We have selected the best of history and memoirs of photography books. Select a letter to discover our A to Z glossary of must-read photography history books:
Stay up-to-date with call for entries, deadlines and other news about exhibitions, galleries, publications, & special events.
Walter Benjamin's A Little History of Photography offers a fascinating glimpse into the early development of photography and its broader implications, making it as relevant today as when it was first published in 1931. In this essay, Benjamin—a philosopher and cultural critic—demonstrates remarkable foresight about the transformative power of photography. His declaration that "the illiterate of the future ... will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph" underscores his belief that the medium would become essential to modern communication and culture.
Beginning with the pioneering experiments of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce, Benjamin traces photography's evolution through to the work of August Sander and Germaine Krull. But his essay goes beyond a simple history of the medium, exploring its artistic, societal, and political potential. In doing so, Benjamin anticipates his later and more famous work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where he would further explore the concept of “reproducibility” and its implications for art in the modern age.
A Little History of Photography remains a seminal text for understanding photography as more than just a technical innovation—it’s a tool for analyzing art, culture, and politics. Benjamin’s insights gave early credibility to the medium and its practitioners, shaping the critical frameworks that are still used today. This essay is a must-read for anyone interested in the philosophical and historical dimensions of photography.
An entertaining and comprehensive compendium packed with fascinating trivia, delightful oddities, and compelling stories that will captivate photographers of all levels and interests!
Dive into photography's rich heritage with A Brief History of Photography, an engaging almanac-style book that offers far more than just the typical and dry historical accounts of the genre. With more than 400 fascinating trivia entries and delightfully odd anecdotes, this book breathes life into the background details, stories, and personalities behind the cameras and processes we know and love.
Meticulously researched and written over two decades, this thoroughly entertaining and highly readable book provides an understanding of photography's evolution, from its beginnings going as far back as the 16th century all the way up to the modern day. Whether you’re dipping into the book for just a few minutes or sitting down for an afternoon of reading, you’ll explore the seminal cameras, lenses, and chemical processes that paved the way, as well as the visionary inventors, influential magazines, and significant photographers who made photography what it is today.
Profusely illustrated with both photographs and line drawings, A Brief History of Photography is an essential addition to any photographer's library. Whether you're a seasoned professional, an avid enthusiast, or simply someone who appreciates the magic of capturing images with your smartphone, this book offers an entertaining and educational look into the genre's rich history. The perfect gift—for either yourself or the photographer on your list—A Brief History of Photography is a must-have for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding and appreciation of this extraordinary art form.
Drawing from approximately 40,000 works of the Farm Security Administration Photographic Archive (1935–42) housed at the New York Public Library, Omen reviews and reframes this landmark project of modern American documentary photography. The monumental project features works by storied photographers such as Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks and Jack Delano. Many of the more iconic images that arose from this initiative were instrumental in constructing a hegemonic narrative of triumph against adversity in Depression-era America. In scrutinizing the backgrounds and secondary characters of some lesser-known photographs, however, a more turbulent story emerges.
Omen is co-edited by Mexican artists León Muñoz Santini and Jorge Panchoaga, providing a fresh perspective on this quintessentially American study. The image sequence amplifies the eerie details in enlarged, stark black-and-white images, creatively cropped and abutted together to form insidious connections. These hidden stories are premonitions of the visible and invisible specters of systemic injustice that characterize American society, their cycles renewing with each successive generation. Thus, Omen at once serves as a mirror for the anguished reality of today, and as a device for reflection on how historical and documentary photography is read and understood: taking the editorial gaze to its ultimate consequences. The book includes a narrative text by novelist and poet Lucy Ives.
The Women Who Changed Photography: And How to Master Their Techniques is a compelling exploration of 50 trailblazing female photographers whose groundbreaking work reshaped the history of photography. Often overshadowed by their male peers, these visionary women developed innovative techniques and unique styles, documenting everything from war and fashion to everyday life. They not only paved the way for future generations but continue to inspire photographers to this day.
