History Books / B

Renata Cherlise’s family loved capturing their lives in photographs and home movies, sparking her love of archival photography. Following in her family’s footsteps, Cherlise established Black Archives, which presents a nuanced representation of Black people across time living vibrant, ordinary lives. Through the platform, many have discovered and shared images of themselves and their loved ones experiencing daily life, forming multidimensional portraits of people, places, and the Black community. These photographs not only tell captivating stories, they hold space for collective memory and kinship.
Black Archives is a stunning collection of timeless images that tell powerful, joyful stories of everyday life and shed light on Black culture’s dynamic, enduring influence through the generations. The images showcase reunions, nights out on the town, parents and children, church and school functions, holidays, big life events, family vacations, moments at home, and many more occasions of leisure, excitement, reflection, and pride.
Featuring more than three hundred images that spotlight the iconic and the candid, Black Archives offers a nuanced compendium of Black memory and imagination.

The Bloomsbury Group in Focus by Maggie Humm offers an enthralling and intimate portrait of the influential Bloomsbury Group through a rich collection of personal photographs. Drawing from the extensive photo albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey, and others, this book provides a unique window into the private world of these celebrated figures.

Humm’s curated selection of images captures the everyday lives and relationships of the Bloomsbury Group with remarkable intimacy. Rather than formal portraits, these photographs depict the group in their domestic environments—engaging in pastimes, surrounded by children, clothed in distinctive styles, and accompanied by servants and pets. The collection reveals their homes, holidays, and the textures of their personal worlds, bringing to life a side of Bloomsbury that feels tactile and immediate.

Some of the photographs are blurred, suggesting moments captured in haste, while unguarded close-ups reflect the complex and deeply emotional ties between the group’s members. These are not just historical documents but testimonies to the intricate web of friendships, romances, and empathetic connections that defined the Bloomsbury Group.

By weaving these images together, Humm presents a fresh and nuanced view of Bloomsbury, portraying the group not only as intellectuals and artists but as real people living richly connected lives. The Bloomsbury Group in Focus is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections of art, photography, and the personal histories of one of the 20th century’s most iconic collectives.

In this book, the authors explore and discuss the development of one of the most interesting and dynamic of photographic genres. Hailed as a landmark work when it was first published in 1994, Bystander is widely regarded by street photographers as the "bible" of street photography. It covers an incredible array of talent, from the unknowns of the late 19th century to the acknowledged masters of the 20th, such as Atget, Stieglitz, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Frank, Arbus, Winogrand, and Levitt to name just a few. In this new and fully revised edition, the story of street photography is brought up to date with a re-evaluation of some historical material, the inclusion of more contemporary photographers, and a discussion of the ongoing rise of digital photography.

The Bitter Years was the title of a seminal exhibition held in 1962 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Edward Steichen, and 2012 marks its fiftieth anniversary. The show featured 209 images by photographers who worked under the aegis of the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1935-41, as part of Roosevelt's New Deal. The FSA, set up to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression, included an ambitious photography project that launched many photographic careers, most notably those of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. The exhibition featured their work as well as that of ten other FSA photographers, including Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans and Arthur Rothstein. Their images are among the most remarkable in documentary photography--testimonies of a people in crisis, hit by the full force of economic turmoil and the effects of drought and dust storms. This volume includes all the photographs in the original show, in a structure and sequence that reflect those devised by Steichen for the exhibition.