art Museum titled Medicine Crow & the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation.
Bíilukaa builds upon this theme of researching historical photographs of Apsáalooke individuals and material culture, with the artist drawing on both her personal collection and works held in museums and archives across the country. Red Star notes, “Since the time I left the Crow reservation I have encountered my tribe’s material cultural in every city I have exhibited or occupied. It is incredible that so much of my community’s history and material culture is kept in the vaults of these institutions hundreds of miles away from their source.” The text features interviews with the artist and members of her extended family, alongside new works of primarily collaged photography.
Red Star has chosen the title Bíilukaa in reference to what the Apsáalooke call themselves: Our Side. Bíilukaa is the book Red Star wishes she could have read when setting out as a young artist, a book that educates the public about collections and archives, while also honoring her family and community.
By Patrick Cariou, Daniel Duane, Perry Henzell, Eddie Brannan
Publisher : Damiani
2022 | 228 pages
Far from modernity: the first overview of the French photographer famed for his portraits of marginal cultures, in acclaimed photobooks such as Surfers and Yes Rasta.
For more than 25 years, French photographer Patrick Cariou has traveled to places around the globe, documenting people living on the fringes of society. Whether photographing surfers, gypsies, Rastafarians or the rude boys of Kingston, Cariou celebrates those who meet the struggles of life with honor, dignity and joy. Bringing together works from his groundbreaking monographs including Surfers, Yes Rasta, Trenchtown Love and Gypsies, Patrick Cariou: Works 1985–2005 takes us on a scenic journey around the world, offering an intimate and captivating look at cultures that distance themselves from the blessings and curses of modernity.
Whether following the waves, living in the mountains or surviving urban and rural poverty, Cariou’s subjects reveal the importance of preserving native culture at a time of Western cultural hegemony. Though they come from different places, his subjects share a common ground, one beautifully articulated by filmmaker Perry Henzell in his essay: “Rasta doesn’t just represent Rasta; Rasta is a banner for spirit worldwide. The spirit of freedom, the spirit of pride, whether you’re rich or poor.”
Patrick Cariou (born 1963) is a French photographer with a career spanning over 30 years. He is best known for his dramatic portraits that reveal an ethnographic research of communities at the edge of society. His books include Surfers (1997), Yes Rasta (2000), Trenchtown Love (2003) and Gypsies (2011).
1372Oluremi C. Onabanjo spotlights a single photograph by Ming Smith, celebrating her synesthetic range and acuity of vision.
“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.” These opening lines to Ralph Ellison’s epochal 1952 novel Invisible Man served as the inspiration for a photographic series that Ming Smith made from 1988 through 1991. One particularly poignant image from this series, rendered in monochrome, is a moody street scene. A sole figure occupies the center of the picture plane―head stooped, hands in pockets, striding down a snow-covered street.
Illuminating the figure from behind, a line of street lights exposes the outer edges of legs and feet, while the torso and head encased in a bulky winter coat seem to blend into the shadow of a looming building. Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere (1991) typifies Smith’s long-term engagement with the tensions that animate the African American experience. This latest volume in MoMA’s One on One series invites readers to perceive the subtle yet significant contributions of this Black woman photographer to the history of the medium.
Coney Island is an American icon celebrated worldwide, a fantasyland of the past with an evolving present and an irrepressible optimism about its future. It is a democratic entertainment where people of all walks of life and places are brought together.
There isn’t anywhere else like it, and that is much of its appeal. Here 170 evocative black-and-white images taken by eminent photographer Harvey Stein from 1970 through 2020 simultaneously look back in time while giving a current view to the people and activities of this “poor man’s Riviera.” The images capture the wonder and intimacy of Coney Island. There is no photo book that has been published that documents a 50-year time period of a famous location taken by one photographer. Being in Coney Island is like stepping into another society, rather than just experiencing a day’s entertainment.
"I Hope You Find What You're Looking For"
96 pages, including 55 B/W Duotones
Hardbound
Essays by Douglas Beasley, Julian Anderson and Gloria Baker Feinstein
Poems by Kim Stafford, Oregon's former poet laureate
printed at Verona Libri in Veron, Italy
published by Yellow Bird Press
This book from award-winning Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert collects his most cinematic images to date.
A master of color-saturated atmospheres, Harry Gruyaert has roamed the world searching for the perfect light for more than forty years. His intuitive and physical relationship to places immerses the spectator in a world that borrows from the cinematic universe and from that of the painter. “A good photo is a photo that says a lot of things about the place and the moment it was taken,” says Gruyaert. Space―its complexity, the perception that we have of it, its plasticity―is a major component of Gruyaert’s images, as if the duality between color and spatiality was dissolving in order to create a work where the only thing that matters is the pleasure of immersion.
