Monographs & Art Books / E

Works by Thomas Eakins and his Circle in the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Renowned photographer Michael Eastman pays haunting tribute to Havana's faded glory. In his numerous works, internationally acclaimed photographer Michael Eastman often focuses on the facades and interiors of the world's cities, such as Paris, Rome, and New Orleans. In this book he explores the houses and streets of Havana. Nearly one hundred photographs from the past two decades reveal a world where triumphant past and vanquished present collide. Painterly in quality, these richly colored photographs are dramatically lit and exquisitely detailed. Though mostly devoid of people, they manage to capture contemporary Cuban life through suggestion: an empty chair, an ancient car, a decrepit hallway, a forgotten chandelier. The result is as eloquent as a love poem written to a city rich in history, culture, and feeling.

Liquid Land is co-authored with my father Rustam Effendi, a dissident scientist and entomologist who devoted his life to studying, hunting and collecting over 90,000 butterflies in the Soviet Union. Inherited by the Azerbaijani State Instute of Zoology after his death in 1991, his vast collection has disintegrated. Alongside thousands of glass boxes filled with butterfy dust, the only remaining visual evidence of his life's work is the fifty photographs of endangered butterflies for a manuscript he never published. Next to my father's dead, but iridescent butterflies, my photographs show life in some of the world's most polluted area, near Baku, where I was born and grew up. In my mind, the contrasting images gravitate towards each other- as I have to my father. Since working on this book I have gotten to know him much better than when he was alive. Salty Waters is the translation from Persian of the "Ab-sheuran" Peninsula; in and around Baku, its main city, the earth is breathing with petroleum fumes, as oil oozes to the surface, turning liquid. The Caspain Sea hugs the eagle-beak shaped land, salting its gas-pocked soil. I photogragh the barren, liquid land of Absheron - its environmental and urban decay, its people living amidst the chaos of industrial pollution. My father's work was in the fresh mountain air. The butterflies that he hunted since he was a boy are spectacular in their symmetry. Carefully placed on plants, they shine with vibrant colours, yet he had to kill each one of them for a picture, piercing his microscopic pins though them.

A pipe dream is a fantastic hope that is regarded as being impossible to achieve. This book is dedicated to the people of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, linked by the oil pipeline and their fading hopes for a better future. Besides corporate public relations campaigns, little photographic evidence exists about the impact the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline had had on Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. This book portrays life as it is lived, with no commercial or public relations agenda. It 'un-smiles' the calendar smiles of corporate propaganda and sheds fresh journalistic light on this geopolitically important region. The original photographs have toured throughout Switzerland in the autumn of 2009.

In April 1979, a book of fifteen colour photographs by William Eggleston was published in a limited edition of twenty. The photographs were taken from the second chapter of an unpublished larger work entitled Wedgewood Blue. Amidst his publications Chromes (2011), Los Alamos Revisited (2012), and the upcoming Democratic Forest (2014) and Election Eve (2016), all documenting his lifetime work, At Zenith constitutes a calm and experimental intermezzo from Eggleston's familiar loudness and intensity of colours. The photographer pointed his camera at the sky to focus on the clouds rolling by.

At the end of the 1950s William Eggleston began to photograph around his home in Memphis using black-and-white 35mm film. Fascinated by the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston declared at the time: "I couldn't imagine doing anything more than making a perfect fake Cartier-Bresson." Eventually Eggleston developed his own style which later shaped his seminal work in color-an original vision of the American everyday with its icons of banality: supermarkets, diners, service stations, automobiles and ghostly figures lost in space. From Black and White to Color includes some exceptional as-yet-unpublished photographs, and displays the evolution, ruptures and above all the radicalness of Eggleston's work when he began photographing in color at the end of the 1960s. Here we discover similar obsessions and recurrent themes as present in his early black-and-white work including ceilings, food, and scenes of waiting, as well as Eggleston's unconventional croppings-all definitive traits of the photographer who famously proclaimed, "I am at war with the obvious."

