To Make Their Own Way in the World is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the history of photography: fifteen daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty-men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina.
Photographed by Joseph T. Zealy for Harvard professor Louis Agassiz in 1850, they were rediscovered at Harvard's Peabody Museum in 1976. This groundbreaking multidisciplinary volume features essays by prominent scholars who explore such topics as the identities of the people depicted in the daguerreotypes, the close relationship between photography and race, and visual narratives of slavery and its lasting effects. With over two hundred illustrations, including new photography by Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent engagement.
American photographers documented and defined the twentieth century in a remarkable array of images, the style and content of which evolved dramatically over the course of the century. In Disappearing Witness, photographer and art historian Gretchen Garner chronicles this transformation, from the introduction of the 35-millimeter camera in the 1920s to the digital photography of today. Accompanied by over 125 key works in the history of photography—fine-art, documentary, and editorial—her thoughtful and enlightening discussion traces American photography's aesthetic, commercial, and technological changes, as the medium's primary role of spontaneous witness gradually gave way to contrived arrangement and artistic invention. Garner discusses direct witness as the dominant paradigm for American photographers from the 1920s to the 1960s. During these decades, photographers saw their medium primarily as a vehicle for truthful description and sometimes as a weapon against social injustice. In the 1960s, however, photographic practice and its cultural significance shifted to reflect more personal, idiosyncratic, and staged visions of reality—a trend, Garner notes, that has intensified with digital photography. The major portion of the book is devoted to post-1960s work, exploring how the changes have affected portraiture, documentary, landscape, still life, fashion, and the new genre of self-imagery. In documenting this transformation in American photography, Disappearing Witness forcefully rethinks the history of photography itself.
In 1909 the French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn launched a monumentally ambitious project: to produce a color photographic record of human life on Earth. An internationalist and pacifist, Kahn believed that he could use the new autochrome--the world's first portable, true-color photographic process--to create a global photographic archive that would promote cross-cultural understanding and peace. Over the next twenty years, he sent a group of photographers to more than fifty countries around the world, amassing more than 72,000 images. Until recently his collection was all but forgotten. Now, a century after he began his "Archives of the Planet" project, this book--richly illustrated in color throughout--and the BBC series it follows are bringing Kahn's dazzling early twentieth-century pictures to a wide audience for the first time, and putting color into what we usually think of as a monochrome world.
Kahn's photographers captured times, places, and people we simply do not expect to see in color photographs. They documented age-old cultures on the brink of being changed forever by war, modernization, and Westernization, recording the last years of Ireland's traditional Celtic villages and the late days of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. They photographed First World War soldiers in their trenches as well as the postwar celebrations in London. In the course of their travels, they also took the earliest color photographs in countries as varied as Vietnam and Brazil, Mongolia and Norway, Benin and the United States.
After being financially ruined in the Great Depression, Kahn was forced to bring his project to a premature end, but today his collection of early color photographs is recognized as one of the world's most important. The Dawn of the Color Photograph makes it easy to see why.
Family Amnesia is a visual tribute and love letter honoring the artist's Chinese American family roots in the United States. The book explores her family's multi-generational resilience and resistance through mixed media collages, her grandfather’s photographs, her own captured images and archival material.
In July, Aperture will release Todd Hido: Intimate
Distance, Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album, a newly
assembled, chronological album compiling over thirty years of Hido’s
photographs, including a selection of new works.
Spending between 24 and 72 hours documenting each family, Lewis's intimate black and white photographs capture caught moments within the homes of a variety of families as the project unfolded over 14 years. The images explore the fullness of parenting, from the unexpected chaos to the quiet shared moments.
The Enchanted Ones, a new photo book by Stephanie Pommez, is a visual tale that drifts between reality and myth, inspired by the legends of the Brazilian Amazon. Shot entirely on 35mm black-and-white film, the book moves beyond documentary into the realm of the imaginary, capturing a world where the seen and unseen coexist.
Soumoud In Dark Times is a new photobook by Rehab Nazzal. Featuring 41 color photographs taken between October 2023 and November 2024, the book presents a diaristic record of everyday life across the West Bank during a year of intensified military and settler violence.
If you’re looking for a photography magazine that does more than showcase beautiful images—one that actually invites you to think, feel, and connect—PhotoED Magazine’s Issue #73 is something special. The theme for this edition is MELD, and it really lives up to that name. It's all about merging: ideas, identities, histories, and creative practices. And the result is a thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly hopeful collection of work.
On 15 May, Amsterdam-based photographer Jackie Mulder releases her first artist book. Known for her unique approach to photography and mixed media art, Mulder presents Thought Trails, a visual fusion of present and past. The book showcases her signature style, where self-made photographs are transformed into dreamlike compositions.
Photographer Hannah Altman’s new book, We Will Return To You, considers how Jewish storytelling is translated and transformed through photographs by evoking the enigmatic, ritualistic, and multi-layered world of folklore. The 71 color photographs in the book, often portraits, are illuminated by Altman’s distinctive use of natural light. An excerpt from the book forms the foundation for her upcoming exhibition, As It Were, Suspended in Midair, in the Kniznick Gallery at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, running February 13–June 12, 2025.
Born in Madagascar and raised in Kenya, celebrated documentary photographer Guillaume Bonn has dedicated over 20 years to exploring and chronicling wildlife conservation practices, vanishing landscapes, and the implementation of landscape and wildlife preservation in East Africa.
