In The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today. The featuring of the Black figure and Black runway and cover models in the media and art has been one marker of increasingly inclusive fashion and art communities. More critically, however, the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body has been reinfused with new vitality and substance thanks to an increase in powerful images authored by an international community of Black photographers.
In a richly illustrated essay, Sargent opens up the conversation around the role of the Black body in the marketplace; the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image; and the institutional barriers that have historically been an impediment to Black photographers participating more fully in the fashion (and art) industries.
"Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints." This is the unspoken rule of urban explorers, who sometimes risk their safety, police records, and even their lives to explore abandoned buildings, sewers and storm drains, transit tunnels, utility tunnels, high-security areas of inhabited buildings, and even catacombs such as those in Paris, Rome, Odessa and Naples. Although these urban explorers usually work solo or in small teams, they collectively put forth a ground cry against a modern culture that embraces the new, polished, uniform, and mundane. Urban explorers find the beauty layers of graffiti by years worth of writers, multi-hued peeling paint, antique objects, someone s initials left in the dust on a broken stained glass window and physical manifestations of memory that abandoned, impermanent urban spaces can hold. Beauty in Decay features the best in full-color, panoramic photographs from urban exploration or Urbex around the world. Overgrown industrial complexes, disused lunatic asylums, abandoned palaces and forgotten monasteries are showcased, and paired with clear-sighted, poetic text.
BEHIND PHOTOGRAPHS: ARCHIVING PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGENDS began as the personal quest of photographer Tim Mantoani to document and preserve noted photographers together with their images. “We have come to a point in history where we are losing both photographic recording mediums and iconic photographers,” Mantoani comments. “While many people are familiar with iconic photographs, the general public has no idea of who created them. This book became a means to do that, the photographer and their photograph in one image.”
As to why he is using a soon-to-be-extinct photographic medium only a handful of which survive, the 20×24 Polaroid, Mantoani explains, “I chose the format for two reasons. First, it is very possible that in just a few years, film for this camera will no longer exist. Second, to me this is the ultimate view camera. If you are going to call the greatest living photographers and ask to make a photo of them and you are shooting 35mm digital, they may not take your call. But if you say you are shooting 20×24 Polaroid, they will at least listen to your pitch.”
In Believing is Seeing Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography. In his inimitable style, Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs, from the ambrotype of three children found clasped in the hands of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg to the indelible portraits of the WPA photography project. Each essay in the book presents the reader with a conundrum and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. During the Crimean War, Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death-one of a road covered with cannonballs, the other of the same road without cannonballs. Susan Sontag later claimed that Fenton posed the first photograph, prompting Morris to return to Crimea to investigate. Can we recover the truth behind Fenton's intentions in a photograph taken 150 years ago? In the midst of the Great Depression and one of the worst droughts on record, FDR's Farm Service Administration sent several photographers, including Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, to document rural poverty. When Rothstein was discovered to have moved the cow skull in his now-iconic photograph, fiscal conservatives-furious over taxpayer money funding an artistic project-claimed the photographs were liberal propaganda. What is the difference between journalistic evidence, fine art, and staged propaganda? During the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006, no fewer than four different photojournalists took photographs in Beirut of toys lying in the rubble of bombings, provoking accusations of posing and anti-Israeli bias at the news organizations. Why were there so many similar photographs? And were the accusers objecting to the photos themselves or to the conclusions readers drew from them? With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris reveals in these and many other investigations how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Part detective story, part philosophical meditation, Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception from one of America's most provocative observers.
In Bending the Frame, Fred Ritchin--Professor of Photography & Imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and author of After Photography--examines the complex relations between social justice and photojournalism in today's oversaturated political and media climates. Is visual journalism even effective at all, given the ease with which so many of us can simply record events? And how can the impact of iconic images from the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War be compared to, say, the consequences of leaked images from Abu Ghraib? Do changes in strategy imply changes in accountability and responsibility for visual journalism as a whole? Ritchin intends his discussion--which ranges across new media but also includes uses of video as well as a wide range of books and exhibitions--to provide critical tools with which to approach the various efforts of today's visual (and "citizen") journalists and documentary photographers. He also examines the historical uses of photography and related media to inspire social change, the better to pose the critical question that lies at the heart of his book: How can images promote new thinking and make a difference in the world?
A follow-up to the successful and acclaimed "Best Business Practices for Photographers", this updated and expanded edition serves as an even more comprehensive guide to achieving financial success and personal satisfaction in your business as a photographer. Included in this new edition are sections on licensing your work, making the career change from a staff photographer to a freelancer, surviving an IRS audit, and more. This book includes best practices in interacting with clients, negotiating contracts and licenses, and business operations. "Best Business Practices for Photographers, Second Edition" is the key to a successful career in photography.
