Monographs & Art Books / L

David LaChapelle returns with his first new publication in a decade. This two-volume collection narrates the photographer's career through his own lens; the first tome traces LaChapelle's rise in the heat of 1980s New York, while the second explores his spiritual and artistic renaissance in 2006-2016. Together, they constitute an unparalleled visual map to the inner workings of a unique creative mind.

As seen on CBS News Sunday Morning and CBS News This Morning: "No city has designed its lighting to look good from orbit. Yet our city lights viewed from above are truly spectacular - a beautiful, unintended consequence of civilization. They radiate into space a message about who we are." (foreword) - Donald R. Pettit / NASA Astronaut. Sublime, quiet, serene, surreal, and other-worldly... these are just a few of the adjectives that only begin to describe Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet's mesmerizing high-altitude nighttime aerial photos over some of the most iconic cities around the world including New York, London, Sydney, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Berlin, and Barcelona. "AIR is a project born of my need to share an important lesson I've discovered over the past decade making aerial photographs: the world is much smaller than we think." says Laforet. "Borders are irrelevant and distances shortened.

32Daring to Look presents never-before-published photos and captions from Dorothea Lange’s fieldwork in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina during 1939. Lange’s images of squatter camps, benighted farmers, and stark landscapes are stunning, and her captions—which range from simple explanations of settings to historical notes and biographical sketches—add unexpected depth, bringing her subjects and their struggles unforgettably to life, often in their own words.

When Lange was dismissed from the Farm Security Administration at the end of 1939, these photos and field notes were consigned to archives, where they languished, rarely seen. With Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn not only returns them to the public eye, but sets them in the context of Lange’s pioneering life, work, and struggle for critical recognition—firmly placing Lange in her rightful position at the forefront of American photography.

32Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was a highly acclaimed social realist photographer who recorded one of the most important historical periods in American social history. In 1935, tired of studio portraiture, she began working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and created many of the images that define the Depression and the disastrous migration of farming families to the West in the popular imagination. This monograph is a concise introduction to her work, with an essay, 55 photographs and picture-by-picture commentaries.

32Toward the end of her life, Dorothea Lange reflected, "All photographs-not only those that are so-called 'documentary'... can be fortified by words." Though Lange's career is widely heralded, this connection between words and pictures has received scant attention. A committed social observer, Lange paid sharp attention to the human condition, conveying stories of everyday life through her photographs and the voices they drew in. Published in conjunction with the first major MoMA exhibition of Lange's in 50 years, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures brings fresh attention to iconic works from the collection together with lesser-known photographs-from early street photography to projects on the criminal justice system. The work's complex relationships to words show Lange's interest in art's power to deliver public awareness and to connect to intimate narratives in the world.

32This beautiful volume celebrates one of the twentieth century's most important photographers, Dorothea Lange. Led off by an authoritative biographical essay by Elizabeth Partridge (Lange's goddaughter), the book goes on to showcase Lange's work in over a hundred glorious plates. Dorothea Lange is the only career-spanning monograph of this major photographer's oeuvre in print, and features images ranging from her iconic Depression-era photograph "Migrant Mother" to lesser-known images from her global travels later in life. Presented as the companion book to a PBS American Masters episode that will air in 2014, this deluxe hardcover offers an intimate and unparalleled view into the life and work of one of our most cherished documentary photographers.

32Reprinted for the first time, this is the most comprehensive collection of the photographer's work ever published. It includes portraits from her early years as a fashionable studio photographer as well as classic images that established her as the preeminent documentary artist of her time.

Frans Lanting’s vibrant tribute to Old Africa revisited on its 20th anniversary.
"Botswana, many say, represents the last of Old Africa. And in the heart of this arid land lies a place as inspiring and as incongruous as the snow-capped summit of Kilimanjaro rising on the equator: that is the Okavango, one of the greatest wetlands on earth, whose very existence in the middle of a desert is nothing short of miraculous." —Frans Lanting, 1993

A notoriously reclusive artist, Sergio Larrain (1931-2012) has nonetheless become a touchstone for those who have come to know and love his work, including authors Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar. Celebrated by Henri Cartier-Bresson, his contemporary and a co-founder of Magnum, Larrain's experimental process yielded images that transformed the fixed nature of the medium. His images have left generations of viewers in awe of the simultaneous serenity and spontaneity that a camera can capture--when placed, that is, in the hands of an artist with such rare meditative passion. "A good image is born from a state of grace," the artist once explained. Sergio Larrain, a selection of more than 200 images, rectifies Larrain's omission from the canon of significant twentieth-century photographers, and combines his work in Latin America with photographs taken in Europe.

A notoriously reclusive artist, Sergio Larrain had a photographic career that was relatively short before he retreated to the Chilean countryside in the late 1960s to study meditation. Nevertheless, he is widely celebrated for his experimental process and the raw imagery he produced throughout Europe and Latin America. His most well-known project, Valparaíso, began in 1957 while he was traveling with poet Pablo Neruda for Du magazine. When the photographs were first published in 1991, Larrain informed the publishers that he had made his own facsimile of the book, reflecting how he would have constructed the layout, and now this facsimile is beautifully produced for the first time in book form. Including text by the celebrated Pablo Neruda as well as correspondence between Larrain and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Valparaíso presents the long-awaited return of this rare and renowned body of work.