Between 1965 and 1974 William Eggleston and Walter Hopps traveled together in the US, Eggleston taking photographs, Hopps driving. During these travels the title Los Alamos was born. At the turn of the century Eggleston, Hopps, Caldecot Chubb and Winston Eggleston edited the photographs into a set of five portfolio boxes containing dyetransfer prints, which were produced in an edition of five with three sets of artist proofs. In addition to this selection, a further thirteen images were printed and released as individually available dye-transfer prints, which were referred to as "cousins" of the Los Alamos project. Hopps' original vision was to make a vast exhibition of the project, but plans fell through and the idea was abandoned. At some point the negatives became separated, Hopps retaining roughly half of the project in Houston. Later Hopps carefully returned what was assumed to be the remainder of the negatives to Memphis and they were catalogued as Box #17. After Hopps' death in 2005 his widow Caroline found another box of negatives that had never been accounted for. These were then catalogued as Box #83 and documented in a hand-made reference book called Lost and Found Los Alamos. In 2011, William Eggleston III (son of William) and Mark Holborn came together to review the now complete set of negatives for a final edit and sequence. They finished their sequence in Göttingen with Winston Eggleston in 2012. It is presented in its entirety in this three-volume set. An earlier edition of Los Alamos edited by Thomas Weski was published by Scalo in 2003. Weski's original essay is included in this revised edition. Los Alamos Revisited has been drawn from the complete set of photographs, including the long lost negatives from Box #83.

After "Chromes" in 2011 and "Los Alamos Revisited" in 2012, Steidl's reassessment of Eggleston's career continues with this new book "The Democratic Forest" and it is yet his most ambitious project. This ten-volume set containing more than 1,000 photographs is drawn from a body of 12,000 pictures made by Eggleston in the 1980s. The price is expensive (more than $500) but it is certainly worth its price if you like the work of this major photographer.

William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes, and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's hometown of Memphis--an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle, the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, gray-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table. For this edition of William Eggleston's Guide, The Museum of Modern Art has made new color separations from the original 35 mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the color will be freshly responsive to the photographer's intentions.

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black and white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessors. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the "first color photographer," and certainly the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of Eggleston. From 1966 to 1971, Eggleston would occasionally use a two and one quarter inch format for photographs. These are collected and published here for the first time, adding more classic Eggleston images to photography's color canon.

In 1977 William Eggleston released Election Eve, his first and most elaborate artist’s book, containing 100 original prints in two leatherbound volumes, housed in a linen box. It was published by Caldecot Chubb in New York in an edition of only five, and has since become Eggleston’s rarest collectible book. This new Steidl edition recreates the full original sequence of photos in a single volume, making it available to the wider public for the first time. Election Eve contains images made in October 1976 during Eggleston’s pilgrimage from Memphis to the small town of Plains, Georgia, the home of Jimmy Carter who in November 1976 was elected 39th President of the United States. Eggleston began photographing even before he left Memphis and depicted the surrounding countryside and villages of Sumter Country, before he reached Plains. His photos of lonesome roads, train tracks, cars, gas stations and houses are mostly empty of people and form an intuitive, unsettling portrait of Plains, starkly different from the idealized image of it subsequently promoted by the media. The book includes a preface by Hollywood screenwriter (The Mummy, 1999), director (Gotham, 1988) and author Lloyd Fonvielle.

William Eggleston’s standing as one of the masters of color photography is widely acknowledged. But the gradual steps by which he transformed from an unknown into a leading artist are less well known. Steidl has undertaken to trace these steps in an ambitious series of publications. Before Color (2010) explored Eggleston’s revelatory early black-and-white images, while Chromes is an edit of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from 10 chronologically ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistc Trust. This archive had once been used by John Szarkowski, who selected the 48 images printed in Eggleston’s seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. Featuring a newly designed slipcase, this three-volume publication presents Eggleston’s early Memphis imagery, his testing of color and compositional strategies, and the development toward the “poetic snapshot.” In short, Chromes shows a master in the making.

Born in Memphis in 1939, William Eggleston obtained his first camera in 1957 and was later profoundly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. His exhibition Photographs by William Eggleston at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 was a milestone; in 2008 a retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2009. Eggleston’s books include Los Alamos Revisited (2012), The Democratic Forest (2015), Election Eve (2017), Morals of Vision (2019), Flowers (2019), Polaroid SX-70 (2019) and The Outlands (2021).

