Miscellaneous Photo Books / B

The eight essays in Beauty in Photography provide a critical appreciation of photography by one of its foremost proponents. The result is a rare book of criticism, alive to the pleasure and mysteries of true exploration.

An exquisite photography book featuring the collaborative work of fashion photographer Tom Kublin and renowned haute couture designer Cristóbal Balenciaga.

The first book to document the short yet prolific artistic career of fashion photographer and filmmaker Tom Kublin, and a celebration of his creative union with Cristóbal Balenciaga during the fashion house's postwar heyday in Paris.

More than 140 photographs and film stills by Kublin capture the golden age of Balenciaga couture in the 1950s and 1960s, from the impeccable elegance of the collection shoots―including exclusive film footage of Balenciaga himself at work―to striking covers and editorials for high-profile magazines.

Balenciaga – Kublin begins with a foreword by Maria Kublin and continues with a biography by Ana Balda, charting Kublins career, his place in the artistic milieu of the European avant-garde, and his working relationship with Balenciaga. Miren Vives, head of the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum, also contributes.

Additional texts come from fashion industry professionals who worked with and knew Kublin best: an interview with his partner and muse, the model Katinka Bleeker; memories from the Italian fashion photographer Gian Paolo Barbieri, who began his career as Kublin's assistant in Paris in the 1960s; and a piece by Lydia Slater, editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar UK, who looks back on Kublin's work for the magazine at a pivotal time in its history.

This book honors the successes and innovations of Kublin's career, recording for posterity his contribution to fashion photography and the iconography of the House of Balenciaga.

For the press tour following the record-breaking release of Greta Gerwig’s award-winning, acclaimed Barbie movie, producer and star Margot Robbie and her stylist Andrew Mukamal immersed themselves in some of Barbie’s most iconic outfits and curated vintage pieces, then approached designers, from Giorgio Armani to Donatella Versace, to create looks inspired by the doll-size originals. Many of these looks were not seen as the official Barbie press tour was cut short—so Margot and Andrew worked with renowned fashion photographer Craig McDean to shoot her in the looks exactly as they were curated: Schiaparelli in Los Angeles, Vivienne Westwood in London, vintage Chanel with matching Steamline luggage at the airport, and beyond.
Accompanying McDean’s sumptuous photography are original Barbie dolls from the period, a treasure trove of rare materials from Mattel’s Barbie fashion archives, and the designers’ sketches and Polaroids from fittings, layered into evocative collages by Fabien Baron, who conceived and produced the shoots and art-directed the book. With text by Margot Robbie and Andrew Mukamal, as well as handwritten contributions from the designers behind the looks (from Olivier Rousteing and Michelle Ochs to Manolo Blahnik and Jeremy Scott), this unique book blends the serious chic of high fashion with the serious fun of Barbie world—the dolls, the history, and the style that have captured imaginations for 65 years.

This is an updated and newly revised edition of the classic book The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression. Originally published in 1994 and first revised in 2010, The Art of Photography has sold well over 100,000 copies and has firmly established itself as the most readable, understandable, and complete textbook on photography. Featuring nearly 200 beautiful photographs in both black-and-white and color, as well as numerous charts, graphs, and tables, this book presents the world of photography to beginner, intermediate, and advanced photographers who seek to make a personal statement through the medium of photography.

Without talking down to anyone or talking over anyone's head, renowned photographer, teacher, and author Bruce Barnbaum presents how-to techniques for both traditional and digital approaches. In this newest edition of the book, Barnbaum has included many new images and has completely revised the text, with particular focus on two crucial chapters covering digital photography: he revised a chapter covering the digital zone system, and includes a brand-new chapter on image adjustments using digital tools. There is also a new chapter discussing the concepts of “art versus technique” and “traditional versus digital” approaches to photography. Throughout the book, Barnbaum goes well beyond the technical, as he delves deeply into the philosophical, expressive, and creative aspects of photography so often avoided in other books.

In this fully revised and greatly expanded second edition of The Essence of Photography, world-renowned photographer and teacher Bruce Barnbaum draws upon 50 years of experience and observation to teach the art of photographic seeing and creativity.

There is a lot more to photography than simply picking up a camera, pointing it toward something, and tripping the shutter. Achieving a great photograph requires thought and preparation, an understanding of the photographic process, and a firm grasp of how light and composition affect a photo. There must be personal involvement and personal expression. There must be experimentation, with the recognition that only a small percentage of experiments end successfully.