30Jacques Henri Lartigue's carefree, joyful, and spontaneous spirit permeates his photography. And yet there are other, lesser-known aspects of his work that invite us to take a closer look. Whether capturing amusing scenes on film or sketching them on paper or canvas, the artist covered a vast range of themes. Lartigue took photographs throughout his career, almost as a matter of routine, which makes his work a vital record of his times. His style gradually evolved, influenced by artistic experiments and personal encounters.

He left behind a rich and varied body of work. Albums of his private photographs provide a romanticized view of the photographer's personal life, revealing his doubts and attempts to understand his place in the world; they constitute an essential part of his body of work. Lartigue played with visual tricks, styles, and recurring themes--transportation, sports, shadow play, chic women--bridging different periods and lending consistency to his work.

The selection of photographs reproduced here represents the best examples of his most popular themes.

30Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) is a central figure of importance in the history of photography. "An amateur graced with genius for forms", at the age of 12 he was already producing photographs capturing the carefree antics of his eccentric family and friends. It was in these early years that he developed a fascination for the subjects that concerned him throughout his life: the immensity of the world to a child; the seaside; women of fashion; and above all, movement -from people walking or jumping, to flying machines and motor cars. Lartigue's photographic work was little-known until the 1960s, which gave him a unique freedom to create images for himself alone, unfettered by the criticism of others. His images evoke the sparkle of a long-gone era, documenting an idyllic world of ladies with parasols and gravity-defying hats; people flying kites or strolling in the park, on bicyles and at the races. This book offers an illustrated tribute to this photographer.

30A sweeping photographic retrospective of the artist's life and work presents the best of Lartigue's entire catalog of photography--from his first photograph to his last-accompanied by six essays covering various aspects of his art. 10,000 first printing.

30Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was the best-known "amateur" in the history of photography, famously discovered by the art world and given an exhibition at MoMA in New York when he was in his late sixties. He began by recording the pastimes and customs of his wealthy Parisian milieu, indulging his fascination with sports and aviation, and throughout his long life he was never without his camera. His friendships extended to the superstars of French culture, but he also made thousands of photographs of his family, wives, and lovers. His work was irresistibly warm and engaging.

Although known for his black-and-white work, Lartigue loved color film, experimenting with the Autochrome process in the teens and twenties and embracing Ektachrome in the late 1940s. His color work, reproduced here for the first time, is astonishingly fresh: the French countryside, the women in his life, famous friends (Picasso, Fellini), and glimpses from his travels all come alive in this delightful book.

An-My Lê's first publication, Small Wars, brought together three bodies of black-and-white work (Vietnam, Small Wars and 29 Palms), offering a trilogy of tautly rendered examinations of landscape, war, memory and spectacle. This earlier work examined the troubling beauty that both informs and binds Hollywood evocations and photojournalistic documents of conflict to Lê's childhood experiences in wartime Vietnam. Events Ashore continues her exploration of the American military, a pursuit both personal and civic. With this body of work, however, Lê emerges as a master colorist, employing the compositional precision and subtlety of palette of the large-format color negative to render the kaleidoscopic shifts of terrain and sudden intrusions of beauty, atmosphere and psychology within her observations of the military at work.

67This oversized book contains twenty-six powerful and psychologically intimate images. Learoyd's minutely detailed, large-scale color portraits do not look like other photographs. Made with a giant camera comprised of two rooms, Learoyd's subject (generally a person, though sometimes an object such as a mirror) occupies one room containing a powerful light source, while the photographic paper occupies the adjacent camera obscura (dark room in Latin). Connecting the two rooms is a lens set within a bellows an accordion-like contraption dating from the medium's first century. The direct-positive images are generous in size and have a subtle tonal range that is reminiscent of Dutch Master painting, though are clearly portraits and studies of our time. In addition to the twenty-six portraits and still lives, the book includes a number of details illustrating the particular focal characteristics of the camera obscura as well as installation photographs.

67This deluxe, oversized monograph offers the most comprehensive collection of British photographer Richard Learoyd's (born 1966) color studio images to date--mostly portraits, but also including a handful of exquisite still lifes. The color images are made with one of the most antiquarian of photographic processes: the camera obscura, literally translated from Latin as "dark room." Learoyd has created a room-sized camera in which the Cibachrome photographic paper is exposed. The subject is in the adjacent room, separated by a lens. Light falling on the subject is directly focused onto the photographic paper without an interposing film negative. The result is a perfectly clear, entirely grainless, larger-than-life image. Learoyd's subjects, composed simply and directly, are described with the thinnest plane of focus, recreating and exaggerating the way that the human eye perceives; the images recall Dutch Master paintings in tone and composition.

42"I first saw some of Laurence’s images in 1993, when she was intersted in covering the 'Secret World'v tour around the world. There was a strong mood to her pictures, very different from any other photos at that time. I was very impressed by her work and although it is not something we normally do, we granted her request to photograph the Tour. The photos she took at that time were wonderful, and as a result we included some of them in the artwork for the Secret World Live record – they are some of my favorites in the photo archives.
Laurence has continued to explore new areas in her work, and I have watched her develop into an extraordinary artist. "
-- Peter Gabriel’s preface

124“I don’t have two lives,” Annie Leibovitz writes in the Introduction to this collection of her work from 1990—2005. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Portraits of well-known figures–Johnny Cash, Nicole Kidman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Keith Richards, Michael Jordan, Joan Didion, R2-D2, Patti Smith, Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, William Burroughs, George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet–appear alongside pictures of Leibovitz’s family and friends, reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early Nineties, and landscapes made even more indelible through Leibovitz’s discerning eye. The images form a narrative rich in contrasts and continuities: The photographer has a long relationship that ends with illness and death. She chronicles the celebrations and heartbreaks of her large and robust family. She has children of her own. All the while she is working, and the public work resonates with the themes of her life.