A handsome overview of Eggleston’s evolution and legacy, from the early black-and-white work to his pioneering adventures in color.

Although the first universal color slide film came onto the market in 1935, it was reserved for the world of advertising, and as late as the 1980s it was still considered commercial, vulgar and unartistic. Despite this, from the 1960s onward, more and more photographers began to discover the creative possibilities of the medium. William Eggleston, whose career has spanned over five decades, not only substantially contributed to this paradigm shift; he also noticeably influenced many subsequent generations. Along with Saul Leiter, Evelyn Hofer and Stephen Shore, Eggleston was one of the first photographers to recognize the distinctive power of color and its unique capacity to create pictures that continuously challenge the everyday. He imbued banality with the uncanny and mysterious, investigating his immediate surroundings again and again―as if he were somehow suspicious of the contents of his freezer, the ketchup bottle on the diner counter, not to mention the guns that appear as if by chance in so many of his pictures. Mystery of the Ordinary captures the full scope of Eggleston’s evolution and legacy: from the early black-and-white work of the late 1950s, in which we witness his discovery and exploration of themes and unconventional croppings, to some of his most iconic color images.

Eisenstaedt's comments on his career as a photographer accompany his photographs of politicians, scientists, musicians, dancers, children, and other subjects.

Personalized signatures and sayings accompany portraits of 200 celebrities by the acknowledged "Father of photojournalism".

A collection of work by the legendary American photographer presents photographs dating from his life in Germany in the 1930s, through his long career with "Life" magazine.

This book has been almost 10 years in the making. The project started out as my process to reconnect to my Bedouin ancestry then turned into an opportunity to connect, learn from and work with the community. Along the way my visual voice has unearthed. The Longing Of The Stranger Whose Path Has Been Broken is a dance, a conversation with the Sinai Bedouin community as we explore what it means to belong, what is this indescribable connection to the land that we all long for and the indigenous experience that is filled with both sorrow and celebration. This book is an alternative Bedouin archive woven by the community themselves, it is an experience that invites readers to look inwards as much as outwards to question the notion of belonging." Rehab Eldalil The book is 182 pages and contains 44 color images, 9 images with embroidery by community members and Native plants from the Sinai region foraged and described by tribe elders as plants that hold medicinal and traditional benefits for the community. The production of the book is supported by the Arab Fund for Art and Culture and it is co-published with Trobades & Premis Mediterranis Albert Camus

Following his career-spanning monograph The Big Picture, Arthur Elgort pays homage to his first love and eternal muse in this new collection of photographs. Through Elgort’s lens we encounter ballet not onstage but behind the scenes where the hard work is done. On this journey through the hallways and rehearsal spaces of some of the world’s most distinguished ballet schools, including the New York City Ballet and the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, we see previously unpublished images of legends such as Balanchine, Baryshnikov and Lopatkina. The perfection of the prima ballerina disappears in these quiet photographs where the viewer is able to witness the individual dancers’ natural glamor as they work to perfect their craft.

“From the first day I worked with Arthur,” writes the hairstylist Christiaan Houtenbos, “I realized his prism is dance. He took its languid, exuberant perfection as his inspiration when he found himself a young Turk in fashion photography. It has to this day served as his anchor.” Elgort’s snapshot style allows the pain and pleasure of one of the world’s most beloved forms of expressive dance to be seen with beauty.

This is Arthur Elgort's (born 1940) first comprehensive book, showing his world-renowned fashion imagery alongside his personal work. The Big Picture spans Elgort's five-decade career and illustrates his longevity as an emulated fashion photographer. His lively and casual shooting style is significantly influenced by his lifelong love of music and dance, particularly jazz and ballet. Elgort's 1971 debut in British Vogue created a sensation in the fashion world where his soon-to-be iconic snapshot style and emphasis on movement and natural light transgressed norms of fashion photography. Elgort subsequently rose to fame working for such distinguished magazines as American, French and Italian Vogue, Interview, GQ, Life and Rolling Stone and shooting advertising campaigns for fashion labels including Chanel, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent.

