Jean-Christophe Béchet retraces here a subjective history of photography and claims its influences: from Eugène Atget to Stéphane Couturier, via Robert Frank, August Sander or Diane Arbus, the great photographers of our time are a major source of inspiration. Text in French.
I Hear Music in the Streets: New York 1969–89 is a vibrant, sprawling portrait of a city and its underground heartbeat — a visual tribute to New York’s music subcultures during two transformative decades. The book gathers snapshots from more than 60 photographers, offering a kaleidoscopic archive of moments when hip-hop, punk, disco, Latin rhythms, street dance, and the spontaneous energy of corners, subways or summer parties converged to create something new.
Organized into eight thematic chapters — from “The Bronx Boys” to “Our Latin Thing,” “The Subways” to “Days of Disco” — the collection maps not only musical evolution, but shifts in identity, styling, community, and cultural expression. Photographs by artists like Arlene Gottfried, Peter Hujar, Susan Meiselas, Martha Cooper, Jamel Shabazz and many others portray a city alive with defiance, creativity, resilience — a metropolis where style, sound and survival intertwined.
There’s urgency in these images — block-party gatherings in the Bronx, break-dancers on summer night sidewalks, disco lights in cramped clubs, street-corner musicians carrying boomboxes as if they carried the weight of a generation. The book evokes a city before gentrification and skyrocketing rents, when public space, subculture and community still found room to breathe and evolve. The photographs resonate with the raw energy of those years: improvisation, hybridity, multicultural exchange and a sense that every street belonged to someone.
Guided by a foreword from music historian Tim Lawrence, the book situates each image in social, cultural and historical context — showing how photography became a tool not just for documentation but for identity, resistance and memory. Far from a sanitized history, it’s a celebration of grit and spontaneity, of people using music and community as survival, protest, joy and art.
I Hear Music in the Streets feels like a time capsule and an anthem: a chronicle of a city in flux, a record of voices who shaped culture from below, and a reminder that music and community often flourish on sidewalks, subway platforms, basements and rooftops — long before the lights of fame and the filters of nostalgia.
In 1911 the French publisher Lucien Vogel challenged Edward Steichen to create the first artistic, rather than merely documentary, fashion photographs, a moment that is now considered to be a turning point in the history of fashion photography. As fashion changed over the next century, so did the photography of fashion. Steichen’s modernist approach was forthright and visually arresting. In the 1930s the photographer Martin Munkácsi pioneered a gritty, photojournalistic style. In the 1960s Richard Avedon encouraged his models to express their personalities by smiling and laughing, which had often been discouraged previously. Helmut Newton brought an explosion of sexuality into fashion images and turned the tables on traditional gender stereotypes in the 1970s, and in the 1980s Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts made male sexuality an important part of fashion photography. Today, following the integration of digital technology, teams like Inez & Vinoodh and Mert & Marcus are reshaping our notion of what is acceptable-not just aesthetically but also technically and conceptually-in a fashion photograph.
Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination invites us to reconsider how portrait photography helped shape a vision of Africa as more than a continent — as a dynamic political and cultural idea. Released just as the exhibition opens at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the book gathers over one hundred striking photographs by pivotal photographers of the mid-20th century and beyond, capturing Africans and members of the diaspora at moments of transformation, hope, and assertion.
From the studios of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé to the streets of Kinshasa, Bamako or Bobo-Dioulasso, these portraits depict everyday people — musicians, workers, youth, families — with dignity, style, and presence. These are not exoticized snapshots but dignified self-representations, where garments, posture, and ambience are charged with meaning. In these images, personal identity becomes collective testimony — a visual articulation of dignity amid decolonization, societal change, and the rethinking of African identity.
The book does more than archive faces — it explores the photographic portrait as a tool of political imagination. It traces how portraiture helped foster Pan-African solidarity, challenged colonial stereotypes, and offered individuals a way to assert themselves on their own terms. By placing these works side by side with contemporary contributions by artists such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi or Njideka Akunyili‑Crosby, the book demonstrates how these dialogues between generations still resonate — how portraiture remains a vital medium for expression, memory, and identity.
With essays by scholars and writers accompanying the images, the publication situates the photographs within broader historical and intellectual currents: decolonization, migration, diasporic exchange, and the global civil-rights movement. It asks its readers to see beyond surface aesthetics — to engage with photography as a medium of empowerment, solidarity, and cultural reinvention. This book is a celebration of African creativity and resilience — a tribute to the power of the portrait to transform how Africa is imagined, represented, and lived.
When battlefield prowess and political manipulation are not enough to achieve peace through victory, we summon our best and brightest to negotiate an end; we celebrate peace settlements; and we give prizes, if not to victors, then to visionaries. We exalt peace as a human achievement, and justly so. But the reality of peace is flawed. The rewards of peace are elusive for the men and women who live in the post-conflict societies of our time. Why is it so difficult to make a good peace when it is so easy to imagine? That is the question behind Imagine: Reflections on Peace.