124The celebrated photographer Annie Leibovitz, author of the New York Times bestselling book A Photographer's Life, provides the stories, and technical description, of how some of her most famous images came to be. Starting in 1974, with her coverage of Nixon's resignation, and culminating with her controversial portraits of Queen Elizabeth II early in 2007, Leibovitz explains what professional photographers do and how they do it. The photographer in this instance is the most highly paid and prolific person in the business. Approximately 90 images are discussed in detail -- the circumstances under which they were taken, with specific technical information (what camera, what settings, what lighting, where the images appeared). The Rolling Stones' tour in 1975, the famous nude session with John Lennon and Yoko Ono hours before Lennon was killed, the American Express and Gap campaigns, Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk, Demi Moore pregnant and naked on the cover of Vanity Fair, and coverage of the couture collections in Paris with Puff Daddy and Kate Moss are among the subjects of this original and informative work. The photos and stories are arranged chronologically, moving from film to digital.

124The photographs by Annie Leibovitz in Women, taken especially for the book, encompass a broad spectrum of subjects: a rap artist, an astronaut, two Supreme Court justices, farmers, coal miners, movie stars, showgirls, rodeo riders, socialites, reporters, dancers, a maid, a general, a surgeon, the First Lady of the United States, the secretary of state, a senator, rock stars, prostitutes, teachers, singers, athletes, poets, writers, painters, musicians, theater directors, political activists, performance artists, and businesswomen. "Each of these pictures must stand on its own," Susan Sontag writes in the essay that accompanies the portraits. "But the ensemble says, So this what women are now -- as different, as varied, as heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this."

Leibovitz addresses young photographers and readers interested in what photographers do, but any reader interested in contemporary history will be fascinated by her account of one of the richest bodies of work in the photographic canon. The subjects include photojournalism, studio work, photographing dancers and athletes, working with writers, and making the transition from shooting with film to working with digital cameras. Originally published in 2008, this revised and updated edition brings Leibovitz's bestselling book back into print.

124Pilgrimage took Annie Leibovitz to places that she could explore with no agenda. She wasn’t on assignment. She chose the subjects simply because they meant something to her. The first place was Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, which Leibovitz visited with a small digital camera. A few months later, she went with her three young children to Niagara Falls. “That’s when I started making lists,” she says. She added the houses of Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin in the English countryside and Sigmund Freud’s final home, in London, but most of the places on the lists were American. The work became more ambitious as Leibovitz discovered that she wanted to photograph objects as well as rooms and landscapes. She began to use more sophisticated cameras and a tripod and to travel with an assistant, but the project remained personal. The final list of subjects is perhaps a bit eccentric. Georgia O’Keeffe and Eleanor Roosevelt but also Elvis Presley and Annie Oakley, among others. Figurative imagery gives way to the abstractions of Old Faithful and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Pilgrimage was a restorative project for Leibovitz, and the arc of the narrative is her own. “From the beginning, when I was watching my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, it was an exercise in renewal,” she says. “It taught me to see again.”

127The fruit of fantastic recent discoveries from Saul Leiter's vast archive, In My Room provides an in-depth study of the nude, through intimate photographs of the women Leiter knew. Showing deeply personal interior spaces, often illuminated by the lush natural light of the artist's studio in New York City's East Village, these black-and-white images reveal a unique type of collaboration between Leiter and his subjects. In the 1970s Leiter planned to make a book of nudes, but the project was never realized in his lifetime. Now, we get a first-time look at this body of work, which was begun on Leiter's arrival in New York in 1946 and honed over the next two decades. Leiter, who was also a painter, allows abstract elements into the photographs and often shows the influence of his favorite artists, including Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse. Leiter, who painted and took pictures prolifically up to his death, worked in relative obscurity until he entered his eighties. He preferred to be left alone, and resisted any type of explanation or analysis of his work. With In My Room, Leiter ushers viewers into his private world while retaining his strong sense of mystery.
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923. In 1946 he moved to New York to become a painter, but was encouraged to pursue photography by the photographic experimentation and influence of his friend, the Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart. Leiter subsequently enjoyed a successful career as a fashion photographer spanning three decades, and his images were published in magazines such as Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Elle and British Vogue. His work is held in many prestigious private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Leiter died in November 2013.

127Saul Leiter (b. 1923 in Pittsburgh) has only in recent years received his due as one of the great pioneers of color photography. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Leiter saw himself for a long time mainly as a painter.

After coming to New York in 1946, he exhibited alongside abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning before beginning in the late 1940s to take photographs. Like Robert Frank or Helen Levitt, he found his motifs on the streets of New York, but at the same time was visibly interested in abstraction. Edward Steichen was one of the first to discover Leiter's photography, showing it in the 1950s in two important exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Back then color photography was regarded as "low art," fit only for advertising. Leiter accordingly worked primarily as a fashion photographer, for magazines such as Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. Nearly forty years would go by before his extraordinary artistic color photography was rediscovered.