Designed in the style of his bestselling Models Manual, this book celebrates the women Arthur Elgort has loved.

In his latest book, the great American fashion photographer Arthur Elgort presents photographs of women that he has taken throughout his career, in homage to their power, their beauty, their joy and their strength. Depicting a variety of subjects, from young ballerinas at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in St. Petersburg to snapshots of fashion’s most influential women, this collection portrays many aspects of femininity across generations. Designed in the style of his classic 1994 book Arthur Elgort’s Models Manual (by the same designer, Steve Hiett), and printed on sumptuous matte paper with a vinyl cover, this book combines text and photographs in one seamless flow, deploying a rich range of color with graphic snap. Featured here are idols such as supermodels Gia Carangi, Cindy Crawford, Karen Elson, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington, and legendary editors such as Franca Sozzani, the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, and Polly Allen Mellen, a former editor at Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Allure.

The first ever book on Ellison's lifelong photography practice, from New York scenes to domestic vignettes.

Ralph Ellison is a leading figure in American literature, hailed for his seminal novel Invisible Man (1952), a breakthrough representation of the American experience and Black everyday life. Lesser known, however, is his lifelong engagement with photography. Photographer is the first book dedicated to Ellison’s extensive work in the medium, which spans the 1930s to the ’90s.

Throughout his life, photography played multiple roles for Ellison: a hobby, a source of income, a note-taking tool and an artistic outlet. During his formative years in New York City in the 1940s, he keenly photographed his surroundings―at times alongside fellow photographer Gordon Parks―with many images serving as field notes for his writing. In the last decades of his life, as he grappled with his much-anticipated second novel, Ellison turned inward, and he studied his private universe at home with a Polaroid camera. At all times his photography reveals an artist steeped in modernist thinking who embraced experimentation to interpret the world around him, particularly Black life in America. In a 1956 letter to fellow writer Albert Murray, Ellison underscored photography’s importance to his creative process: "You know me, I have to have something between me and reality when I’m dealing with it most intensely." Accompanying the photographs in this book are several essays situating Ellison’s work within his broader career as a writer, as well an excerpt from his 1977 essay "The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience."

"Since 2008, I have been working on a series of photographs in the Everglades. As a native of South Florida, the Everglades is an ecosystem that has shaped my own history. The Everglades is a series of ecosystems that thrive on freshwater flowing south from Lake Okeechobee. Agriculture, urban development, and a complex series of canals have redirected and polluted the freshwater flowing into the Everglades. "

In the 1800s, the Everglades were viewed as a landscape to develop and conquer, to alter permanently. To date, more than half of the Everglades have been repurposed for urban and agricultural use. Freshwater flowing into the park is engineered, reads the brochure given to all visitors of Everglades National Park. With the help of pumps, floodgates, and retention ponds along the park's boundary, the Everglades is presently on life support, alive but diminished.

In Everglades, Lisa Elmaleh returned to her native South Florida. In a project that lasted from 2008 until 2016, Elmaleh examined her native landscape, photographing the flora and fauna of the Everglades, the only ecological system of its kind. Inspired by early landscape photographers of the American West, Elmaleh spent her time in the Everglades using a large format 8×10 camera and the wet collodion glass negative process, a nineteenth century process requiring the images be exposed and developed on site in a small portable cardboard darkroom. In this way, Elmaleh hopes to preserve an essence of the Everglades, a land we are rapidly losing without knowing the magnitude of our loss.

The Everglades project was the winner of the Aaron Siskind Foundation award, the Puffin Foundation Grant, and the Everglades National Park Artist Residency (AIRIE).

With their 1953 film Little Fugitive, directors Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin originated a style that revolutionized cinema, presaging the French New Wave and independent American film. This book presents the photographic and cinematographic journey of the iconic figures.

