Monographs & Art Books / N

A document of war and strife during the 1990s, this volume of photographs by the photojournalist James Nachtwey includes dramatic and shocking images of human suffering in Rwanda, Somalia, Romania, Bosnia, Chechnya and India, a well as photographs of the conflict in Kosovo. An essay by the author Luc Sante is included. The book is published to coincide with an exhibition of Nachtwey's work at the International Centre of Photography, New York.

A recent French biography begins, Who doesn't know Nadar? In France, that's a rhetorical question. Of all of the legendary figures who thrived in mid-19th-century Paris-a cohort that includes Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, and Alexandre Dumas-Nadar was perhaps the most innovative, the most restless, the most modern.

The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the prime mover behind the first airmail service, Nadar was one of the original celebrity artist-entrepreneurs. A kind of 19th-century Andy Warhol, he knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them all, conferring on posterity psychologically compelling portraits of Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix, Daumier and countless others-a priceless panorama of Parisian celebrity.

Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, he adopted the pseudonym Nadar as a young bohemian, when he was a budding writer and cartoonist. Later he affixed the name Nadar to the façade of his opulent photographic studio in giant script, the illuminated letters ten feet tall, the whole sign fifty feet long, a garish red beacon on the boulevard. Nadar became known to all of Europe and even across the Atlantic when he launched "The Giant," a gas balloon the size of a twelve-story building, the largest of its time. With his daring exploits aboard his humongous balloon (including a catastrophic crash that made headlines around the world), he gave his friend Jules Verne the model for one of his most dynamic heroes.

The Great Nadar is a brilliant, lavishly illustrated biography of a larger-than-life figure, a visionary whose outsized talent and canny self-promotion put him way ahead of his time.

Celebrated nineteenth-century photographer-and writer, actor, caricaturist, inventor, and balloonist-Félix Nadar published this memoir of his photographic life in 1900 at the age of eighty. Composed as a series of vignettes (we might view them as a series of "written photographs"), this intelligent and witty book offers stories of Nadar's experiences in the early years of photography, memorable character sketches, and meditations on history. It is a classic work, cited by writers from Walter Benjamin to Rosalind Krauss. This is its first and only complete English translation.

In When I Was a Photographer (Quand j'étais photographe), Nadar tells us about his descent into the sewers and catacombs of Paris, where he experimented with the use of artificial lighting, and his ascent into the skies over Paris in a hot air balloon, from which he took the first aerial photographs. He recounts his "postal photography" during the 1870-1871 Siege of Paris-an amazing scheme involving micrographic images and carrier pigeons. He describes technical innovations and important figures in photography, and offers a thoughtful consideration of society and culture; but he also writes entertainingly about such matters as Balzac's terror of being photographed, the impact of a photograph on a celebrated murder case, and the difference between male and female clients. Nadar's memoir captures, as surely as his photographs, traces of a vanished era.

Beginning in 1989, world renown photographer Lu Nan spent fifteen years completing his trilogy: Part One: The Forgotten People--Living Conditions of China's Psychiatric Patients; Part Two: On the Road--The Catholic Faith in China; Part Three: Four Seasons--Everyday Life of Tibetan Peasants. In this opus magnum of epic photography works, Nan affirms a richly human way of seeing.

Each photograph in the trilogy stands on its own, yet belonging inalienably to the whole. Each is a crystalline node that amplifies and extends the other; every individual moment is at the same time an empirical part of all other moments. The trilogy focuses on the human condition in three realms. Particles of substances are caught up in a web of light and shade, suggesting a state of moral elevation and ultimately guiding the viewer's gaze towards a secluded inner spiritual world in all of us.

From 1992 to 1996, Lu Nan photographed On the Road: The Catholic Faith in China, Part Two of the trilogy, across ten provinces and cities in China.

The book is divided into three sections: Forgotten People - looking at the harsh conditions patients endured in psychiatric wards in China. On the Road - an examination of the Catholic faith in China. Four Seasons - an insight into the lives of Tibetan peasants.