This book, published to mark the first major retrospective of Leiter's work anywhere in the world, features for the first time, in addition to his early black and white and color images, his fashion photography, the overpainted nudes, as well as his paintings and sketchbooks.

127The distinctive iconography of Saul Leiter’s early black and white photographs stems from his profound response to the dynamic street life of New York City in the late 1940s and 50s. While this technique borrowed aspects of the photodocumentary, Leiter’s imagery was more shaped by his highly individual reactions to the people and places he encountered. Like a Magic Realist with a camera, Leiter absorbed the mystery of the city and poignant human experiences. Together with Early Color, also published by Steidl, Early Black and White shows the impressive range of Leiter’s early photography.

127Although Edward Steichen exhibited some of Saul Leiter's color photographs at The Museum of Modern Art in 1953, for 40 years afterward they remained virtually unknown to the art world. Saul Leiter: Early Color provides the first opportunity to see a comprehensive presentation of images by one of photography's great originals. Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to be a painter, but through his friendship with the Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart, he quickly recognized the creative potential of photography. Though he continued to paint, exhibiting alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Leiter's camera became--like an extension of his arm and mind--an ever-present interpreter of life in the metropolis. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances. The lyricism and intensity of his vision come into fullest play in his eloquent handling of color unequaled by his contemporaries. Leiter's visual language of fragmentation, ambiguity and contingency is evoked by these 100 subtle, painterly images that stretched the boundaries of photography in the second half of the twentieth century.

127"Saul Leiter's apartment is filled with memories, photographs and paintings of people he knew and the people he lived with but Saul hasn't found the answers yet to questions as to why he has done what he did. Probably because he enjoyed doing it and that's about it. Every time I enter his place this is what strikes me: this apartment filled with his life. It moves me and touches me just the like man living there does. On the occasion of the gallery's fourth solo show, once again, I could'n resist making a catalogue. Saul has therefore been digging in his archive and selected 34 unpublished photographs for which I'm very grateful" - from the introduction by Roger Szmulewicz, Gallery owner. New small volume (21x15) with 34 previously unpublished colour images.

897Since the 1950s, Herman Leonard's photographs of jazz musicians have been crucial in shaping the image of the music and the world in which it was created. Leonard's friendships with jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis gave him rare access to the innovators who made modern jazz and the places in which they made it. Leonard took his camera into the smoky clubs and after-hours sessions, to backstage parties and musicians' apartments, to build an incomparable visual record of one of the twentieth century's most significant art forms. His luminous images of Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and many others, both in performance and "off duty," are at once supreme examples of the photographer's art and a unique record of a musical revolution. For this definitive collection of his work, Leonard has retrieved scores of previously unseen photographs, published here for the first time, alongside his most famous and widely recognized images. Accompanied by an essay exploring the stories behind the pictures, and an interview with Leonard revealing his techniques, Jazz captures and preserves the glory days of the music that has been called "the sound of surprise."

897The first book on Leonard's full body of work, including portraits of Billie Holliday, Tony Bennett, Quincy Jones and Frank Sinatra. With a camera as his backstage pass, Herman Leonard has photographed the giants of jazz in their golden age, movie stars on set and on their travels to exotic places, the fashion world of Paris in the 1960s, and the inner sanctums of his beloved New Orleans. His friendships with the jazz greats, moments at Harlem and Paris jazz clubs, and colorful life enabled him to document the lives of the cultural icons of his day, with such rare images as Marilyn Monroe on an elephant in the circus, to Albert Einstein at his desk. This exquisite book is the first full treatment of this extraordinary life and distinctive body of work, giving Leonard's photographs the artistic recognition that they deserve.

897Gathers postwar portraits of more than sixty top jazz musicians and singers from Louis Armstrong to Lester Young

897Typically a photograph of a jazz musician has several formal prerequisites: black and white film, an urban setting in the mid-twentieth century, and a black man standing, playing, or sitting next to his instrument. That's the jazz archetype that photography created. Author K. Heather Pinson discovers how such a steadfast script developed visually and what this convention meant for the music. Album covers, magazines, books, documentaries, art photographs, posters, and various other visual extensions of popular culture formed the commonly held image of the jazz player. Through assimilation, there emerged a generalized composite of how mainstream jazz looked and sounded. Pinson evaluates representations of jazz musicians from 1945 to 1959, concentrating on the seminal role played by Herman Leonard (b. 1923). Leonard's photographic depictions of African American jazz musicians in New York not only created a visual template of a black musician of the 1950s, but also became the standard configuration of the music's neoclassical sound today. To discover how the image of the musician affected mainstream jazz, Pinson examines readings from critics, musicians, and educators, as well as interviews, musical scores, recordings, transcriptions, liner notes, and oral narratives.

Eastman Kodak, the company which pioneered so much in photography from the 1880s through the 1960s, could have owned digital imaging; the very first electronic camera was born in one of Kodak's labs. Instead, they missed that boat, going into a tailspin that resulted in their eventual bankruptcy. Tied to that economic engine, the fortunes of Rochester, New York, the archetypal company town where Kodak had its headquarters, fell as "Big Yellow" collapsed. Catherine Leutenegger's attentive, deadpan studies of Rochester today explore the face of a city once central to photography but now irrelevant and adrift.