From Back Home documents a rural Sweden far removed from the big city. Photographers Anders Petersen (born 1944) and JH Engström (born 1969) both hail from the rural county of Värmland in Sweden, and have returned there to produce this marvelous collaboration. The result is an intimate journey among people, experiences and landscapes spanning over 300 pages. Engström writes of the project: "The land between Klarälven River and the chestnut tree at Ekallén is full of little hard memories of sad and lonely times, but there is also a streak of warm confidence that runs all the way up to Älgsjövallen, a place of fairytale creatures and inquisitive moose. I am carrying my camera, shooting these old dreams through the foliage. It means my memories can never be destroyed because they no longer end in themselves." And Petersen writes: "I’ve returned to something my body and emotions recognize."

Mitch Epstein's latest project tackles one of the most loaded issues on the nation's agenda: what and who powers America? Between 2003 and 2008, prompted by the evacuation of an environmentally contaminated Ohio town, Epstein traveled the United States to document the country's energy "hot spots," where fossil fuel, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind and solar power are produced, encountering further contaminations, Homeland Security obstacles, corporate invincibility and the occasional token of hope. In a post-Katrina and post-Patriot Act America, the angle of engagement permitted Epstein often varied, so that many of the power plants and refineries were shot from an enforced distance ("If you were Muslim, you'd be cuffed and taken in for questioning," he quotes an F.B.I. agent in West Virginia telling him). Alongside these classic depictions of looming, obdurate power, Epstein includes more idiomatic images--a woman wading in the water above Niagara Falls, father and son motorcross bikers, a tree cluttered with debris--which bring the issues back down to human scale. Epstein tells in an accompanying essay how these experiences deepened his political convictions, and led him to think harder about the artist's role in a country teetering between collapse and transformation. Here is his portrait of early twenty-first-century America, as it clings to past comforts and gropes for a more sensible and sustainable future.

Mitch Epstein was 48 and living in New York when his mother called him about the fire. On a windy August night in 1999, two 12-year-old boys had broken into a boarded-up apartment building owned by Epstein's father in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and, just for the hell of it, set it ablaze. The fire had spread, engulfing a nineteenth-century Catholic church, then a city block. The $15 million lawsuit brought by the church against the senior Mr. Epstein threatened to unravel his life. Faced with the family crisis, Mitch went home to help, possessed by the question of how his father, once owner of the largest furniture and appliance store in western New England and former Chamber of Commerce Businessman of the Year in 1970, ended up a character out of an Arthur Miller tragedy. What resulted is Family Business, an epic work about the demise of a Jewish immigrant dynasty. It traces the parallel fall of a New England town from industrial giant to drug-dealing capital. Epstein has combined formally rigorous, large-scale photographs with fluid video clips to re-create his father's universe. The book's four chapters--"store," "property," "town," "home"--include photographs, storyboards, video stills, archival materials and text, resulting in a mixed-media novel that asks how the American Dream failed his father and his generation of men.

Mitch Epstein's new work is a series of photographs of the idiosyncratic trees that inhabit New York City. These pictures underscore the importance of trees to urban life and their complex relationship to their human counterparts. Rooted in New York's sidewalks, parks, and cemeteries, some trees grow wild, some are contortionists adapting to constrictive surroundings, while others are pruned into prize specimens. As urban development closes in on them, surprisingly, New York's trees continue to thrive. From 2011 to 2012, Epstein explored New York's five boroughs in search of remarkable trees, often returning to photograph the same trees through the changing seasons and light. Many of these trees, Epstein learnt, were planted in one context--a farm or nursery, for instance--and had survived to be part of another, a city street or public garden; and most will likely outlive us to find their habitat continue to change. The cumulative effect of these photographs is to invert people's usual view of their city: trees no longer function as background, but instead dominate the human life and architecture around them.

Ephemeral glimpses of ancient American trees not yet destroyed by climate change.

With Old Growth, American photographer Mitch Epstein invites readers into a diverse transcontinental forest that includes white pines, hemlocks, sequoias, moss-covered cedars, bald cypresses and bristlecone pines that have survived for millennia. The book explores the enigma of time, while also evoking the forests’ historical struggle to survive American expansionism. Over the past 500 years, Americans have destroyed more than 95 percent of the original forests in the United States. Yet, these are indispensable in the fight against climate change―large, old trees hold significantly more carbon than replanted saplings.

