Monographs & Art Books / V

Meditative landscape photography featuring softly lit mountain ranges.

Belgian photographer Bastiaan van Aarle (born 1988) captures the ever-changing landscape of mountains, transformed by light, time and the planet’s constant rotation. Experimenting with different techniques, van Aarle explores the boundaries of photography, its medium-specific properties and how they relate to the perception of reality.

Aurore Valade designs images in which she plays with the iconography of the scenography. She photographs people who interpret their own role, in their interior. In these very elaborate staging often surface the clichés, significant reflections of a social, economic or cultural situation of our time but also certain values ​​which question the limits of the private sector.

For the fifth edition of the Photaumnales, Aurore Valade was invited to Beauvais as part of an artistic residency to work on the theme "Inhabited city, urban portraits". For several months, she advertised in the local press, met the inhabitants, in search of models ready to re-enact a scene from their daily and intimate life in a public space, or open to the outside. The places and the subjects are left most of the time to the choice of the models who represent there lived or fictional scenes. The intimacy is exteriorized through a theatrical game presented as a spectacle populated by characters from ordinary life.

Plein air offers a strange permutation between indoors and outdoors where what should be played inside is played outside.

From the beach to school, Aurore Valade tried to capture that "kind of energy that springs from boredom and reverie" of which Baudelaire spoke. Through several photographic series, she then became interested in the notion of "youth" as an overflowing vital force and met adolescents whom she questioned about their personal lives. With their complicity, she built scenarios leading them to (re) play scenes inspired by their daily lives. Aurore Valade re-enacts some of these situations, amplifying the often artificial and anecdotal aspect of the stories which thus become almost fictional images, revealing the provocative attitudes specific to this youth who breaks codes and conventions in an attempt to assert themselves.

When we boredom is composed of the following series: "Summer time" series produced during an artist residency at the Collioure Modern Art Museum in 2006; “Plein air” series produced as part of the Les Photaumnales de Beauvais festival in 2008; "We were bored" series produced during an artist residency in schools in partnership with the Center d’art de Yonne in 2010; “Staging” is a participatory and educational project carried out in collaboration with the students of the Honoré Daumier high school in Marseille in partnership with the FRAC PACA in 2014.

A deeply poignant look at the reality of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the lens of Peter van Agtmael.

Peter van Agtmael's monograph, 2nd Tour, Hope I Don't Die, chronicles his stay as an embedded photographer in Iraq from 2006 though 2008. As a young photographer, Peter quickly identified with the soldiers he was stationed with, allowing him to effectively portray all the uncertainty and chaos of war. His work not only captures the lives of the soldiers, but also the altered lives of the Iraqi civilians.

Buzzing at the Sill is Peter van Agtmael's work about coming home from years of covering war in Iraq and Afghanistan and trying to understand his experiences and his country. The work is a stew of reflections on war, memory, identity, race, class, family and the landscape.

Buzzing at the Sill was shortlisted for the 2017 Rencontres D’Arles Book Award and Kassel Book Award and was named a “Book of the Year” by Time, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Mother Jones, and Internazionale.

Disco Night Sept. 11 is a chronicle of America's wars from 2006-2013. The photographs shift back and forth from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the USA, unsparingly capturing the violent, ceaseless cost, but also the mystery and the madness, the beauty and absurdity at the core of each conflict. The narrative is complemented by nineteen gatefolds which elaborate on places and individuals.

Disco Night Sept 11 was shortlisted for the 2014 Aperture/Paris Photo Book Award and named a ‘Book of the Year’ by The New York Times Magazine, Time, Mother Jones, and Vogue.

Sorry for the War chronicles the dissonance between perceptions of the post-9/11 wars in America, and the violence and upheaval of the wars as experienced by those trapped in the war zones. The photographs in Sorry for the War weave together the war in Iraq during the time of ISIS, the mass exodus of refugees to Europe, militarism, terrorism, nationalism, myth-making and propaganda. This is van Agtmael’s fourth book about the United States and the world after 9/11 and reflects a nation’s struggle to reckon with the chaos unleashed in the fear and anger that followed the World Trade Center attacks. The photographs are disturbing, darkly humorous, contradictory, mysterious and damning, serving as both evidence and interpretation of a country gone adrift, with often disastrous consequences. An extensive text, in English and Arabic, combines journalism and personal reflection into a thorough narrative to accompany the nonlinear, poetic sequencing of the images.

While Ian van Coller was growing up in the 1970s, the black women working in his parents upper class home in a whites-only suburb of Johannesburg were valued as members of the family. Nannies and maids who helped raise the children and run the household, they were ever-present confidants and friends. And yet they were conspicuously absent from family vacations and photo albums.