For years Daniel Naudé has traversed South Africa's countryside recording his travels as a way of understanding South Africa and its complexities. Among his most arresting subjects are animals, and the collection of images in this book is as beautiful as it is intriguing.

The penetrating stare of a feral Africanis dog; the regal dignity of enormous horned cattle; farmers bottle-feeding a lamb, clutching a young donkey, or stolidly leading their goats to pasture-all are photographed against the backdrop of South Africa's rolling hills, grasslands, and seashore. As Naudé's muted colors contrast with the animals' stark silhouettes, viewers are compelled to share his intrepid curiosity about the nature of human dominion over animals, and about how the histories of all living things are intertwined and indivisible.

This book is a narrative and pictorial celebration of the Ankole, the most magnificent breed of cattle in the world. In this majestic book, Cyril Ramaphosa reveals his passion and love for cattle as he introduces us to the magnificent Ankole cattle, originating in Uganda, and now, through his intervention, flourishing in South Africa.

He reflects on the legacy bequeathed him by his father, Samuel Mundzhedzi Ramaphosa, who had to leave behind his cattle herd in Venda to find work in Johannesburg. Life in the city was tough and demanding, weakening Samuel's links with his ancestral origins and causing the loss of his herd. The love of cattle runs deep in South Africans and Cyril is fulfilling his father's legacy, instilling a new pride for South Africans with these remarkable cattle.

The renowned South African photographer Daniel Naudé's moving studies of cattle in cultures where they are considered sacred offer unique insight into the lives of the people, the animals, and the spiritual practices that have remained unchanged for thousands of years. For the past two years Daniel Naudé has focused on photographing cattle in societies where these animals are venerated.

This beautiful book presents images from parts of Uganda, Madagascar, and India where these animals represent a culture's most profound beliefs. Naudé photographs his subjects with the same respect any photographer would lend toward humans. Richly colored and exquisitely composed, these portraits capture the animals' presence and the landscapes they inhabit while also telling us much about cosmology, ancestor worship, culture, and the tradition of spiritual practices that have evolved over the ages. Like the best photographers, Naudé achieves this all within a single photographic frame.

Drawn from the archives of some of the world’s finest museums, this collection of historic specimens, photographed for stereoscopic viewing, brings the natural world to life in thrilling and beautiful ways. Since collecting fossils as a child, photographer Jim Naughten has always been fascinated by the natural world.

Now a renowned photographer, he has started to experiment with stereography and has turned to his boyhood interest, gaining access to some of the world’s most prestigious natural history museums. This gorgeously produced book contains 50 images of marine life, reptiles, mammals, birds, and primates photographed expressly for viewing through a stereoscope, which is included with the book. Stereoscopy was invented in 1839 to study binocular vision. Having two eyes allows humans to determine distance and depth, and stereoscopy shows a left- and right-eye view from a slightly different angle, as we see things in day-to-day life.

Looking through the viewer, readers will see the specimens as three-dimensional objects. As the images jump off the page, their incredible details become apparent―delicate bat wings, the spiraling skeleton of a python, the almost mythic form of a leafy sea dragon. Texts on the work, the history of stereoscopy, and the specimens themselves provide rich background to the project and Naughten's achievement in bringing to life a world that seamlessly melds the past and present.

The magnificent traditional costume of the Herero of Namibia, southern Africa, is a stark reminder of the country's tumultuous past. In the late 19th century, the influence of missionaries and traders in German Southwest Africa led to the adoption by the Herero of the European dress of the day.

Over time, the voluminous gowns, completed by a cattle-horn-shaped headdress, came to represent the cultural identity of the Herero women. The men's ceremonial dress also harks back to colonial times: following the brutal war of 1904, the Herero adapted the uniforms of German soldiers for their own Otruppe ('troops') movement. In Conflict and Costume, acclaimed photographer Jim Naughten captures the colorful Herero attire in a series of spectacular portraits.