Old Growth highlights the astounding diversity, interdependence and sculptural beauty of America’s ancient forests. Made with an 8×10 camera in color and black and white, Epstein’s images convey nuances of the forest that people cannot normally see, in the hope that gaining proximity to these epic, life-giving trees could inspire us to protect them. To borrow from ecologist Suzanne Simard, this book is not simply about how we can save trees; it is about how the trees might save us.

In his newest series, Mitch Epstein investigates permanence and impermanence by photographing rocks that last millions of years and clouds that evaporate before our eyes. These large-format black-and-white pictures, taken in New York City, examine society’s complex relationship to nature, a theme Epstein has explored in previous work, such as his acclaimed tree pictures. “While laid up with a ruptured Achilles tendon, I wrestled with the passage of time, which suddenly felt palpable; read Robert Smithson; and reconsidered the inextricability of nature and human society,” Epstein notes. “All this led me to photograph rocks and clouds in the city.”

The way the sky and ground can mirror one another intrigued ancient Chinese painters, as well as Smithson and the Surrealists, all of whom inspired this project. Here, Epstein draws attention to the sculptural quality of New York City’s clouds, bedrock and architecture--which, at its most elemental, is made from rock. Cloud wedges engulf a cargo ship, buildings recall Constructivist paintings and boulders are imposing elders in the middle of a park or sidewalk. Rocks and Clouds suggests society’s inability to control time and tame nature. While it seems impossible to make a fresh picture of New York, Epstein gives us a surprising portrait of it.

Between 1973 and ’76, Mitch Epstein (born 1952) photographed in American cities―New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans, among others. He was initially shooting in black and white as a student of Garry Winogrand, when he asked his teacher, “Why not color?” With Winogrand’s blessing, Epstein shot his first rolls of Kodachrome. Silver + Chrome is a chronicle of his three years alternating between color and black and white, before eventually committing to color.

This book contains Epstein’s earliest work, virtually none of which has been seen before. In these kinetic tableaux, the artist’s exuberance is tamed, just barely, by his formal intelligence. He depicts American city life as it undergoes taboo-shattering sexual liberation, economic crises and the repercussions of a boondoggle war in Vietnam, immersing us in the urban chaos of this complicated time.

Ordinary things here startle, while the extraordinary appears at perfect ease in the world. These pictures, made in the 1970s and 80s, offer a window into the beginning and breadth of Mitch Epstein's career. Most of these photographs are previously unpublished--culled from 15 years of work that addresses the theme of American recreation. Epstein's interpretation of leisure in the United States is characteristically subtle, ranging and sharp-witted. In Recreation, teenage girls abandon a baby to fondle a snake; children sleep naked on a car in an open campground--people stake their private ground in public, if only for a moment, during which Epstein's camera finds them. Gesture gives many of these photographs their pulse: tender hand, strained shoulder, swiveled hip. It isn't the fact of thirteen year olds smoking that will astound viewers, but the grace and knowledge in the young fingers that hold the cigarettes. Epstein's wit is laced with compassion, as he turns these rituals of boredom and beauty, excess and denial, alienation and possibility into a distillation of modern America.

One of the 20th century's most celebrated image-makers, this collection, in a generously oversized format, focuses on Elliott Erwitt's distinctive photographs of dogs. In a heartfelt and original tribute to man's best friend, this photographic master captures all the diversity of the canine kingdom. We witness Fido's many moods from playful, perky scamp to quiet and constant companion. Ranging from daring little imps to lumbering and gentle beasts, Erwitt's images unveil the quirkiness that makes these creatures so beloved while combining an unerring sense of composition with the magic of the moment.

To select the never-before published color photographs for this vast project, Elliott Erwitt sifted through his ample archive of nearly half a million 35mm slides. Then he began the mammoth task of whittling it down to this epic collection of roughly 450 pages. For most of these images, the color managed to stay miraculously preserved and every evocative detail is as crisp as the date of its creation. Whether world leaders or sassy showgirls, the subjects reflect Erwitt's own wry and eclectic sensibility. To say the juxtapositions are intriguing would be an understatement. From marketplaces to military camps, Vegas to Venice, there's a rich mixture of public pageantry and carefully observed private interactions. English/German/French/Italian/Spanish edition.