Apartheid, though it has been officially consigned to history, continues to live on in nearly a million South African homes where blacks still serve the needs of the white minority. Ian van Coller s first monograph, Interior Relations, deftly probes this enduring racial fault line with a simple yet elegant premise: he has asked black housekeepers, nannies and maids to wear their finest clothes, and to sit for formal portraits in the homes they care for.

Though the subjects' white employers are never shown, evidence of their privilege crowds around the women, forever out of reach: every portrait a cameo of apartheid in redux.

For Sindiwe Magona, one of South Africa's most celebrated black writers, working as a domestic in her youth provided a desperately needed but meager income that she was forced to supplement by selling sheep heads on the street. Serving white families represented a constriction of the soul that was broken only by the force of her will to become a writer.

Beginning in the spring of 2017, Dutch photographer Carla van de Puttelaar began work on a new and timely portraiture series devoted to highlighting prominent and promising women in the international art world. Artfully Dressed: Women in the Art World is the profound culmination of these ongoing efforts.

Bringing together a powerful group of over 250 women, this vibrant collection of portraits unites these women in their brilliance and strength. Together they represent a wide range of backgrounds, nationalities, careers, ages, and expertise. Whether graced in the haute couture traditions of the world’s top designers, donned in ornate and billowing period costumes, dressed in seemingly outmoded vintage garments, or wrapped in almost otherworldly, luxurious materials, this book showcases a global ensemble of dynamic art-world women, illuminating and complimenting their achievements and wildly distinct personalities, all by framing them in fabric.

Informed by the high contrast, chiaroscuro-like technique of her own past studio projects, van de Puttelaar’s series is an important document of the present time of women in the art world.

Carla van de Puttelaar opens our awareness to the sensitivity and sensuality of skin. The female body has long been the main subject of her photography, and her models appear poised and aloof, with chilled skin lit by natural light, one of Van de Puttelaars most important tools and assets one which she harnesses with incredible deftness.

She also examines the skin and texture of flowers in her Hortus Nocturnum series, particularly those about to fade. Adornments comprises a new collection of photographs, where images of flowers and trees are juxtaposed with the faces and bodies of women, capturing Galateas and Ophelias, conjuring Rembrandt and Maria Austria.

The intimate and delicate nude portraits of this Dutch photographer are characterised by an alienating sensuality. This new series of images, in which Van de Puttelaar depicts women in full length for the first time while retaining every breathtaking detail of their skin, draws its inspiration from the painters Cranach and Botticelli.

Eboundja is a project that occupies Reinout van den Bergh from 2011 onwards. Since 2009, the thirty families of the same-named fishing village in southern Cameroon are in great uncertainty about their future. The village is situated in the middle of a coastal strip where the Chinese, in exchange for Cameroon’s iron ore, are constructing a deep sea harbour. The inhabitants are vulnerable to the combination of a corrupt government and megalomaniac project developers. In a series of photographs van den Bergh shows, with great commitment, the decline as well as the intimacy and beauty of the small community; the resignation but also the pride and resistance.

As of 2006 van den Bergh has been curator of the Dutch BredaPhoto festival. His work has been exhibited in various museums in Eastern and Western Europe and Africa, and published in several books and other publications.

Thousands of miners lived in the mine housing estate in Beringen in Belgian-Limburg. The mine permeated the estate. From the start of the 20th century, every day thousands of miners extracted coal from the ground. Daily they exchanged daylight for dark mine shafts. In their spare time they got together during sporting events and in the theatre, church, mosque and the café. Here, Reinout van den Bergh took his photographs in 1981.

With his camera he was part of the community. He joined the miners into the bathing rooms and into their homes and followed them underground. He zoomed in on their black stained faces, recorded their daily rituals and photographed the dangerous work with which they earned their bread.

Photographer and visual artist Ruud van Empel has evolved a striking style through his experimentation with the tension between the camera and digital technology. Demonstrating a strong technical prowess, he digitally dissects and reconstructs fragments taken from his own photographs to create hybrid works of astonishing colour: dreamlike scenes, arresting portraits of women and children, quirky and curious gatherings of objects, lush and leafy forests, and surreal undersea vistas.

This book is published to accompany a retrospective of his work in Brussels, the scope of which includes nearly 400 images an invitation to enter a sublime, magnificent, and marvellous world.