Business and Legal Forms for Photographers, 4th Edition contains 34 forms for photographers, each accompanied by step-by-step instructions, advice on standard contractual provisions, and unique negotiation checklists to guide professionals to the best deal. Included are contracts for wedding, portrait, and assignment photography; publishing, collaboration, and licensing contracts; property and model releases; assignment estimate/confirmation/invoice; delivery memo; stock photography invoice; stock agency agreement; permission form; copyright registration and transfer forms; nondisclosure agreement; license of rights; license of electronic rights; trademark application; employment application and agreement; and more. Included is a CD-ROM containing electronic versions of each form. New to this edition are forms for leases, subleases, and lease assignments, plus an update to cover changes in copyright registration.
In a very short space of time, Geert Broertttes lost the most important women in his life. His aunt, grandmother and mother passed away. He shared his grief with his girlfriend, who became a recurring theme in this series. But even this relationship ended, a couple of months after his mother passed. Broertjes photographed the process instinctively. It was only afterwards that he noticed the coherence of his work. It became a poetic story about love, loss and grief.
I communicate with the world by creating visual narratives of composited photographs, often illuminating that in-between moment in time. It is how I explore dreams deferred, connections to prior generations, the natural world and our place within it. Making art is my psychological release, my obsession and my salvation.
In Lost Venice (Damiani, April 2020) photographer Sarah Hadley presents an alluring and haunting portrayal of this majestic city as distilled through her personal lens of loss and nostalgia. By contemplating the temporal beauty of Venice, Hadley examines our own impermanence and the uncertain future of this unique city.
Same-sex relations are illegal in thirty-two African countries. Most, including Kenya and Uganda, were former British colonies, and the legacy of the colonialists' anti-gay legislation can be felt to this day. In 2014 Uganda introduced a so-called "kill the gays" law that sought to broaden the criminalization of same-sex relations, making it punishable by life imprisonment and, in some instances, death. In 2019 Uganda's Minister of Ethics and Integrity called to introduce such a bill once again.
Stephan Vanfleteren is mainly known to the general public for his penetrating black & white portrait photography, but over the past decades his work has ranged to documentary, artistic and personal pictures. From street photography in world cities like New York to the genocide of Ruanda, from storefront façades to the mystical landscapes of the Atlantic wall, from still lifes to intense portraits. The iconic images sit side by side with unknown treasures in this heavy tome containing no less than 505 photographs.
The tourist season is over, the promenade is empty and Brexit is at the door when Benita Suchodrev returns to the British coastal town of Blackpool to photograph the hidden reality behind the famous Amusement Mile. She leads us to local churches, soup kitchens, youth shelters, old age homes and impoverished neighborhoods, meets bizarre characters, underage mothers, drug-addicts, artists, and hermits. She photographs strangers on train platforms, homeless in torn rags feasting on ham sandwiches and coffee under a dark overpass, closed storefronts and deserted alleys on a rainy night.
Coincidences, the first monograph from American photographer Jonathan Higbee, comprises over ten years of Higbee's work on the streets of New York City, including iconic and never-before-published photographs. A self-professed love letter to New York, Higbee captures moments of serendipity when people and their surroundings collide in beautiful, humorous and sometimes extraordinary ways. Aperture Gallery & Bookstore will host a book release and reception for Coincidences on Tuesday, November 5 at 6:30pm.
In 2003, photographic artist Charlotta María Hauksdóttir moved from her native Iceland to California to study photography. The relocation stirred in her a sense of rootlessness and a yearning for the landscapes of her childhood. She began making regular trips to Iceland to take photographs of the breathtaking landscapes of fjords, mountains, craggy shorelines and glaciers that she would then reconstruct and repurpose in her studio, as we do our memories. The resulting images are published in A Sense of Place: Imprints of Iceland by Charlotta María Hauksdóttir (Daylight Books, January 2020). The book reveals how the physical space of landscapes can be closely tied to a person's identity, sense of being, and personal history.
Here is a selection of photo books that, in my opinion, should be in your library! It is of course a very subjective choice and if I could, I would have chosen at least 50 of them. This collection will help you to draft your 'wish list' or to find the perfect gift for someone who enjoys photography. Happy Holidays!
Do you like cookies? 🍪 We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website, to show you personalized content and to analyze our website traffic. Learn more