Set against the Namibian landscape, these dramatic images show the striking costumes and their proud owners to full effect: men in elaborate, home-made paramilitary uniforms, and women in spectacular floor-length frocks with matching horns. Dr Lutz Marten contributes an insightful text that places the dress in its historical context.

Every summer thousands of people from all over the world gather in a Kentish field and leave the present firmly behind. They step out of their routine daily lives and transform into historical characters from the First and Second World Wars, often embracing their roles with such vigor and obsessive attention to detail that it is hard to imagine them outside of this fictitious combat zone.

Taking on a different name, identity and sometimes even a different tongue, these roleplayers re-enact battles and drills from an imagined past to a degree that becomes something more than acting, a collective fantasy played out on a massive scale. London photographer Jim Naughten's portraits of these re-enactors are shot formally, in three-quarter profile, usually from the legs up, against white back drops--an effect that heightens the sense of artifice and anachronism. Beautifully bound and printed, this volume records a world apart from both past and present.

A spellbinding journey into the world of Chanel haute couture, captured by one of fashion's most acclaimed photographers.

In exclusive shoots with the house of Chanel, photographer Cathleen Naundorf gained rare access to their haute couture collections--which entail thousands of hours of handwork, crafting, and embellishing. The result: a book of ethereal, cinematic photographs of gowns against theatrical backdrops that capture the ensembles' exquisiteness and the magical allure of haute couture. This is what sartorial dreams are made of.

For more than two decades, Naundorf has used her expert photographic skills to pay homage to the haute couture aesthetic. Combining her experiences in travel, art, and photojournalism, Naundorf elaborately arranges each detail of her images using storyboards and extensively researches the lighting for every image. Captured with analogue large-format cameras, each photograph is a singular vision suggesting romance, surrealism, exoticism, and above all else, fantasy.

Catalog of the exhibition at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris, France. It comes in 10 booklets, each one of them dedicated to one period of Marie-Paule Nègre's work. It is a wonderful book to discover or rediscover the work of this French artist.

"This book is about a journey. Not only physical but also spiritual, made of experiences and feelings. Carried out over many years and through hundred places, and yet timeless and motionless. A deep dive into the human soul.

Photography has been for me like a bridge, a way to wordlessly talk to people, communicating only through shared feelings and common sensations.

I have been walking a long way, listening to the voices and the emotions welcoming my footsteps … the ambiguous yet unforgettable beauty of fallen angels, while smiling devils were winking at me from behind a corner … a mirror sending back to me reflections of tenderness and compassion, sadness and passion, desolation and joy. So many shadows and so many sunrays.

Pathos has been my companion all along my photographic journey." -- Giorgio Negro

A driven perfectionist with inexhaustible curiosity about people, Arnold Newman was one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most prolific photographers. In a career that spanned nearly seven decades and produced many iconic works, Newman became renowned for making “pictures of people” (he objected to the term “portraits”) in the places where they worked and lived―the spaces that were most expressive of their inner lives.

Refusing the label of “art photographer,” Newman also accepted magazine and advertising commissions and executed them to the same exacting standards that characterized all of his work. He spent countless hours training aspiring photographers, sharing his own vast experience, but allowing them the freedom to experiment and discover. Rich with materials from Newman’s extensive archive in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Arnold Newman offers unprecedented, firsthand insights into the evolution of the photographer’s creativity. Reproduced here are not only many of Newman’s signature images, but also contact sheets, Polaroids, and work prints with his handwritten notes, which allow us to see the process by which he produced the images.

Pages from his copious notebooks and calendars reveal Newman’s meticulous preparation and exhausting schedule. Adsheets and magazine covers from Holiday, LIFE, Newsweek, Look, Esquire, Seventeen, Time, and Sports Illustrated show the range of Newman’s largely unknown editorial work. Roy Flukinger provides a contextual overview of the archive, and Marianne Fulton’s introduction highlights the essential moments in the development of Newman’s life and work.

Arnold Newman (1918-2006) was one of the most productive, creative, and successful portrait photographers of the twentieth century.