The distinctive style of photographer and visual artist Ruud van Empel has evolved through an ongoing exploration of the tension between the camera and digital technology. He digitally dissects and reconstructs hundreds of diverse fragments taken from his own photographs to create synthesised, hybrid works that portray dreamlike scenes and natural utopias. Following in the romantic tradition, Van Empels stylised collages seek beauty, serenity, and the sublime; a subjective experience of the natural world fuelled by a disenchantment with our contemporary reality. Making Nature is published on the occasion of an exhibition of his recent work at Museum Belvédère.

Exhibition catalogue from the Groninger Museum on the works of Ruud van Empel (b 1958). Van Empel has developed a unique working method within digital photography. The images he compiles display a paradisiacal world that has never existed in the form shown.

This world is populated by children and dreamy adolescents as a personification of innocence, which is one of the most important themes of Van Empel s work. But innocence is always vulnerable, and the longing for paradise is an all-too-human illusion that will be disturbed sooner or later.

From hundreds of fragments adopted from digital photos, Van Empel compiles new images that seem very life-like and realistic, but also conjure up a world that has never existed. Essays by Deborah Klochko, Oscar van den Boogaard, Ruud Schenk.

It is far from an easy task to classify someone as prolific, creative and versatile as Ruud van Empel, let alone place his works in an art genre box. For nearly 10 years he has been developing his particular style, for which he is internationally known, depicting hundreds of innocent-looking children in dense nature, and since not long ago also still lifes and nudes.

Van Empel is one of a kind on the contemporary art scene. His various pictures resonate with many classical artworks, as he uses elements, compositions and topics from previous epochs and incorporates them in his pictures to create his own, unique and poignant style. The current show at Flatland Gallery will focus on his latest works, his still lifes and self portraits.

Van Empel employs the inheritance of cubists, exploring traditional artistic techniques within a contemporary framework. Just like Henri Matisse, who designed his monumental Oceania using cut-outs, van Empel creates digital photo collages from pictures he took and cut out on a digital screen. Though at first glance his works appear to be photos taken in real life, they depict a world shaped entirely by the artist. He places plants together that would never coexist in nature and portrays faces of people that have never lived and never will.

Over the last 20 years, Hellen van Meene has produced a complex body of work, offering a contemporary take on photographic portraiture. Characterized by her exquisite use of light, formal elegance and palpable psychological tension, her depictions of girls and boys on the cusp of adulthood demonstrate a clear aesthetic lineage to seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Van Meene captures the intimacy in the photographer-subject relationship, bringing out a sense of honesty and vulnerability from within her models and highlighting the beauty of imperfection.

She carefully poses her subjects in their environments to emphasize their fragility, adding a palpable tension to the photographs. At the same time, she captures them at deeper, more introspective moments-masterfully moving between the staged nature of the portraits and the real experiences of her subjects. The combination of van Meene's instinctive understanding of the universality of adolescent experience and the highly intimate collaboration between photographer and model makes for powerful portraits that resonate long after viewing.

This book brings together more than 250 images, for the most comprehensive presentation of the artist's work to date.

An elephant, a waterfall, a tree. For award-winning nature photographer Marsel van Oosten, simplicity is the ultimate form of expression. Through singular subjects and pared-down motifs, he captures the beauty, diversity, and vulnerability of the natural world.

This visually stunning volume begins with photographs from Africa before moving through all the continents. The alternations between landscapes and close-ups, color and black-and white photographs, create a stunning, emotive journey across the planet we call home. Text in English and German.

A photographic monument, immortalizing the remains of Hitler's Atlantic Wall, which stretched across Europe's western coast.

During World War II, Adolf Hitler gave the order for a line of defense to be constructed along the coasts of the western front. Ranging from the French-Spanish border to the north of Norway, this Atlantic Wall is a series of bunkers, barricades and coastal batteries.

Belgicum is a photo project about Belgium. It is not an objective representation of a country but rather a subjective photographical document in black and white. It's a journey of exploration into a small country in the heart of Europe, at the turn of the centuries.

More than fifteen years Vanfleteren has wandered through and hunted in the 'Belgicum' territories, guided by emotion and by the love for his homeland. He made a journey through a scarred land, in search of the irretrievable identity of a country with the melancholic soul of an old nation.

Over the past ten years, over 11,000 copies were sold of this international bestseller. Belgicum grew out to be a reference work in the Belgian history of photography. On the occasion of the tenth birthday of this cult book, it was reprinted.

First major retrospective on photographer Stephan Vanfleteren. Includes previously unpublished work with expansive personal reflections and stories from three decades of encounters and photography.