The book features iconic figures such as Anna Atkins, Imogen Cunningham, Nadine Ijewere, Lee Miller, Shirin Neshat, Lorna Simpson, Cindy Sherman, Zanele Muholi, and Ingrid Pollard. Each section highlights their contributions, illustrating how their work has transformed the way we see the world and photography itself. Beautifully illustrated with full-color images of both the photographers and their creations, the book provides a rich visual journey through the evolution of the medium.
In addition to celebrating these pioneering women, the book offers practical advice on how to incorporate their techniques and styles into your own photography. With step-by-step instructions, readers can learn to master the approaches that made these photographers iconic and bring a fresh perspective to their own work.
For those eager to understand and emulate the styles of these influential artists, The Women Who Changed Photography serves as both a historical tribute and a practical guide. It's an essential read for anyone interested in photography and the lasting impact of women in the field.
The Bloomsbury Group in Focus by Maggie Humm offers an enthralling and intimate portrait of the influential Bloomsbury Group through a rich collection of personal photographs. Drawing from the extensive photo albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey, and others, this book provides a unique window into the private world of these celebrated figures.
Humm’s curated selection of images captures the everyday lives and relationships of the Bloomsbury Group with remarkable intimacy. Rather than formal portraits, these photographs depict the group in their domestic environments—engaging in pastimes, surrounded by children, clothed in distinctive styles, and accompanied by servants and pets. The collection reveals their homes, holidays, and the textures of their personal worlds, bringing to life a side of Bloomsbury that feels tactile and immediate.
Some of the photographs are blurred, suggesting moments captured in haste, while unguarded close-ups reflect the complex and deeply emotional ties between the group’s members. These are not just historical documents but testimonies to the intricate web of friendships, romances, and empathetic connections that defined the Bloomsbury Group.
By weaving these images together, Humm presents a fresh and nuanced view of Bloomsbury, portraying the group not only as intellectuals and artists but as real people living richly connected lives. The Bloomsbury Group in Focus is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections of art, photography, and the personal histories of one of the 20th century’s most iconic collectives.
Calling the Shots: LGBTQIA+ Photography from the Victoria and Albert Museum is an engaging and accessible exploration of LGBTQIA+ representation in photography, offering a groundbreaking survey of queer history through one of the world’s largest photography collections. Drawing from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, the book showcases a rich array of global LGBTQIA+ photographers, subjects, and communities.
Through six thematic chapters—Icons, Staged, Body, Liberty, Making a Scene, and Beyond the Frame—the volume highlights the vital role of photography in expressing, documenting, and celebrating queer life. Each chapter opens with a concise essay, followed by a visually stunning collection of photographs. Expanded captions and "artist in focus" features spotlight key works and moments in queer history, drawing attention to the intersection of photography with activism, performance, nightlife, and subcultures.
The book thoughtfully juxtaposes bold proclamations of queer identity with personal explorations of self, documenting moments of struggle, joy, and everyday life alongside staged performances and photographic fictions that challenge traditional notions of gender and sexuality.
Curated by Zorian Clayton, Calling the Shots serves as both an inspiring visual archive and a vital resource for anyone interested in the history of photography, as well as those passionate about LGBTQIA+ history. Through its inclusive lens, it offers a powerful and expansive appraisal of how photography has shaped and continues to reflect queer communities and culture.
Renata Cherlise’s family loved capturing their lives in photographs and home movies, sparking her love of archival photography. Following in her family’s footsteps, Cherlise established Black Archives, which presents a nuanced representation of Black people across time living vibrant, ordinary lives. Through the platform, many have discovered and shared images of themselves and their loved ones experiencing daily life, forming multidimensional portraits of people, places, and the Black community. These photographs not only tell captivating stories, they hold space for collective memory and kinship.
Black Archives is a stunning collection of timeless images that tell powerful, joyful stories of everyday life and shed light on Black culture’s dynamic, enduring influence through the generations. The images showcase reunions, nights out on the town, parents and children, church and school functions, holidays, big life events, family vacations, moments at home, and many more occasions of leisure, excitement, reflection, and pride.