In his series Opera, photographer David Leventi (born 1978)-whose work has been widely published in Time, The New York Times Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler and American Photography-captures the interiors of more than 40 opera houses spanning four centuries and four continents. Shot meticulously over five years, Opera presents a typology; each empty hall is seen from the place at center stage where the singers would stand. The large-format camera reveals these temples of music in their wealth of architectural detail and acoustic design; the body of work historically documents landmarks that serve as symbols of their nations' wealth and grandeur, their dedication to the promotion of the arts and to bringing communities together. With its unique concept-the opera house as a lens for cultural survey, a unifying force and tradition across continents-the collection serves as a beautiful tribute to opera.

Helen Levitt (1913-2009) numbers among the foremost exponents of street photography. As a passionate observer and chronicler of everyday street life in New York, she spent decades documenting residents of the city's poorer neighbourhoods such as Lower East Side and Harlem. Levitt's oeuvre stands out for her sense of dynamics and surrealistic sense of humour, and her employment of color photography was revolutionary: Levitt numbers among those photographers who pioneered and established color as a means of artistic expression. The book accompanying the retrospective of the Albertina Museum features around 130 of her iconic works. These range from her early, surrealism-influenced photographs of chalk drawings to her 1941 photos from Mexico and the clandestinely shot portraits of New York subway passengers that Walker Evans encouraged her to do in 1938. Many of these photos come from Helen Levitt's personal estate, and this exhibition represents their first-ever public showing.

In 1938 Helen Levitt (1913-2009) accompanied Walker Evans on a project to photograph passengers on the New York subway. Soon she was taking her own pictures. More empathetic and informal than Evans', Levitt's finest photographs are the product of her willingness to participate as a fellow citizen, not as a photographer setting herself apart. The disarming ease of Levitt's pictures quickly accrues into an undeniably singular attitude to both the medium and the world.
Around 1978-a full four decades after her first foray-Levitt returned to the New York subway, by which time public behavior on the subway was visibly less formal. She seems to have picked up exactly where she had left off in 1938, but in general her photography was even less restricted-more in keeping with her looser street photographs. This is the most comprehensive publication of Helen Levitt's photographs from the New York subway, many of which are published here for the first time.

Helen Levitt's earliest pictures are a unique and irreplaceable look at street life in New York City from the mid-1930s to the end of the 1940s. There are children at play, lovers flirting, husbands and wives, young mothers with their babies, women gossiping, and lonely old men. A majority of these photographs have never been published. Other pictures included in this book are now world-famous, now part of the standard history of photography. Together they provide a record of New York not seen since Levitt's pioneering solo show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1943.
Levitt's photographs are in some of the best photography collections in America, including: The Met, MoMA, The Smithsonian, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

483Despite the promise of alternative energy, coal still fuels most of our power plants and steel mills. The story of its extraction, and of the people who live, work, and endure in West Virginia, Southwestern Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, has been a source of fascination bordering on obsession for the photographer Builder Levy. For four decades, he has been witness to a dangerous industry where workers operate heavy machinery in close quarters underground, extracting ever-increasing tonnage of coal. Over the last two decades, at surface mines, Levy has seen powerful explosives tear apart mountain summits, followed by giant draglines that scoop out the exposed veins of coal in massive, destructive, quantities. He has also witnessed strikes and picket lines, desperation and rage, hope and dignity, and the inevitable natural and man-made disasters that are part of the territory.

483The photographs in this book invite us to experience real lives as real people live them, while at the same time enjoying the beauty of the photographic medium. Builder Levy's work combines social documentary and street photography with the elements of fine art. In these photographs we come face to face with persevering individuals in inner-city neighborhoods in New York City; in communities in the hills and "hollers" and inside coal mines of Appalachia; on the central Asian steppe of Mongolia; in Cuba; and at street demonstrations in the 1960s and the new millennium.

483Levy ( Colonialism in America: The Appalachian Case ) here presents 93 sensitive black-and-white documentary photographs of miners and mining communities taken in the 1970s and early '80s in West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. There are shots of miners setting up support struts or drilling holes for dynamite, working with pick and shovel, taking a lunch break. We see mining families and their friends, the bars they go to, the machines and tools of their trade, their homes and the towns where they live. We also see the slag heaps, sludge ponds and mountainsides denuded by strip-mining that lie in the mining industry's wake. Lewis's knowledgeable introduction to Appalachian mining examines the dangers of the work and the demographics of the industry, describes union struggles and community life in the coal camp and indicts ecologically destructive company policies throughout mining history.

936Between July 1945 and November 1962 the United States is known to have conducted 216 atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests. After the Limited Test Ban Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1963, nuclear testing went underground. It became literally invisible-but more frequent: the United States conducted a further 723 underground tests, the last in 1992. 100 Suns documents the era of visible nuclear testing, the atmospheric era, with one hundred photographs drawn by Michael Light from the archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. National Archives in Maryland. It includes previously classified material from the clandestine Lookout Mountain Air Force Station based in Hollywood, whose film directors, cameramen and still photographers were sworn to secrecy.

The title, 100 Suns, refers to the response by J.Robert Oppenheimer to the world's first nuclear explosion in New Mexico when he quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, the classic Vedic text: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . . I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." This was Oppenheimer's attempt to describe the otherwise indescribable. 100 Suns likewise confronts the indescribable by presenting without embellishment the stark evidence of the tests at the moment of detonation. Since the tests were conducted either in Nevada or the Pacific the book is simply divided between the desert and the ocean. Each photograph is presented with the name of the test, its explosive yield in kilotons or megatons, the date and the location. The enormity of the events recorded is contrasted with the understated neutrality of bare data. Interspersed within the sequence of explosions are pictures of the awestruck witnesses.