Stephan Vanfleteren (1969) is best known for his probing black and white portraits, but in recent decades he has also produced a wide range of documentary, artistic and personal work. From street photography in global cities like New York to the genocide in Rwanda, from building fronts and shop windows to the mystical landscapes of the Atlantic Wall, from still lifes to penetrating portraits.

To mark Vanfleteren's 50th birthday, he is celebrating with a major retrospective which will occupy the entire Antwerp Museum of Photography (FOMU, 25 October 2019 - 1 March 2020) and with this publication Present, in which he looks back over his fascinating career. "I was there, I was present", says the photographer, who always feels himself to be both accomplice and witness.

For Present, Vanfleteren has taken a generous selection of more than 400 photos from his ample archive, some of which have become iconic images while others have never been published before. In extensive texts, he reflects on how his own work and photography as a genre have evolved over the past decades and links these developments with a number of major social changes.

This superbly illustrated book is an impressive overview of Vanfleteren's work and offers a comprehensive picture of him as a photographer, as an artist and, above all, as a human being living life with empathy, wonder and curiosity.

An ode to Alberic 'Briek' Schotte, the godfather of all flandriens. The heroes of the Tour of Flanders and the Paris-Roubaix are tough and determined. The Flemings specialize in riding on bad roads and in bad weather.

This set of photos provides an intimate and emotional portrait of these legendary athletes, landscapes and the Flemish culture. Stephan Vanfleteren has been photographing cycling races in Belgium and its surrounding areas for more than 15 years already. With more than 100 images, carefully selected by photographer Stephan Vanfleteren.

With Surf Tribe, photographer Stephan Vanfleteren shows that there is far more to surf culture than just sport and competition. Surfing is also about a deep admiration and respect for the ocean, as well as the feeling of insignificance when confronted with the forces of nature. Surfers use the waves for fun, but also to forget and to battle, both with others and with themselves.

Vanfleteren looks beyond the traditional borders of the United States and Australia and searches the globe for people who live in places where sea and land meet. He documents a fluid community, with nature as its sole leader. He has sought out young talent, living icons, and old legends, both competitive and free surfers.

The photographs here are serene black and white portraits in Vanfleteren's well-known, haunting style; as always, he reaches below the surface and goes to the core of his subjects. Included, amongst many others, are Kelly Slater, Gerry Lopez, John Florence, Mickey Munoz, Filipe Toledo and Stephanie Gilmore.

For more than twenty years, Craig Varjabedian has explored and photographed the red cliffs and sweeping plains of the fabled 21,000-acre Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. In Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby, he shares more than one hundred new black-and-white photographs capturing its evanescent light. These images reach beyond familiar ideas associated with the Ranch--such as its renown as a site of personal renewal and transformation, and as the longtime home of twentieth-century painter Georgia O'Keeffe--into Varjabedian's singular vision of his subject and its ties to ideas of identity, place, and perception.

To further illuminate the experience of Ghost Ranch, Varjabedian gathered essays to accompany his photographs, including an "appreciation" of Ghost Ranch written by Georgia O'Keeffe. These include an evocative introduction by photographer Jay Packer, a major essay by writer Marin Sardy examining the place's natural features and social history, and topical essays by theological studies professor Belden C. Lane, arts writer Douglas A. Fairfield, and former Ghost Ranch executive director Rob Craig. Also included are forewords by Cathy L. Wright, Director of the Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, and Debra Hepler, Executive Director of Ghost Ranch.

Winner of the Prestigious New Mexico-Arizona Book Award.

Award-winning photographer Craig Varjabedian has spent decades photographing the many moods of the magnificent and ever-changing landscape of New Mexico's White Sands National Monument. His photographs reveal snow-white dunes of gypsum, striking landforms, storms and stillness, panoramic vistas and breathtaking sunsets, intricate wind-blown patterns in the sand, ancient animal tracks, exquisite desert plants, and also the people who come to experience this place that is at once spectacular yet subtle. Varjabedian's evocative color images provide the reader with an almost palpable sense of this extraordinary place.

These photographs are enriched by several essays written by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, noted poet and author; Dennis Ditmanson, retired White Sands National Monument superintendent; Jim Eckles, retired Missile Range public affairs officer; and Craig Varjabedian, the photographer who shares his insights and experiences of photographing this inspiring landscape and offers tips on making better pictures of White Sands.

This collection of elegantly composed black-and-white images by one of New Mexico's most accomplished photographers, celebrates the state's captivating physical variety and enduring allure.