For nearly seventy years, he applied himself to his craft, and he was rewarded by the regular publication of his work in the most influential magazines of the day. He also had several major solo exhibitions, and his work can be found in prestigious photography collections around the world. A celebration of Newman's achievements and the first monograph to be published after his death, this book contains more than 200 images, many of which have never before been seen in book form. These include individual and group portraits, as well as landscapes, architectural details, and cityscapes.

Published to accompany a touring show opening in Berlin in March 2012, the book features quotes from interviews with Newman, short biographies of his sitters, and essays on this most deeply principled of perfectionists. The mainly black-andwhite photographs showcase Newman's remarkable talent-with subjects ranging from Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe to Igor Stravinsky and Gore Vidal-in an homage to a true master of modern photography.

Published to coincide with the centennial of Arnold Newman's birth, Arnold Newman: One Hundred offers a celebratory look at 100 of the photographer's most provocative and memorable images.

Arnold Newman is widely renowned for pioneering and popularizing the environmental portrait. He placed his sitters in surroundings representative of their professions, aiming to capture the essence of an individual's life and work. Though this approach is commonplace today, his technique was highly unconventional in the 1930s when he began shooting his subjects. His environmental approach to portraiture was influenced by symbolism and impressionism, and defined by the imperative of captivating the viewer no matter how well known the subject was.

While he specialized in photographing artists, Newman captured the likenesses of a vast range of figures, from athletes and actors to presidents and politicians, including Marlene Dietrich, John F. Kennedy, Harry S. Truman, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan, Mickey Mantle and Audrey Hepburn.

Two cameras, one couple: Helmut Newton and Alice Springs turn the lens on their love and their life.

Us and Them is an ode to partnership and art. First published in 1999, it gathers photographs by Helmut Newton and his wife, the actress and photographer June Newton, who worked under the pseudonym Alice Springs. The collection is arranged into five sections, alternating the gaze between Newton and Spring’s own tender internal world of “Us”, and the glamorous encounters of their social and professional milieu -“Them”.

The “Us” sections of the book reveal the pair’s portraits of each other and themselves, as startling in their moments of vulnerability as they are infectious in their episodes of joy. We see the pair pensive, weary, or roaring with laughter. Alice photographs Helmut on set with his models, in the shower, and in stilettos. Helmut captures Alice in the kitchen, in costume, and hanging up the washing in the nude. Along the way, we are alerted to the frailties and intimacies that make up a long-term partnership and that coexisted with the high-voltage glamour for which Newton is renowned. The particular power of the pictures is to locate as much magnetism and beauty in an aging, ailing partner (Helmut in the hospital, Alice adjusting her spectacles), as in the pristine physiques of a Newton fashion shoot.

In the concluding “Them” section, Newton and Springs each turn their lens on the same, typically famous, subjects, including Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, David Hockney, Dennis Hopper, Karl Lagerfeld, and Timothy Leary. While Newton casts these subjects with his unique brand of statuesque allure, Springs deploys a softer focus to find something more suggestive, delicate, or playful.

As we move from, in Newton’s words, “truth and simplicity” to “editorializing”, through youth and age, love and sex, and the public and private spheres, Us and Them offers not only an elegant example of independent visions within a shared life, but also a tender and inspiring chronicle of love through passing time.

Virtually unparalleled in scope and spanning more than five decades, the photography of visionary Helmut Newton (1920–2004) reached millions through publication in magazines like Vogue and Elle. His oeuvre transcended genres, bringing elegance, style, and voyeurism to fashion, portrait, and glamour photography through a body of work that remains as inimitable as it is unrivaled. Having mastered the art of fashion photography early in his career, Newton’s shoots invariably went beyond standard practice, blurring the lines between reality and illusion. Newton’s clear aesthetic pervades all areas of his work, particularly fashion, portraiture, and nude photography. Women take center stage – with subjects such as Catherine Deneuve, Liz Taylor, and Charlotte Rampling. Moving beyond traditional narrative approaches, Newton’s fashion photography is imbued not only with luxurious elegance and subtle seduction, but also cultural references and a surprising sense of humor.