In 1964, while on assignment for Newsweek magazine, photojournalist Elliott Erwitt spent a week in Cuba as a guest of Fidel Castro. There, he captured now-iconic photographs of the beloved Cuban president along with the revolutionary leader Che Guevara. Over fifty years later, coinciding with restored diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States, Erwitt returned to document both its urban and rural landscapes, and -most prominently- the people of this fascinating nation. Presented in a book for the very first time, Erwitt's captivating black-and-white photographs offer an intimate look into this intriguing Caribbean island. From candid glimpses of Fidel Castro to Havana's breathtaking architectural details and scenes of rural life, Cuba reflects an in-depth visual exploration that unveils the heart and soul of the country. Complete with anecdotal recollections penned by Erwitt himself (for example, the time when Che Guevara offered him a box of cigars) and a compelling foreword written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this stunning tome isn't a mere chronicling of Cuba's people and places--it's a historical record of a nation in flux as it opens up to the rest of the world.

Seeing what few others see, and capturing it for all of us, is the essence of Personal Exposures. For this volume Elliott painstakingly culled the work of a lifetime, rediscovering prints he had not seen in years and creating a unified whole that reflects a consistent, mature vision of photography and humanity. Here are men, women, and children in off-guard moments; old people; little girls hamming it up; and even various dogs, who have their own preoccupations. The pictures reflect a lifetime of humorous, ironic observation and sensitivity to the human condition. 248 duotone photographs.

Includes previously unpublished photographs of Pittsburgh by acclaimed photographer Elliot Erwitt taken between 1949 and 1950. These photographs, capturing the humanity and spirit of the architecture and people of the city of Pittsburgh, were thought lost until the negatives were recently located in the Pittsburgh Photographic Library.

Photographic master Elliott Erwitt has created many noteworthy portraits of womankind over the years. In Regarding Women he presents us with an exceptional collection composed (almost) exclusively of black-and-white female portraits. This volume is Erwitt's evocative personal tribute to female strength, intelligence, and beauty. The archival material spans several generations, with many images not previously published or rarely seen before. Conveying respect, admiration, and sometimes awe, these photographs portray all the complex elements that make up the feminine nature, whether formidable and tenacious, or occasionally capricious and coy. Through capturing their many varied facets the photographer shares his insights into how all kinds of women make their way into-- not to mention their mark on--the world. In these pages, readers will find romance and glamour, touches of sensuality, as well as much affection. Of course, there are also those disarming flashes of candid everyday humor that are so quintessentially Erwitt.

One of the all-time greats, Elliott Erwitt is a master whose photographs have defined the visual history of the 20th century--and the 21st. Although his work spans decades, continents and diverse subjects, it is always instantly recognizable. Spontaneous and original, Erwitt's visions are imbued with true artistry and no trace of artifice. In this definitive collection, the master shares those works he considers his personal best. As you browse this carefully curated retrospective, you'll feel nostalgia, wonder--and a lasting sense of life's rich potential.

In 2010, more Americans were living below the poverty line than at any time since 1959, when the US Census Bureau began collecting this data. In 2011, Kira Pollack, Director of Photography at Time, commissioned Joakim Eskildsen to photography this growing crisis affecting nearly 46.2 million Americans. Based on census data, Eskildsen, together with journalist Natasha del Toro, travelled to the places with the highest poverty rates in New York, California, Louisiana, South Dakota and Georgia over seven months to document the lives of those behind the statistics. The people Eskildsen has portrayed―those who struggle to make ends meet, who have lost their jobs or homes and often live in unhealthy conditions―usually remain invisible in a society to which the myth of the American Dream still remains strong. Many of Eskilden's subjects hold there is no such dream anymore―merely the American Reality.