Featuring more than three hundred images that spotlight the iconic and the candid, Black Archives offers a nuanced compendium of Black memory and imagination.
A magnificently illustrated history showcasing the work of three hundred women photographers from all over the world, from the invention of the medium through to the present.
Since the invention of the camera, women photographers have been key innovators in the medium and members of all major photography movements. These are artists who never stopped documenting, questioning, and transforming the world, breaking down social boundaries, challenging gender roles, and expressing their imagination and sexuality.
To capture the diversity of this global body of work, authors Luce Lebart and Marie Robert have invited 160 international women writers to contribute to this bold and beautifully illustrated manifesto.
Spanning from 1850 to the present day, and including images by Helen Levitt, Carrie Mae Weems, Hannah Höch, Sarah Moon, Eve Arnold, and Shirin Neshat, among many others, A World History of Women Photographers is an invaluable work of reference.
A definitive photographic history of the world under Covid-19., this book reveals in pictures the story of humankind's resilience, resourcefulness, and sense of purpose in the face of a global Pandemics documented by the photographers of Agence France Presse.
The Year That Changed Our World is a definitive, visual history of the Covid-19 Pandemic. With more than 450 photographs, this ambitious publication traces the arc of the Pandemic from early 2020 through to the vaccine breakthroughs of Spring 2021.
Here, the talented photographers of Agence France Presse document the deep, human stories of the Pandemic. Active in more than 150 countries, these capture all sides of the Covid-19 story as experienced by people throughout the globe. Organized into six chronological parts, and braided together with thematic breakout sections, including topics such as protests, sports, and politics, The Year That Changed Our World is a comprehensive time capsule. These images show the extraordinary efforts to understand, control, and cope with a previously unknown virus alongside the human stories of our lives at home: playing, caring, watching, and sharing, both together and at a distance.
Edited by Marielle Eudes, Director of Photography at Agence France Presse, and featuring, texts, quotes and insights from a range of contributors and public figures, The Year That Changed Our World is a photographic testament to humankind's resilience in the face of the pandemic. The book's arresting imagery provides a visual record for us and for future generations to better understand the world during the time of Covid-19.
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843 – 1999, 10×10's most recent “book-on-photobooks” anthology in its ongoing examination of photobook history, explores photobooks created by women from photography's beginnings to the dawn of the 21st century. Presenting a diverse geographic and ethnic selection, the anthology interprets historical photobooks by women in the broadest sense possible: classic bound books, portfolios, personal albums, unpublished books, zines and scrapbooks. Some of the books documented are well-known publications such as Anna Atkins' Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853), Germaine Krull's Métal (1928) and Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), while other books may be relatively unknown, such as Alice Seeley Harris' The Camera and the Congo Crime (c. 1906), Varvara Stepanova's Groznyi smekh. Okna Rosta (1932), Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson's African Journey (1945), Fina Gómez Revenga's Fotografías de Fina Gómez Revenga (1954), Eiko Yamazawa's Far and Near (1962) and Gretta Alegre Sarfaty's Auto-photos: Série transformações-1976: Diário de Uma Mulher-1977 (1978). Also addressed in the publication are the glaring gaps and omissions in current photobook history-in particular, the lack of access, support and funding for photobooks by non-Western women and women of color.
Aperture PhotoBook Awards: Winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year 2021
Follow the fascinating threads of human history in this monumental volume, amply illustrated with maps, archival imagery, and revealing photographs.
History comes to life in this comprehensive overview of humankind, from earliest times to the present day. Each page is filled with stunning visuals and thought-provoking text that make this book an instant classic. From the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Gulf War, from the Xia and Shang Dynasties of Bronze Age China to the new space race, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the digital age-here, in vivid color and crisp narrative, is the sweeping story of the history of civilization.
The Colors of Photography aims to provide a deeper understanding of what color is in the field of photography. Until today, color photography has marked the "here and now," while black and white photographs have been linked to our image of history and have formed our collective memory. However, such general dichotomies start to crumble when considering the aesthetic, cultural, and political complexity of color in photography.