The evidence of these photographs is terrifying in its implication while at same time profoundly disconcerting as a spectacle. The visual grandeur of such imagery is balanced by the chilling facts provided at the end of the book in the detailed captions, a chronology of the development of nuclear weaponry and an extensive bibliography. A dramatic sequel to Michael Light's Full Moon, 100 Suns forms an unprecedented historical document.

936Located at 8,000 feet, 20 miles southwest of Salt Lake City in the Oquirrh Mountains, the Bingham Canyon copper mine is the largest manmade excavation in the world. More than half a mile deep, with a rim nearly three miles in width and a smelter stack only 35 feet shorter than the Empire State Building, Bingham has produced more copper than any mine in history. This volume presents San Francisco-based photographer Michael Light's series of breathtaking black-and-white aerial images of the Bingham Mine and Garfield Stack taken in the course of a single day. For the last several years, Light has become known for his aerial photos of the settled and unsettled areas of the American West, which reveal a fascination with geology, mapping and human impact on the land. These series have been published as limited edition, critically acclaimed artist's books; this is Light's first trade-edition release.

936The most thrilling of all journeys--the missions of the Apollo astronauts to the surface of the Moon and back--yielded 32,000 extraordinarily beautiful photographs, the record of a unique human achievement. Until recently, only a handful of these photographs had been released for publication; but now, for the first time, NASA has allowed a selection of the master negatives and transparencies to be scanned electronically, rendering the sharpest images of space that we have ever seen. Michael Light has woven 129 of these stunningly clear images into a single composite voyage, a narrative of breathtaking immediacy and authenticity that begins with the launch and is followed by a walk in space, an orbit of the Moon, a lunar landing and exploration, and a return to Earth with an orbit and splashdown.

Graced by five 45-inch-wide gatefolds that display the lunar landscape, from above the surface and at eye level, in unprecedented detail and clarity, Full Moon conveys on each page the excitement, disorientation, and awe that the astronauts themselves felt as they were shot into space and then as they explored an alien landscape and looked back at their home planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away.

Published on the thirtieth anniversary of Apollo 11--the first landing on the Moon--this remarkable and mesmerizing volume is, like the voyages it commemorates and re-creates, an experience both intimate and monumental.

936The greater Los Angeles area covers 4,850 square miles--the size of a small country--and holds almost 18 million people. Perhaps America's largest human creation, it has been vilified and celebrated in equal measure since its inception. Is L.A. the face of the apocalypse, or an ultimate paradise at continent's edge--or both? With LA Day/LA Night, photographer Michael Light continues his aerial examination of the arid American West by bringing together two opposing views of the city in a double-volume set. LA Day stares directly into the sun, which blasts the metropolis in a relentless and specific light. LA Night drifts over the city as it grows darker, and begins to resemble the starry sky vaulted above. Referencing Ed Ruscha, Peter Alexander, Julius Schulman and writers from Philip K. Dick to Raymond Chandler, LA Day/LA Night continues Los Angeles's rich cultural legacy of examining its favorite schizophrenic subject--itself.

936San Francisco-based photographer Michael Light's (b. 1963) fourth Radius book of his aerial survey Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West journeys into the vast geological space and time of the Great Basin—the heart of a storied national "void" that is both actual and psychological, treasured as much for its tabula rasa possibilities as it is hated for its utter hostility to human needs.

Twelve thousand years ago most of the Great Basin-that part of the country between California and Utah where water does not drain to the ocean- was 900 feet underwater, covered by two vast and now largely evaporated historical lakes, Bonneville and Lahontan. The shrunken remnants of Lake Bonneville today are the Great Salt Lake in Utah and its eponymous salt flats, while the best known portion of the former Lake Lahontan is the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, an alkali bed that floods and dries each year, creating the flattest topography on earth, home to the annual counterculture festival Burning Man.

“What’s Going On” is a collection of photographs taken from 1969-1974 showing Ken Light’s early work as he chronicled America and the political upheaval of his generation. In this era, America was deeply divided and at war with itself, yet Americans saw much promise and felt that fundamental change was possible. It was a time when young people believed they could create a better world. It is a period we should not forget. These photographs share many of the important moments of these times. Light began this work in his late teens and while some of the images were published in the underground newspapers back in the day, many more were not.

936Until 2008 Nevada was the fastest-growing state in America. But the recession stopped this urbanizing gallop in the Mojave Desert, and Las Vegas froze at exactly the point where its aspirational excesses were most baroque and unfettered. In this third Radius Books installment of noted photographer Michael Light's aerial survey of the inhabited West, the photographer eschews the glare of the Strip to hover intimately over the topography of America's most fevered residential dream: castles on the cheap, some half-built, some foreclosed, some hanging on surrounded by golf courses gone bankruptcy brown, some still waiting to spring from empty cul-de-sacs. Throughout, Light characteristically finds beauty and empathy amidst a visual vertigo of speculation, overreach, environmental delusion and ultimate geological grace. Janus-faced in design, one side of the book plumbs the surrealities of "Lake Las Vegas," a lifestyle resort comprised of 21 Mediterranean-themed communities built around a former sewage swamp. The other side of the book dissects nearby Black Mountain and the city's most exclusive-and empty -future community where a quarter billion dollars was spent on moving earth that has lain dormant for the past six years. Following the boom and bust history of the West itself, Light's photographs terrifyingly and poignantly show the extraction and habitation industries as two sides of the same coin.