During the 1990s, Newton shot for the German, American, Italian, French, and Russian editions of Vogue, primarily in and around Monte Carlo where he was living from 1981 onwards. Transforming locations like his own garage into starkly contrasting or particularly minimalist theatrical stages, Newton would often portray the eccentric lives of the beautiful and rich, full of eroticism and elegance, in unconventional scenarios. He made use of and simultaneously questioned visual clichés, at times tinged with self-irony or mockery, but always full of empathy.

Helmut Newton. Legacy, which accompanies an international exhibition tour of Newton’s work, showcases highlights from one of the most published bodies of work in photography, including numerous rediscovered images. A prolific image maker and genuine visionary, this book celebrates Newton’s lasting influence on modern photography and visual art to this day.

Polaroids occupy a special place in photography, all the more so since the development of digital techniques. The instant print and absence of editing tools allows these one-of-a kind images a beguiling realness: In no other photographic medium does the moment find its material form with such sincerity and such speed.

Throughout his career, Helmut Newton used polaroids not just for their poetics but as a crucial tool for testing lighting and composition before a shoot began. Many photographers threw these tests away. Luckily for us, Newton kept his, allowing his widow June Newton to assemble this fascinating behind-the-scenes look at some of his greatest shoots, from the classic nudes in Milan to latex-clad shots in St. Tropez.

With images visible folds or handwriting, these snaps from the seventies, eighties, and nineties are akin to the preparatory sketches to masterpiece paintings. Offering fascinating insight into Newton’s creative direction and process, they stand as works of art in their own right, and as a historical testament to a bygone age of fashion photography.

SUMO was a titanic book in every respect: a 480-page tribute to the 20th century's most influential, intriguing and controversial photographer, breaking records for weight and dimensions.

Fifty people worked with Helmut and June Newton for three years to complete a book that weighed 30kg (66lbs). But size wasn't everything. Control and quality - printing, paper, binding - were all critical in making SUMO a worldwide publishing sensation, which is in many famous collections all around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Agriculture is an unavoidable fact of African life: it accounts for 70% of employment on the continent, and 25% of its GDP. Whilst Nickerson's earlier work, Farm, concentrated on how individual identity is made through improvisation, Terrain takes a broader view, focusing on the synergy between cultivation, workers and the environment.

The result is a new kind of portraiture that steps away from photojournalism, refusing to merely illustrate statistics and moral indignation. Terrain instead employs a reduced artistic language to draw attention to important debates around crop specialization, subsistence farming and food security. Terrain is about human intervention in the natural landscape, the impact our presence has and the changes it brings about and how, for better and for worse, the world that we make, in turn, changes who we are.

From Cape Ras Kamboni in southern Somalia to Mozambique along Kenya and Tanzania stretch, in a slight gulf sprinkled with islands to the south by the Comoros and closed by the open palm of Madagascar, the Swahili coasts ... People have been trading there since the dawn of time, with India, the Arabian Peninsula or Madagascar. All kinds of goods, sugar cane, millet, cloves, ivory. Rhino horns. Indigo. Turtle shells. Pagan slaves, captured far inland and despised by Muslims on the coast.

Gilles Nicolet's images follow closely, step by step, the shape of the coast. We meet, pell-mell, men, women, children, boats, fish, spiders. We have the impression that the photographer only has to look around for the lens to capture a moment of beauty.

A rhythmic, multifaceted and dazzling portrait of Bangkok.

The photographer Peter Nitsch (born 1973) captures the people, cityscape and street life of Bangkok with a sensitive touch and sharp attention to small but evocative details. His multifaceted panorama of Thailand’s capital is collected here.

In Color In Japan is the debut book of the award-winning street photographer Shin Noguchi, with an introduction by Chuck Patch. 130 powerful images tell the story of everyday public and private life in Japan.

500 limited-edition copies signed by Shin Noguchi will be available in White (470) and Black (30) editions.