With subject matter ranging from some of the state's most iconic landforms--including the White Sands desert and Carlsbad Caverns--to the people who work the land, Varjabedian's images pay homage to New Mexico's ancient history and to the homely details of everyday life. In photographing his subjects, whether epic or mundane, Varjabedian seeks the moments when the light, shadow, composition, and other elements combine to express the beauty of the place.

Marin Sardy's wide-ranging essay provides historical and cultural contexts in which to understand Varjabedian's work. Scholar-poet Jeanetta Calhoun Mish defines the particular quality of the artist's imagery.

Award-winning photographer Craig Varjabedian's new book The Light of Days Gone By was 45 years in the making. It celebrates with stunning imagery the journey of a photographer and the beautiful light he has witnessed and captured along the way. The Light of Days Gone By is a testament to Varjabedian's vision and years of hard work and will appeal to anyone who appreciates fine photography.

Varjabedian's photographs from the magnificent red hills of Ghost Ranch and gleaming white dunes of White Sands to more faraway places—from strong Native Americans to weathered cowboys and more—these expansive landscapes and intimate portraits are all presented in this beautifully printed book.
The 48 color and black & white photographs were carefully curated by Varjabedian's long time studio director Cindy Lane, to not only share the breadth of this photographer's career but also to reveal relationships between individual images and from the themes he has explored over the years. Complementing the images are two essays. Cindy Lane provides insight into the photographer's artistic vision and Myra Bullington looks at the importance of photographs to memory and shares an appreciation for the photographer and his work. The book is not signed.

Museum curator Catherine Whitney writes “Craig Varjabedian's photography captures, with arresting clarity, the ineffable whispers of time and spirit layered deep in New Mexico's cultural landscape. Through the artful combination of his compassionate eye and technical virtuosity, he evokes the past in the present and the holy in the everyday." Craig Varjabedian is a photographer who explores the back roads of the American West, making pictures of the unique and quintessential. 45 years behind the camera, 14 books, 42 museum exhibitions and hundreds of fine art photographic prints all comprise a rich and rewarding career. His images share awe-inspiring stories of the land and the people who live on it—one photograph at a time.

Jacko Vassilev was born to freespirited parents in communist Bulgaria. As a boy, he dreamed of freedom, the simple right to plan out one's own life and destiny. Taught by his parents to "ask questions" and to "read between the lines," he courted trouble as a young student, asking his teacher after a lesson on patriotism: "People are arrested, killed by their own if they want to flee and find a better life. Why are they killing them if it is such a paradise here?" For an answer, he was forced to kneel and keep his hands in the air for at least five hours; if he let his arms drop, he would be beaten with a stick and a belt.

At twenty-eight, he put his dreams of freedom to the test, attempting to escape past the barbed wire and border patrols. He was caught, severely beaten (he sustained a fractured neck), and tossed into a slave-labor camp for one year. He befriended many of the older political prisoners, and instead of building up hate, he built up the strength to survive. While the camp was harsh, he was not subjected to the drugging and injections of the mental "institutes" where many other political prisoners languished. Though his body suffered, his mind was clear. "It was the university of my life," he states over three decades later. "I've learned from the bad people how to be strong." It is this same willingness to confront suffering and the "reality" of life that informs his work, even now.

His work is a reminder of an often-harsh reality, bringing us down to earth, and yet Jacko Vassilev is a self-described optimist. He considers it his life's work to uncover the humanity in each person that he photographs, no matter the circumstances of their lives. He believes joy is an integral part of that humanity. Witness the face of the small Bulgarian girl, swimming in her older brother's or father's shoes, as she helps a fellow creature, a dove, attain the freedom she herself may never have. She is too young to be hemmed in by her future; she experiences only the joy of the moment, of being the instrument of freedom for another.

Unseen images of the Great Depression from the famed chronicler of the African diaspora.

Pierre Verger is considered one of the most outstanding photographers of the 20th century and a recognized researcher in the field of African Diaspora and religion studies. Verger traveled to the US in 1934 and 1937, during the Great Depression, producing a collection of stunning images that document America’s national symbols and the challenging social and economic atmosphere of the time.

Verger was able to capture with nuanced sensibility the cultural and racial diversity of a country where many citizens still confront segregation and poverty; his photographs constitute an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of 1930s America and to the growth of photojournalism, documentary and art photography.

In his introduction to this volume, Javier Escudero Rodríguez frames Verger´s significant contribution to modern photography, as well as the lasting relevance of this new collection of images of the Great Depression. The 150 photographs included here―the majority of which have never been published before―were selected from 1,110 negatives, after meticulous research at the Pierre Verger Foundation in Salvador, Brazil.