With essays by Charlotte Cotton, Bettina Gockel, Tanya Sheehan, Blake Stimson, Kim Timby, Kelley Wilder, Deborah Willis. Photographic contributions by Hans Danuser and Raymond Meier.
By Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis. Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr
Publisher : Aperture
2020 | 488 pages
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.
Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850-1950 portrays the history of romantic love between men in hundreds of moving and tender vernacular photographs taken between the years 1850 and 1950. This visual narrative of astonishing sensitivity brings to light an until-now-unpublished collection of hundreds of snapshots, portraits, and group photos taken in the most varied of contexts, both private and public.
Taken when male partnerships were often illegal, the photos here were found at flea markets, in shoe boxes, family archives, old suitcases, and later online and at auctions. The collection now includes photos from all over the world: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Greece, Latvia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Serbia. The subjects were identified as couples by that unmistakable look in the eyes of two people in love - impossible to manufacture or hide. They were also recognized by body language - evidence as subtle as one hand barely grazing another - and by inscriptions, often coded.
Included here are ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, glass negatives, tin types, cabinet cards, photo postcards, photo strips, photomatics, and snapshots - over 100 years of social history and the development of photography.
Loving will be produced to the highest standards in illustrated book publishing, The photographs - many fragile from age or handling - have been digitized using a technology derived from that used on surveillance satellites and available in only five places around the world. Paper and other materials are among the best available. And Loving will be manufactured at one of the world's elite printers. Loving, the book, will be up to the measure of its message in every way.
In these delight-filled pages, couples in love tell their own story for the first time at a time when joy and hope - indeed human connectivity - are crucial lifelines to our better selves. Universal in reach and overwhelming in impact, Loving speaks to our spirit and resilience, our capacity for bliss, and our longing for the shared truths of love.
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.
Beautifully illustrated, this penetrating book offers a sweeping view of humanity from prehistory to the modern day, presented in a unique time-line format.
Sweeping but succinct, this comprehensive reference presents all of world history in a browsable format featuring more than three dozen maps, along with hundreds of photographs and illustrations. From the dawn of humankind to today's global complexities, this book provides a compelling reminder that history is unfolding all around us. The epic story of humanity on all seven continents is explored through a unique design that combines concise essays with expansive time lines that invite deeper reading on milestone moments, explained within the broader context of the era. The final chapter highlights such recent events as SpaceX's heavy rocket launch, the restoration of U.S./Cuba relations, and the historical trends that were the precursors to the state of our world today. Informative and richly illustrated, this authoritative take on world history will be a compelling reference you'll turn to again and again.
Capturing daily life in every corner of the world, this sumptuous collection of great street photography shows the very best of the genre. From pre-war gelatin silver prints to 21st-century digital images, from documentary to abstract, from New York's Central Park to a mountain city in Mongolia, these photographs reveal the many ways street photography moves, informs, and excites us. The book includes work by the likes of Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Joel Meyerowitz, Gordon Parks, André Kertész, Garry Winogrand, Roger Mayne, and other masters of street photography who pushed the genre's boundaries and continue to innovate today. Each exquisitely reproduced photograph is presented on a double-page spread and accompanied by an informative text. David Gibson's insightful introduction traces the history of street photography, reflects on its broad appeal, and looks toward the future of the genre.
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.
A comprehensive guide to all things photographic, Photography opens with a gallery of more than 30 of the key figures in photography, from 19th-century pioneers to famous photographers working today. The gallery provides fascinating contrasts between such diverse genres as art photography, reportage, portrait, and wildlife photography. The book then tells the story of photography, from its beginnings to the rise of the "selfie" today.
Naomi Rosenblum's classic history of photography traces the evolution of this young art form chronologically and thematically. Exploring the diverse roles that photography has played in the communication of ideas, Rosenblum devotes special attention to topics such as portraiture, documentation, advertising, and photojournalism, and to the camera as a means of personal artistic expression. Her text is illustrated with nearly nine hundred images by photographers both celebrated and little known, arranged in stimulating juxtapositions that illuminate their visual power.