Roma, Sinti, Calé--whatever they'd prefer to be called, the scattered members of the largest minority in Europe are most widey known as Gypsies. Throughout their history, the Roma have been subjected to persecution, expulsion, slavery, prohibitions on the use of the Romany language and other creative attempts to assimilate, misuse or extinguish their peoples. Throughout Europe, attitudes towards them remain at least suspicious, and many still face direct discrimination. Cia Rinne and Joakim Eskildsen have visited Roma in seven different countries between 2000 and 2006, often staying with families in order to photograph and write about their lives, their culture and their situation. In The Roma Journeys they document these encounters with Eskildsen's moody color images and Rinne's sympthetic essays, and offer a rare view into a little-known life. With a foreword from Günter Grass and an enclosed CD with field recordings and music recorded on the authors' journeys.

Haunted by space both actual and metaphorical, remembered and constructed, Lalla Essaydi's work reaches beyond Islamic culture to invoke the Western fascination with the veil and the harem as expressed in nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings with the odalisque. The world that Western artists encountered in North Africa was suffused with the exquisite beauty of the architecture, the interior decor, and women's clothing. It is this beauty that Moroccan-born artist Essaydi reclaims in Les Femmes du Maroc, her second powerHouse Book.

Essaydi's work revisits the world of women, suggesting the complexity of feminine identity and the tension between hierarchy and fluidity that are at the heart of Arab culture. Not simply a critique of either Arab or Western culture, Essaydi's photography offers a more active, even subversive engagement with cultural patterns to convey her own experience as an Arab woman.

In these images, the text adorning the women's bodies is partly autobiographical. Essaydi speaks her own thoughts and experiences directly, as a woman caught between the past and present, between East and West, and also as an artist, exploring the language in which to "speak" from this uncertain space. Without specificity of place, the text itself becomes the world of the subjects-their thoughts, speech, clothing, shelter, and nomadic home. However, this text is incomplete. It involves the viewer as well as the writer in a continual process of reading and revising, of losing and finding in its multiple and discontinuous threads. Similarly, the women in the photographs require multiple visual readings. Both are as elusive as "woman" herself-not simply because she is veiled but because she is still in progress.

Although his work has received many awards, been enshrined in the best museums, and been exhibited on several continents, Evans's total corpus is only now being fully examined. This important book revises our appreciation of Evans by presenting previously unknown material in an accessible context. Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Doug Eklund, and Mia Fineman offer novel insights into the sources and legacy of Evans's work. The result is a superb exploration of what was achieved by one of our finest, mostly deeply American artists.

More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the images of essential America that we have long since accepted as fact, and his work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film and visual arts in other mediums. The original edition of American Photographs was a carefully prepared letterpress production, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Evans that captured scenes of America in the early 1930s. As noted on the jacket of the first edition, Evans, "photographing in New England or Louisiana, watching a Cuban political funeral or a Mississippi flood, working cautiously so as to disturb nothing in the normal atmosphere of the average place, can be considered a kind of disembodied, burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers." This seventy-fifth anniversary edition of American Photographs, made with new reproductions, recreates the original 1938 edition as closely as possible to make the landmark publication available for a new generation.

Walker Evans's career spread over 46 fitful and prolific years, yet in a scant two, 1935-1936, he produced the singular body of work that came to define him. During that brief time, while working for the Farm Security Administration (previously the U.S. Resettlement Administration) photographing the consequences of the Great Depression, he refined a hybrid style that combined documentation with sly personal comment. He delighted in traveling incognito as an artless photojournalist, but with the independence to satisfy his own artistic designs. Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary presents these seminal images for the first time as a comprehensive, cohesive body of work, in chronological order. These are prime examples of Evans's alchemy, his seemingly effortless transformation of mundane fact into sweeping lyricism. They not only define his mature style, but also offer a path for artists of future generations. Evans has been called the most important American artist of his century, and the impact of his vision reaches well beyond the province of photography. With texts by John T. Hill, Heinz Liesbrock and Allan Trachtenberg.

A concise, reduced-format edition includes the same content as the original 1994 edition and 300 duotone photographs, in a portrait that surveys every significant aspect of his life and work.

In 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.