French photographer, ethnologist, anthropologist and researcher Pierre Verger (1902–96) was born in Paris but lived most of his life in the city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, in Brazil. Verger photographed some of the most renowned figures of his time, such as Chang Kai Chek, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and Ernest Hemingway, but the bulk of his oeuvre was based on everyday life and popular culture across five continents. Verger also wrote several reference texts on Afro-Bahian culture and the Diaspora.

Photographer Pierre Verger believes that "photography enables us to see what we don't have time to see, for it is fixed. What's more, it memorizes, it is memory." For Verger, who traveled the world and immersed himself in the cultures of the people he photographed, these images capture his history. For others, they convey a sense of history--personal and cultural. These light-drenched photos of images--a small-town Mexican carnival in the '30s, Brazilian dock workers in the '50s, a Peruvian trapeze artist in the '40s, and 1937 Shanghai street scenes--present a portrait of a world now lost amidst decades of war and political and social upheaval. Verger believed that along with his profession came the role of messenger, connecting people of different cultures via his revelatory portraits. And his success in that endeavor is evident in the sheer force of these images, truly a testament to people in another place and time.

A book with photographs inspired by a poem about early emotional loss.

This pictorial history of Jewish life in Germany in the 1930s before the Holocaust, shows the stories of individuals, their increasing poverty, sad wisdom and enduring love in the years leading up to World War II.

Between 1935 and 1938 the celebrated photographer Roman Vishniac explored the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, capturing life in the Jewish shtetlekh of Poland, Romania, Russia, and Hungary, communities that even then seemed threatened―not by destruction and extermination, which no one foresaw, but by change. Using a hidden camera and under difficult circumstances, Vishniac was able to take over sixteen thousand photographs; most were left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. With the publication of Children of a Vanished World, seventy of those photographs are available, thirty-six for the first time. The book is devoted to a subject Vishniac especially loved, and one whose mystery and spontaneity he captured with particular poignancy: children.

Selected and edited by the photographer's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, and translator and coeditor Miriam Hartman Flacks, these images show children playing, children studying, children in the midst of a world that was about to disappear. They capture the daily life of their subjects, at once ordinary and extraordinary. The photographs are accompanied by a selection of nursery rhymes, songs, poems, and chants for children's games in both Yiddish and English translation. Thanks to Vishniac's visual artistry and the editors' choice of traditional Yiddish verses, a part of this wonderful culture can be preserved for future generations.

Emphasizing Roman Vishniac's prodigious talents as one of the great documentary photographers of the 20th century, this volume presents the full range of his artistic genius. Drawn from the International Center of Photography's vast holdings of work by Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), this generously illustrated and expansive volume offers a new and profound consideration of this key modernist photographer. In addition to featuring Vishniac's best-known work - the iconic images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust - this publication also introduces many previously unpublished photographs spanning more than six decades of Vishniac's work.

These include newly discovered images of prewar Berlin, rare film footage from rural Jewish communities in Carpatheina Ruthania, documentation of postwar ruins and Displaced Persons' camps, and vivid coverage of Jewish life in America in the 1940s and '50s. Essays by world-renowned scholars of photography, Jewish history and culture address these new found images and consider them in the context of modernist tendencies in Berlin in the 1920s and '30s; the rise of Nazi power in Germany and Eastern Europe; the uses of social documentary photography for relief organizations; the experiences of exile, displacement, and assimilation; and the impact of Vishniac's pioneering scientific research in color photomicroscopy in the 1950s and '60s.

This first retrospective monograph on Roman Vishniac offers many new perspectives on the work and career of this important photographer, positioning him as one of the great modernists and social documentary photographers of the last century.

This is the first book to present Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Berlin – the unknown early oeuvre of one of the master photographers of the twentieth century. The images are accompanied by Mara Vishniac Kohn’s sensitive memoirs of her father and her childhood in Berlin.

Photographer Roman Vishniac came to fame with the book A Vanished World, which features photographs of the world of eastern European Jews. Vishniac lived in the German capital from 1920 to 1939 and captured many scenes of everyday life, including people on the streets, Berlin stock characters, friends, family, and Jewish institutions.

Elie Wiesel provides the preface to a master photographer's record of eastern Europe's Jewish communities in the years just before World War II with 160 photographs that capture the ordinary lives of Jews before the Holocaust. 50,000 first printing.

Panda Love is a collection of incredible images of these gentle giants. Ami Vitale's stunning photographs, taken on location in China, document the efforts to breed pandas and release them back into the wild. Ami was given unprecedented access to the pandas and her photos give an amazing insight into the bears' lives in both the sanctuaries and their natural habitat. Fluffy panda cubs tumble out of baskets and play hide-and-seek with their carers, while the adult pandas curiously explore the forest and climb trees.