128From the world's most foremost photographer of women comes the splendid celebrations of female form and mystique--a massive collection that spans 300 pages and covers every aspect of Peter Lindbergh's impressive body of work. Nearly every beautiful woman of the past two decades has posed for Peter Lindbergh, from supermodels to movie stars. This splendid monograph represents the definitive collection of Lindbergh's considerable oeuvre: classic fashion photographs, arresting candids, portraits of female celebrities--including Madonna, Isabella Rossellini, Sharon Stone, Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, Darryl Hannah--and of course his signature shots of the world's supermodels.

128Internationally-revered German fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh revolutionized his metier with iconic images of the 1980s supermodels. From his beginnings, he has sought to capture the personality, character, and identity of fashion models, not just the glitter and glamour. In 1997 he presented his seminal book Images of Women comprising his work of the 1980s and 1990s. As a sequel, Lindbergh now presents Images of Women II featuring the highlights of his work created between 2005 and 2014: fashion photographs, nudes, and portraits of today's actresses and models such as Milla Jovovich, Isabella Rossellini, Monica Bellucci, Jamie King, Emmanuelle Seigner, Tilda Swinton, Kate Moss, Elisa Sednaoui, Jessica Chastain, Hye Jung Lee--and the occasional man, such as Hollywood grand seigneur Kirk Douglas.

128Peter Lindbergh is one of the most talented photographers of his generation. His vision ranges from a world seen through the eyes of Fellini to that of post-war Berlin. His brilliantly posed fashion photographs depict women whose beauty is striking in its intensity. This remarkable collection features Lindbergh's most famous photographs, as well as never-before-published images from the past three years of his career. This visually stunning book includes an interview with Lindbergh by critic and photographer Antonio Ria.

128Peter Lindbergh is courted by international fashion magazines and is loved for his sensitive portraits of the most beautiful women in the world. The renowned photographer who lives in Paris and New York and works all over the world has also published two earlier books with overwhelming success: Ten Women (1996) with dream shots of ten dream models, and Images of Women (1997), a collection of famous fashion photographs of beautiful women.

As a climax in his third book, Untitled 116, Peter Lindbergh presents a collection of his most impressive photographs of 116 stars in the world of pop music, cinema and fashion, such as Monica Bellucci, Juliette Binoche, Naomi Campbell, Geraldine Chaplin, Catherine Deneuve, Linda Evangelista, Aretha Franklin, Daryl Hannah, Milla Jovovich, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Demi Moore, Jeanne Moreau, Charlotte Rampling, Anna Nicole Smith, Sharon Stone, Tina Turner, Isabella Rossellini, Veruschka, and many others.

836Baobab: Tree of Generations is a limited edition portfolio of twelve 11x14" pigment ink prints from Elaine Ling's acclaimed series of photographs of these magnificent trees from Madagascar, Mali and Limpopo, Africa. The Edition is limited to 30 portfolios.
Using the now discontinued 4x5 Polaroid positive/negative material with its distinctive edges, Ling's photographs capture the dramatic nature of these monumental trees. For this portfolio, the images are bled to the edges of the paper. Also included is an essay by Kevin Miller, Director, Southeast Museum of Photography.
This is the fifth publication in our photo-eye Editions series of contemporary photographers' projects. Housed in a beautiful, engraved aluminum box, the work is exquisitely printed on 11x14" Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper. These prints may easily be framed using our matching German-made, magnetic aluminum shadow-box frames. Please inquire about these wonderful frames

836Mongolia: Land of the Deer Stone is a visually stunning collection of Elaine Ling's photography. The book's sumptuous, oversized book contains 180 pages, with 116 photographs printed from 4x5 Polaroid negatives on heavy cover stock. Dr. Alison Devine Nordstrom, Curator of Photographs at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, wrote the introduction. Her engrossing text introduces Ling's elegant, deceptively spare photographs. She explains why and how their intimately, lyrical documentation of Mongolia's vast, half-million square miles of desert and nomadic people is notable. For six years between 2002 and 2008 photographer Elaine Ling explored a culture whose roots were established some 700 years ago, in the 13th century under the rule Chinggis Khan. During her five trips to Mongolia's Gobi Desert Ling searched for and subsequently photographed Deer Stones, Turkic Stones and the shamanistic stone makers, known as ovoos. Known for her interest in deserts, Ling's work is characterized by minimal compositions of light and form often mimicking the impactful, yet paradoxically simple desert landscape. Her passion for simple forms and scenes led her to the Gobi in search of a subject scattered throughout: ancient stones. In the process, her impassioned journey and warm nature opened the hearts and homes of people she encountered. It is this unique access that gives the audience a look at a culture currently experiencing a rebirth of Buddhist traditions nearly lost under Soviet suppression. Commanding and intimate, Mongolia: Land of the Desert is a pictorial tribute to a magical and mysterious land, its people, and their traditions. Elaine's Ling's compassionate collection provides a breathtaking and revealing peak into a rich culture against an astonishing backdrop of desert, high plains, and mountains.

836For thirty years, photographer Elaine Ling wandered through deserts, canyons and jungles across four continents gathering the mythology of stones. This book offers a stunning global view of a very unique presentation of natural and ancient stones, from the Joshua Tree to a Chinese tomb, from the ruins of Petra in Jordan to the junge of Myanmar, from Cappadocia to Australia's Kangaroo Island. Listen to the polyphonic voice of Talking Stones.