In this revised and expanded second edition of The Essence of Photography, best-selling author and world-renowned photographer and teacher Bruce Barnbaum explores these seldom-discussed issues by drawing upon his personal experiences and observations from 50 years of photographing and teaching. In addition to photographs, Bruce also uses painting, music, and writing, as well as the sciences and even business, to provide pertinent examples of creative thinking. These examples serve as stepping stones that will lead you to your own heightened ability to see and be creative.

The best of Harry Benson's era-defining Beatles portfolio, capturing the Liverpudlian quartet on the road, performing, and coming to terms with skyrocketing fame. From a pillow fight in Paris to their first U.S. tour, shot in luminous black and white, Benson's pictures show intimate glimpses of George, John, Paul, and Ringo composing, relaxing, and engaging with euphoric fans.

This elegantly packaged celebration of birds from around the world unites incredible animal portraits from Joel Sartore's distinguished National Geographic Photo Ark project with inspiring text by up-and-coming birder Noah Strycker. It includes hundreds of species, from tiny finches to charismatic eagles; brilliant toucans, intricate birds of paradise, and perennial favorites such as parrots, hummingbirds, and owls also make colorful appearances. Everyone who cares about birds--from the family with a bird feeder outside the kitchen window to the serious birder with a life list of thousands--will flock to this distinctive and uplifting book.

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.

Shining Lights: Black Women in Photography in the 1980s–90s is the first critical anthology of Black women photographers active in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s, providing a richly illustrated overview of a significant and overlooked chapter of British photographic history. Seen through the lens of Britain’s sociopolitical and cultural contexts, the publication tells a unique story from the dual perspectives of lived experience and historical investigation, authored and researched by one of the period’s most influential photographic artists, Joy Gregory. The pioneering and diverse work created by Black women artists in the UK over the course of these two decades marked an important juncture in both documentary and conceptual practices, including the experimental use of photomontage, self-portraiture, staged imagery, and photography in dialogue with other media. Shining Lights showcases the expertise and evolution of this work, illuminated by ephemera and archival material, new essays and roundtable conversations, foregrounding a variety of individual artistic developments as well as the communities fostered around them. Amongst the fifty-eight photographers included are Maxine Walker, Ingrid Pollard, Claudette Holmes, Roshini Kempadoo, Mohini Chandra, Carole Wright, Joy Gregory, Sutapa Biswas, Maud Sulter, Brenda Agard, Anita McKenzie, Mitra Tabrizian, Poulomi Desai, Virginia Nimarkoh, Jennie Baptiste, Nudrat Afza, Merle Van den Bosch, and Eileen Perrier. This comprehensive publication by Joy Gregory is developed in close collaboration with photography historian and writer Taous Dahmani, and is co-published with Autograph, London.

The latest and third BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! volume presents new work by more than sixty photographers from thirty countries including China, India, Iran, Poland, and Russia where gay rights are repressed and queer lives are under constant threat.

BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! was founded by The Little Black Gallery and is curated by Ghislain Pascal to promote queer and gay fine art photography, which includes their bi-annual magazine with the same name. The first BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! book was published in 2019, the second volume in 2020, both have sold out. Part of the proceeds of this volume will be donated to charities supporting the LGBTQ+ community and fighting the HIV / AIDS epidemic.

Featured Photographers: AdeY, Johnny Abbate, Alex Avgud, Yves De Brabander, Domenico Cennamo, David Charles Collins, Alexander Courtman, David-Simon Dayan, Alejo Dillor, Ivan Donadio, Diogo Duarte, Michael Epps, Matthew Finley, Stéphane Gizard, Greg Gorman, Ashish Gupta, Jerome Haffner, Babak Haghi, Tim Hailand, Brice Hardelin, Florian Hetz, Serge Le Hidalgo, Raj Kamal, Matheus Katayama, Dmitry Komissarenko, Richard Kranzin, Leo Maki, Krzysztof Marchlak, Paul McDonald, Juan Antonio Papagni Meca, Charles Moriarty, Bert Van Pelt, Sebastian Perinotti, Alessandro Pollio, Xavier Samre, Michael Sondergaard, Tyler Udall, Ruben van Schalm, Luis Venegas, Gerardo Vizmanos, Shen Wei et al.

"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 this greatly anticipated book The Art of Boudoir Photography: How to Create Stunning Photographs of Women, pro photographer Christa Meola goes beyond photography instruction to include detailed information on how to help women look and feel beautiful by cultivating their sex appeal. This beautifully illustrated guide will not only enhance your understanding of how to bring out the best in every woman, but also sharpen your photography skills in order to capture her successfully.