The latest from Massimo Vitali, master portraitist of the beach and the disco.

This large-format volume, collecting images from 2009 to 2018, is the latest in Steidl’s series publishing the life’s work of Massimo Vitali. Following the first two volumes, published together as Landscape with Figures / Natural Habitats, 1994–2009 in 2011 (and now out of print), Entering a New World presents Vitali’s large-scale color images of humans interacting en masse―both consciously and unconsciously―with their environments.

In the first edition of Landscape with Figures (2004), Massimo Vitali showed his entire oeuvre of the 1990s, broadening the scope of his survey of beaches and discos to include skiing resorts and swimming pools from across the globe.

Since 2007 Vitali has modified his perspective, shifting between an architectural background and a bizarre and fantastic mise-en-scène inspired by Romantic landscape painting. The book--composed of 70 photographs from 2004 to 2009--also includes a "genealogical tree" of his photographs--120 thumbnails images which make visual connections by color, composition and time.

In the first volume of Landscape with Figures published in 2004, Massimo Vitali showed his entire oeuvre from the nineties, broadening the scope of his survey of beaches and discos to include skiing resorts and swimming pools from across the globe.

Since 2007 Vitali has modified his perspective, shifting between an architectural background and a volume Natural Habitats, comprises seventy photographs, spanning from 2004 to 2009 - also includes a "genealog - ical tree" of his photographs: 120 thumbnail images which make visual connections by color, composition and time.

Silent Kingdom reveals the world beneath the waves in an ethereal collection of black-and-white underwater photography.

Through stunning black-and-white images, award-winning photographer Christian Vizl uses a masterful control of light and shadow to portray the creatures of the sea as they are rarely seen, at home in the ethereal world beneath the waves.

From capturing the ferocity of sharks to the playful dance of dolphins, Vizl turns aquatic creatures and marine seascapes into visions of sublime grace and beauty suspended in time and space. With each turn of the page, venture deeper into the one realm in which humans do not reign and discover an unforgettable world that few have ever seen.

Though the ocean covers over 70 percent of planet Earth, over 80 percent of that vast wilderness remains unexplored. As human activity begins to impact these once-untouched regions, it is more important now than ever to acknowledge both the beauty and value of our seas and the necessity of preserving one of the last true wild frontiers of our world.

Silent Kingdom is both an ode both to the beauty of the ocean and the magnificent creatures that inhabit it and a call to action to preserve the fragile underwater world of our planet.

Winner of the Premier Print Award - 2019 Prize for Special Innovation in Printing and Second Place winner of the 2019 Sony World Photography Awards, Natural World & Wildlife category.

A Career of Japan is the first study of one of the major photographers and personalities of nineteenth-century Japan. Baron Raimund von Stillfried was the most important foreign-born photographer of the Meiji era and one of the first globally active photographers of his generation. He played a key role in the international image of Japan and the adoption of photography within Japanese society itself. Yet, the lack of a thorough study of his activities, travels, and work has been a fundamental gap in both Japanese- and Western-language scholarship.

Based on extensive new primary sources and unpublished documents from archives around the world, this book examines von Stillfried's significance as a cultural mediator between Japan and Central Europe. It highlights the tensions and fierce competition that underpinned the globalising photographic industry at a site of cultural contact and exchange - treaty-port Yokohama. In the process, it raises key questions for Japanese visual culture, Habsburg studies, and cross-cultural histories of photography and globalisation.

In 1573, the Tokugawa Shogunate came to power and banished foreighners from Japan. Totally isolated for the next 250 years, Japan became, for Westerners, a lost civilization; a remote island kingdom shrouded in mist and legend evoking whispered images of another time. In 1853, Japan let down the barriers. The world finally could see what it had only imagined. Among the early arrivals were three little known artists: photographer Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried, and the novelist Pierre Loti.

Their work caused an immediate sensation throughout Europe, giving birth to the Western fascination and obsession with Japan. It is easy to see why. In the photographs of Beato and Stillbried, a legend comes to life. Whether the subjects are fishmongers or princes, grocers, or samurai, everything is strange, mysterious, alluring. The simple, direct photography overlaid with stylized, exquisitely subtle hand coloring imparts an aura of enchantment to everything. Myth and reality become one.Pierre Loti adds a bittersweet poignancy to the photographs.