Harry Gruyaert: Between Worlds dissolves the boundaries between exterior and interior spaces, a closed world and one that is open to elsewhere. From shops, cafés, subway platforms, and hotel roomsin Europe, the Middle East, the United States, and Africa from the1970s to today, Gruyaert deploys the very essence of visual writing:a luminous alchemy suspended in time. A collection of seventy-five images that connect one realm with the next, this volume shows that beyond the marvelous colorist that he is, Gruyaert’s images also depict a photographer’s vision of the world.
Father and son collaborate on a photographic panorama of humanity
Famed photojournalist Steve Schapiro (1934–2022) and his son Theophilus Donoghue (born 1982) have collaborated on a photo project that is 70% Schapiro, 30% Donoghue. Seventy Thirty depicts the various faces and expressions of humanity, from metropolitans to migrants, homeless people to conspicuous celebrities such as Alec Guinness, Allen Ginsberg, Muhammad Ali, Robert De Niro, René Magritte, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol. Schapiro photographs early New York skateboarders while Donoghue documents current Colombian breakdancers. Schapiro includes his classic photograph Man on Iceberg, which was the opening spread of a Life story on existentialism. Similarly, Donoghue contributes his contemplative photograph Hindsight Intersection, recently featured in ARTSY’s 20 21 Artists in Support of Human Rights Watch benefit auction. Shooting in monochrome with an occasional dash of color, Schapiro and Donoghue portray the proud and lofty as well as the humble and humorous.
Isolated in the confinement of her Los Angeles home during the covid lockdown, Indian-born American artist Rohina Hoffman takes us on a metaphorical journey connecting her roots to food through the rituals of daily meals. In Embrace, Rohina combines two photographic projects.
Being a Sapeur is more than a way of dressing, more than a hobby and more than a means of earning money and respect. It’s a prestigious brotherhood with its own moral and social codes and ultimately it is a way of life and survival. Many use it as an escape to forget daily problems and hardships, explaining that the dressing up and parading in the streets makes them feel important, allowing them to forget about their daily struggles in a chaotic Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. While they are often treated as next-door celebrities, their embodied art form brings them both a touch of glamour and a reprieve from the humble, bleak, and even destitute neighbourhoods that they have spent their entire lives in.
For more than 25 years, French photographer Patrick Cariou has traveled to places around the globe, documenting people living on the fringes of society. Whether photographing surfers, gypsies, Rastafarians or the rude boys of Kingston, Cariou celebrates those who meet the struggles of life with honor, dignity and joy. Bringing together works from his groundbreaking monographs including Surfers, Yes Rasta, Trenchtown Love and Gypsies, Patrick Cariou: Works 1985–2005 (published by Damiani) takes us on a scenic journey around the world, offering an intimate and captivating look at cultures that distance themselves from the blessings and curses of modernity.
Here is a selection of photo books that, in my opinion, should be in your library! It is of course a very subjective choice and if I could, I would have chosen at least 50 of them. This collection will help you to draft your 'wish list' or to find the perfect gift for someone who enjoys photography. Happy Holidays!
Niko J. Kallianiotis' Athênai in Search of Home (published by Damiani) presents photos taken in and around Athens, the city in which he grew up. The images reflect the artist's eagerness to assimilate back into a home that feels at once foreign and familiar. Throughout the years the city and the surrounding territories have experienced their share of socio-economic struggles and topographic transformations that have altered its identity. The city of Athens in Kallianiotis' photographs is elliptically delineated as a vibrant environment that binds together luxury and social inequality. The photographer depicts a city in which the temporal and the spatial elements often clash with each other while conducting his research for a home that has changed over the years as much as he did.
In The Haight-Ashbury Portraits, 1967-1968 (published by Damiani) during the waning days of the Summer of Love, Elaine Mayes embarked on a set of portraits of youth culture in her neighborhood. Mayes was a young photographer living in San Francisco during the 1960s. She had photographed the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and, later that year the hippie movement had turned from euphoria to harder drugs, and the Haight had become less of a blissed-out haven for young people seeking a better way of life than a halfway house for runaway teens.
Originally published in 1983 , Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen's Byker is recognised as a seminal body of work and a modern classic of photography. Konttinen documented a close-knit community in Newcastle in an area that was her home for seven years and which was destined for wholesale redevelopment. The work gained national recognition as a key photographic account of a rich working class culture on the eve of its destruction. The book was selected by The Observer as one of the top ten books of the year.
In this unconventional, lyrical biography, Lesy traces Evans's intimate, idiosyncratic relationships with men and women-the circle of friends who made Walker Evans who he was. Evans's photographs of James Agee, Berenice Abbott, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Lesy's telling of Evans's life stories.
Do you like cookies? 🍪 We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website, to show you personalized content and to analyze our website traffic. Learn more