During Barack Obama's two terms, Pete Souza was with the President during more crucial moments than anyone else--and he photographed them all. Souza captured nearly two million photographs of President Obama, in moments highly classified and disarmingly candid.
Obama: An Intimate Portrait reproduces more than 300 of Souza's most iconic photographs with fine-art print quality in an oversize collectible format. Together they document the most consequential hours of the Presidency--including the historic image of President Obama and his advisors in the Situation Room during the bin Laden mission--alongside unguarded moments with the President's family, his encounters with children, interactions with world leaders and cultural figures, and more.
Souza's photographs, with the behind-the-scenes captions and stories that accompany them, communicate the pace and power of our nation's highest office. They also reveal the spirit of the extraordinary man who became our President. We see President Obama lead our nation through monumental challenges, comfort us in calamity and loss, share in hard-won victories, and set a singular example to "be kind and be useful," as he would instruct his daughters.
This book puts you in the White House with President Obama, and will be a treasured record of a landmark era in American history.Age Range: Adult
By Dana Canedy, Darcy Eveleigh, Damien Cave, Rachel L. Swarns
Publisher : Black Dog & Leventhal
2017 | 304 pages
It all started with Times photo editor Darcy Eveleigh discovering dozens of these photographs. She and three colleagues, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave and Rachel L. Swarns, began exploring the history behind them, and subsequently chronicling them in a series entitled Unpublished Black History, that ran in print and online editions of The Times in February 2016. It garnered 1.7 million views on The Times website and thousands of comments from readers. This book includes those photographs and many more, among them: a 27-year-old Jesse Jackson leading an anti-discrimination rally of in Chicago, Rosa Parks arriving at a Montgomery Courthouse in Alabama a candid behind-the-scenes shot of Aretha Franklin backstage at the Apollo Theater, Ralph Ellison on the streets of his Manhattan neighborhood, the firebombed home of Malcolm X, Myrlie Evans and her children at the funeral of her slain husband , Medgar, a wheelchair-bound Roy Campanella at the razing of Ebbets Field.
In this book, the authors explore and discuss the development of one of the most interesting and dynamic of photographic genres. Hailed as a landmark work when it was first published in 1994, Bystander is widely regarded by street photographers as the "bible" of street photography.
It covers an incredible array of talent, from the unknowns of the late 19th century to the acknowledged masters of the 20th, such as Atget, Stieglitz, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Frank, Arbus, Winogrand, and Levitt to name just a few.
In this new and fully revised edition, the story of street photography is brought up to date with a re-evaluation of some historical material, the inclusion of more contemporary photographers, and a discussion of the ongoing rise of digital photography.
War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life. What she does, with clarity, beauty, and candor, is to document, often in their most extreme moments, the complex lives of others. It’s her work, but it’s much more than that: it’s her singular calling.
Lynsey Addario was just finding her way as a young photographer when September 11 changed the world. One of the few photojournalists with experience in Afghanistan, she gets the call to return and cover the American invasion. She makes a decision she would often find herself making—not to stay home, not to lead a quiet or predictable life, but to set out across the world, face the chaos of crisis, and make a name for herself.
From Darkroom to Daylight explores how the dramatic change from film to digital has affected photographers and their work. Harvey Wang interviewed and photographed more than 40 important photographers and prominent figures in the field, including Jerome Liebling, George Tice, Elliott Erwitt, David Goldblatt, Sally Mann, Gregory Crewdson, Susan Meiselas and Eugene Richards, as well as innovators Steven Sasson, who built the first digital camera while at Kodak, and Thomas Knoll, who, along with his brother, created Photoshop. This collection of personal narratives and portraits is both a document of this critical moment and a unique history of photography. Much of Wang's work has been about disappearance-of trades, neighborhoods, ways of life-and to live through this transition in his own craft has enabled him to illuminate the state of the art as both an insider and a documentary photographer.
Women have had a special relationship with the camera since the advent of photographic technology in the mid-nineteenth century. Photographers celebrated women as their subjects, from intimate family portraits and fashion spreads to artistic photography and nude studies, including Man Ray's Violon d'Ingres. Lesser known - and lesser studied - is the history of women photographers, who continue to make invaluable contributions to this flourishing art form.