Only the most intrepid urban explorers cross the tattered ruins of the old iron curtain to endure the excessive bureaucracy, military paranoia and freezing winds of the East to hunt for the ghosts of an empire. Rebecca Litchfield is one who couldn’t resist the haunting allure of the ruins of the Soviet Union. Time and again she risked radiation exposure, experienced arrest and interrogation, and was accused of espionage while collecting the stunning photography in Soviet Ghosts. Join her on an adventure through the ruins of soviet bloc, never before seen by western eyes.

863

863To contemplate Jean Daniel Lorieux's work is to contemplate an entire era, which this emblematic photographer made sure to capture on film. Even though he started his career as a war reporter in Algeria, it now seems that Lorieux only has eyes for beauty. As a result, he travelled the world, pursuing sun and blue skies in order to give striking contrasts to his pictures.

Breaking down the structure of the photograph as truth and the book as narrative, Joshua Lutz's second monograph, HESITATING BEAUTY, it is an intimate portrait unlike other photographic models. Rethinking how photographs and text can function, Lutz blends family archives, interviews and letters with his own photographic practice seamlessly into a precious, fictitious experience of a life and family consumed by mental illness. Instead of showing us what it looks like, HESITATING BEAUTY is able to play with our own conceptions of reality to show us what it feels like.

57Though the sense of realism in German photographer Loretta Lux's striking portraits of children remains eerily intact, Lux does not strive to create faithful photographic representations of her young subjects. Instead, each image--invariably comprised of a lone child in a sparse landscape--is painstakingly composed and manipulated to create psychically charged explorations of the nature of childhood and the process of self-discovery. Originally trained as a painter, Lux continues to draw influence from paintings by old masters such as Velasquez, Goya and Runge. This influence is especially apparent in Lux's compositions. After carefully choosing the models, costumes and backdrops--sometimes using her own paintings--she digitally combines and enhances each element to form meticulously structured tableaux. The consistently forlorn expressions of her models combined with the hyperreality of the image create portraits that transcend their subjects and remind us that childhood is as chaotic and multidimensional as any other part of life.

New York-based photographer Janelle Lynch (born 1969) creates still lives within landscapes that combine similar and disparate elements. Informed by Lynch’s recent immersion in drawing and painting, the biological need for connection and the consequences of disconnection.

Following in the footsteps of classic films like The Maltese Falcon and The Lady from Shanghai, veteran photographer Fred Lyon creates images of San Francisco in high contrast with a sense of mystery. In this latest offering from the photographer of San Francisco: Portrait of a City 1940–1960, Lyon presents a darker tone, exploring the hidden corners of his native city. Images taken in the foggy night are illuminated only by neon signs, classic car headlights, apartment windows, or streetlights. Sharply dressed couples stroll out for evening shows, drivers travel down steep hills, and sailors work through the night at the old Fisherman's Wharf. Stylistically, many of the photographs are experimental the noir tone is enhanced by double exposures, elements of collage, and blurred motion. These strikingly evocative duotone images expose a view of San Francisco as only Fred Lyon could capture.

First published in 1968, and now back in print for the first time in ten years, The Bikeriders explores firsthand the stories and personalities of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. This journal-size volume features original black-and-white photographs and transcribed interviews by Lyon, made from 1963 to 1967, when he was a member of the Outlaws gang. Authentic, personal and uncompromising, Lyon's depiction of individuals on the outskirts of society offers a gritty yet humane perspective that subverts more commercialized treatments of Americana. Akin to the documentary style of 1960s-era New Journalism made famous by writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, Lyon's photography is saturation reporting at its finest. The Bikeriders is a touchstone publication of 1960s counterculture, crucially defining the vision of the outlaw biker as found in Easy Rider and countless other movies and photobooks.

Danny Lyon is one of the 20th century’s most influential documentary photographers. In The Seventh Dog, Lyon tells the story of his personal photographic journey, beginning in the present day and moving back in time through the 1950s. Beautifully produced, this unique photo book features Lyon’s own writings, collages, letters, documents, and color and black–and–white photographs – many published here for the first time.

San Francisco Then by Fred Lyon is cloth bound, Hard cover, 9.5 x 11 inches, 112 pages, 70 dual-color plates. Signed copies are available. Publication date May 2010 Brand New 2nd Edition.

With a landmark around every corner and a picture perfect view atop every hill, San Francisco might be the world's most picturesque city. And yet, the Golden City is so much more than postcard vistas. It's a town alive with history, culture, and a palpable sense of grandeur best captured by a man known as San Francisco's Brassai. Walking the city's foggy streets, the fourth-generation San Franciscan captures the local's view in dramatic black-and-white photos— from fog-drenched mornings in North Beach and cable cars on Market Street to moody night shots of Coit Tower and the twists and turns of Lombard Street. In San Francisco, Portrait of a City 1940–1960, Fred Lyon captures the iconic landscapes and one-of-a-kind personalities that transformed the city by the bay into a legend. Lyon's anecdotes and personal remembrances, including sly portraits of San Francisco characters such as writer Herb Caen, painters Richard Diebenkorn and Jean Varda, and madame and former mayor of Sausalito Sally Stanford add an artist's first-hand view to this portrait of a classic American city.