In this stunning collection, photographic essays make grippingly palpable the stakes during war and peace. Samantha Power, former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Justice Richard Goldstone, ICTY prosecutor, and Jonathan Powell, chief negotiator for the Northern Ireland Good Friday agreement, are joined by world-renown writers Jon Lee Anderson, Philip Gourevitch, Jon Swain, Robin Wright, Anthony Loyd and Martin Fletcher in revealing the complexities of redemption and rebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Colombia, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda. We hear first person accounts of survival and the search for inner peace that bring the big picture to the personal. With added insights from scholars and practitioners, the book offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into the unvarnished story of peace and a window into what it takes for societies and individuals to move forward after unspeakable brutality.
Apple's latest iPad tablet has been an incredible success and generated a lot of interest from photographers soon after it was released. Instead of hauling a laptop along on vacation or to a photo shoot, a photographer can bring the lightweight iPad and take advantage of its large screen, third-party software, and online access. The iPad is great for reviewing photos on-site using something other than a camera's small LCD, editing photos, presenting a photographer's portfolio, and more. This fully updated 2nd edition of the iPad for Photographers will help novice, intermediate, and pro shooters to: • Get photos onto the iPad. Import using the camera connection kit. • Take photos with the iPad. • Back up photos. Copying photos from memory cards; using iCloud Photo • Stream as online backup; uploading files to Dropbox; and so on. • Organize your photos. • Rate photos and assign tags in the field--instead of waiting until you get home! • Edit photos on the iPad. • Share photos with others: iCloud Photo Stream, play on an Apple TV, and more. • Create your portfolio. Use portfolio software to give impressive presentations to prospective clients. Great for wedding photographers meeting people face to face, for example. • Video. Edit clips in iMovie, create slideshows, rough cuts, and more. In addition, photographers will learn other clever uses for their iPad, such as triggering the shutter using an iPad; using the screen as a fill flash; storing PDFs of camera manuals, books, etc.; and much more!
In the winter of 2021, Luke Oppenheimer arrived in the Tien Shan mountains of central Kyrgyzstan with a straightforward assignment: document the wolves that prey on livestock in the remote shepherding village of Ottuk. Each year, wolves descend from the high ridges to kill dozens of horses and countless sheep. For families whose wealth is measured in hooves and wool, these losses are catastrophic. The men ride into the mountains during the harshest winter months to track and hunt the predators, navigating blizzards and subzero nights in defense of their herds.
Spanning more than a decade of journeys and visual discoveries, Stories Untold is the ambitious new publication by internationally acclaimed photographer Calla Fleischer, a traveler whose lens is guided as much by curiosity as by empathy. Expansive in both scale and spirit, the nearly 400-page volume gathers a rich tapestry of images that explore the subtleties of the human experience—from fleeting gestures in crowded streets to quiet, contemplative portraits that linger long after the page is turned.
The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway is a groundbreaking photographic and historical project by Charleston-based photographer Virginia McGee Richards, published by MIT Press in April 2026. The work uncovers a little-known chapter of American history, revealing a 300-mile network of colonial-era canals—called “cuts”—dug by enslaved people between the 17th and 18th centuries along the Atlantic coastline from Charleston, South Carolina to St. Augustine, Florida.
"Another Time, Another Place" is an homage to New York City in the 1980s, when it was raw, chaotic, and alive with possibility. Downtown Manhattan was a place where art, music, performance, and nightlife collided—igniting a cultural revolution that still echoes today.
Where Do I Go? is the newest photobook by Rania Matar, bringing together approximately 128 color portraits of young women living in Lebanon today. Released in the shadow of the fiftieth anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War, the book offers a meditation on life shaped by prolonged instability, without allowing conflict to dominate the narrative. Instead of foregrounding destruction, Matar centers creativity, dignity, and resilience, crafting a body of work that quietly insists on the complexity of everyday existence amid uncertainty.
Award-winning Palestinian photographer Ahmad Al-Bazz presents a groundbreaking new work, The Erasure of Palestine, the result of a three-year journey documenting the remnants of hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns depopulated and destroyed from 1948 to the present. Through his lens, Al-Bazz confronts history, memory, and contemporary occupation, offering a stark counter-narrative to the dominant historical record.
With Cockaigne, Austrian photographer Gregor Sailer directs his gaze toward the largely unseen machinery of contemporary food production. Drawing inspiration from the medieval legend of the “Land of Cockaigne” — a fantasy of limitless abundance — Sailer examines the very real systems, technologies, and infrastructures that underpin how food is produced, distributed, and controlled today. The book challenges readers to rethink ideas of nourishment, consumption, and collective responsibility.
In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast, signaling peace following 30 years of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. Photographer Julie McCarthy photographed annually for five years on Shankill Road, a one-mile Protestant/Loyalist enclave running parallel to the Catholic/Republican area. A wall called the “Peace Wall” divides the two communities.
For the first time, Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings brings together the full transcripts of key historic recordings made with and by the acclaimed British photographer, writer, and feminist Jo Spence (1934–1992), alongside a wealth of unpublished photographs and documents. This landmark book offers an intimate window into the life, work, and politics of one of the most influential figures in British documentary photography.