Featuring more than 300 illustrations, A History of Women Photographers is the only comprehensive survey of women photographers from the age of the daguerreotype to the present day. In this edition, author Naomi Rosenblum expands the book's coverage to include additional photographers and fourteen new images. The text and the appendix of photographer biographies have been revised throughout, and Rosenblum also provides a new afterword, in which she evaluates the influence of rapidly changing digital technology on the field of photography and the standing of women photographers in the twenty-first century.
Written by world-renowned photographer, writer, and broadcaster Tom Ang, Photography lavishly celebrates the most iconic photographs and photographers of the past 200 years.
Tracing the history of photography from its origins in the 1800s to the digital age, Photography: The Definitive Visual History is the only book of its kind to give a comprehensive account of the people, the photographs, and the technologies that have shaped the history of photography.
Publisher : RM/Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofía
2014 | 264 pages
The form of the photo book allows for narrative meaning to arise from the images, and as such, has been used by many of the most preeminent photographers to present and communicate their works. In Spain particularly, the photo book is colored by a complex national history: the Civil War, the transition to democracy, the social and cultural role of the peasantry and the evolving role of women have all been significantly documented via the photo book. The relationship of Spanish culture and photography to the photo book is comprehensively explored in this volume, published to accompany an exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. This volume collects the work of not only well-known photographers such as José Ortiz Echagüe, Alfonso, Francesc Català-Roca, Ramón Masats, Xavier Miserachs, Francisco Ontañón and Colita, but also relatively unknown figures, such as Antonio Cánovas, the collective work of Misiones Pedagógicas (Teaching Missions), José Compte, Enrique Palazuelo, Luis Acosta Moro and Salvador Costa. Text by Horacio Fernández explains the cultural significance of these artists' works and further delves into the complex relationship between the Spanish photo book and literature.
n August 1993, when Nirvana was in New York to perform at the legendary Roseland Ballroom, Jesse Frohman photographed them for the London Observer’s Sunday magazine—the last formal photo shoot in which Cobain participated before he committed suicide on April 5th, 1994. Over the course of ninety photographs, Cobain seems an almost feral creature, by turns gentle, playful, defiant, suffering, or absorbed in his music. There’s a diverse range of shots of Cobain with fellow band members Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl and on his own, posing, performing, and greeting fans. Jon Savage’s original interview, which appeared with Frohman’s photographs in the Observer is also reproduced, giving us Cobain in his own words. The book is a touching tribute to Cobain twenty years after his tragic demise, and following Nirvana’s recent induction in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 90 illustrations, 25 in color
A history of photography
narrated through exhibitions and the theory
that has accompanied it has never been carried out
yet. It would be very interesting, furthermore, to trace
back the different aesthetic schools and communication
theories that have pointed out the evolution of
the history of photography and its public moments
par excellence: exhibitions.Installations manifest values, ideologies, politics and aesthetics.
Phaidon’s iconic The Photobook: A History series has been hailed as "the most important contribution to the field since modern histories of photography began" (photo–eye). In the third and final volume, legendary photographer Martin Parr and co–author Gerry Badger bring the series fully up to date with a curated selection of more than 200 photobooks dating from World War II to the present day.
Bringing together a group of stylistically diverse but similarly adventurous and innovative artists, this book explores the intense creative experimentation in photography that has occurred since the 1970s. Few people ask, "What is a painting? A drawing? A sculpture?" But the medium of photography, especially since the 1970s, has been constantly changing as technological developments allow for endless experimentation--until the very definition of a photograph becomes ripe for debate. Beginning with the waning days of conceptual art, this book presents a wide variety of artists--among them James Welling, Christopher Williams, Marco Breuer, Alison Rossiter, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter--who have reconsidered and reinvented the role of light, color, composition, materiality, and subject in the art of photography. Brought together for the first time in book form, these individuals have found new ways of implementing both analog and digital technology, in many cases creating hybrid works that open up new possibilities for today's artists. Filled with brilliant color reproductions, this volume not only traces the many strands of experimentation that have developed out of conceptual art, but also encourages dialogue on the continuing experimentation that is occurring as photography continues to evolve within the analog and digital worlds.