By the time Loti arrived in Japan, the old world was rapidly disappearaing . One gets the sense in his writing of somenone deperately holding on to a lovely dream as it slowly fades from memory. That dream lives again in this superbly produced book (originally published in France). The vivid images of this strange and wonderful civilization dazzle the eyes and size the imagination. These are photographs from another time. And another world.

Today's most exciting woman behind the camera, Ellen von Unwerth's photographs are published in all the world's great magazines. Known as "the comical model," she started her career on the catwalk. Today she likewise adds a touch of humor to her fashion and nude photographs. While her colleagues concentrate their dramatic composition on capturing the "big moment," she deploys great sensitivity and intuition to hunt down the "decisive moment," where the irony and wit of reality slumber.

Spontaneity is her forte, her motto being that life is spontaneous about revealing its best side. "Couples" is fresh and unconventional, dissolving the traditions of the photography book. She wanted it to be a "fast" book - racy, loud yet high-caliber, with a handy format and as thick as a Bible, a book that is real fun. Spontaneous, personal and uncomplicated, playful with all types of couples: behind the scenes of life and fashion, sex and glamour.

Ellen von Unwerth was a supermodel before the term was invented, so she knows a thing or two about photographing beautiful women. Now one of the world’s most original and successful fashion photographers, she pays homage to the world’s most delectable females in Fräulein. This celebration of our era’s sexiest female icons includes Claudia Schiffer, Kate Moss, Vanessa Paradis, Britney Spears, Eva Mendes, Lindsay Lohan, Dita von Teese, Adriana Lima, Carla Bruni, Eva Green, Christina Aguilera, Monica Bellucci and dozens more.

Switching effortlessly between color and immaculate black and white, von Unwerth’s photography revels in sexual intrigue, femininity, romance, fetishism, kitsch humor, decadence and sheer joie de vivre. Whether nude or in lingerie and a dazzling smile, her subjects are never objectified. Some flaunt personal fantasies; others are guarded, suggesting that we have stumbled into a secret world. Fashion and fantasy were never so enchantingly combined.

An enchanted trip through Bavaria with Ellen von Unwerth

Ellen von Unwerth’s puckish humor pervades the pages of Heimat, an enchanted tour around Bavaria. The renowned fashion and music photographer revisits her childhood homeland to shoot a posse of gorgeous girls out for fun and adventure amid the region’s undulating fields; age-old traditions; and deep, mysterious forests.

As they happily discard their dirndls and run riot across the countryside, von Unwerth’s heroines demonstrate the attributes and attractions of the region, whether munching on pretzels, striding out across pristine pastures, or seducing lederhosen-clad farmhands (and each other). Blending old-world charm with a rebellious edge and a sly subversion of traditional gender roles, Heimat bursts with fresh, provocative eroticism, tied up with wit, laced with an abiding love for a proud and beautiful region.

Collector's Edition of 1,500 copies (No. 401–1,900), each numbered and signed by Ellen von Unwerth.

Also available as four Art Editions (No. 1–400), all with a signed photographic print.

Von Unwerth's book is a wild and sexy romp. Long known for her provocative work in the fashion world, here she is the director on the set, creating a sadomasochistic story, told solely in photographs, which delves into sexual obsession. Revenge begins with a trio of young women arriving at the Baroness's estate expecting a relaxing weekend. The Baroness, her chauffeur, and her stablehand soon have them involved in something quite different.

The first Olga book sold out in record time—don’t miss your chance to take the heiress home now! Set in a glorious French château, this new collaboration with Ellen von Unwerth is a photo story brimming with luxury, glamour, and lust. As Olga the sexually candid heroine seeks out unexpected lovers, The Story of Olga is a transgressive, irresistible fantasy like you’ve never seen before.

Limited Collector’s Edition of 1,000 copies, numbered and signed by Ellen von Unwerth

The Moth Wing Diaries is a photographic narrative addressing themes of memory, providence, revival and dreams, by native Texan photographer Lori Vrba (born 1964). Vrba's surreal landscapes and portraiture explore the artist's sense of conflict and ultimate peace with the Southern terrain.

The story of homai vyarawalla's life and her work spans an entire century of indian history india's first woman photojournalist, homai photographed the last days of the british empire and her work traces the birth and growth of a new nation she was the only professional woman photojournalist in india during her time her survival in a male dominated field is all the more significant because the profession continues to exclude most women even today this book acknowledges her role as a pioneer among women and her contribution to early photojournalism in india she was recently honoured with the first national photo award for lifetime achievement by the government of india about the author: sabeena gadihoke teaches video and television production at the jamia millia islamia in new delhi she is also an independent documentary filmmaker and cameraperson