History Books / I

The visual history of the American counterculture finds a rigorous archival update in In Case You Missed It: Counterculture Photography of the 1960s and 1970s. The volume centralizes the work of Jerry “Dok” de Wilde, a photographer whose proximity to the era’s most significant social and artistic upheavals provided him with an unfiltered vantage point. De Wilde, whose father was a prominent figure in the Dutch Resistance and an influential theatrical designer, brought a disciplined eye to the seemingly chaotic developments of the Los Angeles scene. His documentation tracks the evolution of a decade defined by the rejection of traditional institutional structures, moving from the localized experiments of the Hollywood Hills to the mass mobilizations of the anti-war movement.

A primary focus of the collection is "the Farm," an agrarian commune situated in the hills above Los Angeles that functioned as a laboratory for alternative living. De Wilde’s imagery records the daily logistics of communal life, capturing the intersection of creative labor and social radicalism. These intimate domestic scenes are juxtaposed against high-profile cultural milestones, including the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. During this event, de Wilde captured iconic frames of Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding, documenting the precise moment when the hippie movement transitioned into a global media phenomenon. His lens serves as a technical witness to the aesthetic shifts in fashion and performance that would eventually permeate mainstream American culture.

The publication also addresses the political maturation of the era through de Wilde’s coverage of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam and various civil rights demonstrations. By navigating fluidly between the private spaces of artists and the public squares of activists, the book presents a layered analysis of a community bound by the pursuit of systemic transformation. The high-contrast black-and-white plates and vibrant color sequences emphasize the sensory density of the period. In Case You Missed It functions as a cold, evidence-based survey of a fleeting sociological climate, preserving the visual data of a generation that attempted to redefine the American social contract before the tide of the 1970s brought new economic and political realities.

From the first announcement in 1839 of the daguerreotype process at a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, photography found itself suspended uneasily between science and the arts, a new technology that offered previously unimaginable possibilities for pictorial representation. While photography's capacity for naturalistic reproduction threatened one traditional function of painting, the camera's artificial eye could offer new models for looking at the world. In the work of pioneering photographers such as Gustave Le Gray, Eugène Cuvelier, Nadar, Atget and André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, impressionist artists such as Manet, Corot, Monet, Pissarro and Degas found new ways of seeing.
The key position that photography now occupies in contemporary art has encouraged a renewed interest in photography's historical relationship to the other visual arts. The Impressionists and Photography pursues this line of research. Luxuriously produced and lavishly illustrated, this volume reexamines the lively debate that photography's emergence generated among critics and artists, and offers a critical reflection on the affinities and mutual influences between photography and painting in France in the second half of the 19th century.

Acclaimed photography critic Vince Aletti has selected 100 significant magazine issues from his expansive personal archive, revealing images by photographers rarely seen outside their original context. With his characteristic élan and featuring stunning images, Aletti has created a fresh, idiosyncratic, and previously unexplored angle on the history of photography.
Issues, a luxury, oversized object, richly illustrated with brilliant reproductions, and enclosed in an elegant archival-style magazine-file box, is an essential addition to every book collection on photography, fashion, and graphic design.
It's the first survey to explore the history of photography through the lens of fashion magazines, spanning the years 1925 to 2018. Magazines featured include American, British, and French Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, W, Details, Purple Fashion, The Face, Dutch, and many more.

This compelling book chronicles the most influential ideas that have shaped photography from the invention of the daguerreotype in the early 19th century up to the digital revolution and beyond. Entertaining and intelligent, it provides a fascinating resource to dip into. Arranged in a broadly chronological order to show the development of photography, the ideas that comprise the book include innovative concepts, cultural and social incidents, technologies, and movements. Each idea is presented through lively text and arresting visuals, and explores when the idea first evolved and its subsequent impact on photography.

"Instant photography at the push of a button!" During the 1960s and '70s, Polaroid was the coolest technology company on earth. Like Apple, it was an innovation machine that cranked out one must-have product after another. Led by its own visionary genius founder, Edwin Land, Polaroid grew from a 1937 garage start-up into a billion-dollar pop-culture phenomenon. Instant tells the remarkable tale of Land's one-of-a-kind invention-from Polaroid's first instant camera to hit the market in 1948, to its meteoric rise in popularity and adoption by artists such as Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, and Chuck Close, to the company's dramatic decline into bankruptcy in the late '90s and its unlikely resurrection in the digital age. Instant is both an inspiring tale of American ingenuity and a cautionary business tale about the perils of companies that lose their creative edge.