John Berger's explorations of the relationships between the individual and society, culture and politics, and experience and expression through the written word, films, photographic collaborations and performances are unmatched in their diversity, ambition and reach. His television series and book Ways of Seeing revolutionized the way that art is understood. Now, Understanding a Photograph gathers the photography writings of one of the most internationally influential authors of the past 50 years.
Most people outside of the art world view art as something that is foreign to their experiences and everyday lives. A People’s Art History of the United States places art history squarely in the rough–and–tumble of politics, social struggles, and the fight for justice from the colonial era through the present day. Author and radical artist Nicolas Lampert combines historical sweep with detailed examinations of individual artists and works in a politically charged narrative that spans the conquest of the Americas, the American Revolution, slavery and abolition, western expansion, the suffragette movement and feminism, civil rights movements, environmental movements, LGBT movements, antiglobalization movements, contemporary antiwar movements, and beyond.
With previously unpublished photographs by an incredibly diverse group of the world's top news photographers, Photojournalists on War presents a groundbreaking new visual and oral history of America's nine-year conflict in the Middle East. Michael Kamber interviewed photojournalists from many leading news organizations, including Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Magnum, Newsweek, the New York Times, Paris Match, Reuters, Time, the Times of London, VII Photo Agency, and the Washington Post, to create the most comprehensive collection of eyewitness accounts of the Iraq War yet published.
Six hundred thousand lives were lost between 1861 and 1865, making the conflict between North and South the nation’s deadliest war. If the “War Between the States” was the test of the young republic’s commitment to its founding precepts, it was also a watershed in photographic history, as the camera recorded the epic, heartbreaking narrative from beginning to end—providing those on the home front, for the first time, with immediate visual access to the horrors of the battlefield.
To cover the Vietnam War, the Associated Press gathered an extraordinary group of superb photojournalists in its Saigon bureau, creating one of the great photographic legacies of the 20th century. Collected here are images that tell the story of the war that left a deep and lasting impression on American life. These are pictures that both recorded and made history, taken by unbelievably courageous photojournalists. In a moving essay, writer Pete Hamill, who reported from Vietnam in 1965, celebrates their achievement.
1350Piercing Time examines the role of photography in documenting urban change by juxtaposing contemporary “rephotographs” taken by the author with images of nineteenth century Paris taken by Charles Marville, who worked under Georges Haussmann, and corresponding photographs by Eugène Atget taken in the early twentieth century.
The public outpouring of support for newly elected President John F. Kennedy in 1960 was only exceeded in scope and magnitude by the manifestations of grief and mourning after his assassination in 1963. These responses had an unusually strong visual component: likenesses of the president were framed in shop windows, pinned to living room walls, and plastered in public spaces across the nation. Fifty years after Kennedy’s death, this book observes the public’s reaction to the president’s election and assassination, featuring many photographs published here for the first time. In his travels throughout America during this period, Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) encountered these responses and photographed what he witnessed. From Washington, D.C., to Buffalo to Minneapolis to Los Angeles, Friedlander has captured a moment in American history that galvanized the nation and continues to resonate today.
Today color photography is so ubiquitous that it's hard to believe there was a time when this was not the case. Color Rush explores the developments that led us to this point, looking at the way color photographs circulated and appeared at the time of their making. From magazine pages to gallery walls, from advertisements to photojournalism, Color Rush charts the history of color photography in the United States from the moment it became available as a mass medium to the moment when it no longer seemed an unusual choice for artists. The book begins with the 1907 unveiling of autochrome, the first commercially available color process, and continues up through the 1981 landmark survey show and book, The New Color Photography, which hailed the widespread acceptance of color photography in contemporary art. In the intervening years, color photography captured the popular imagination through its visibility in magazines like Life and Vogue, as well as through its accessibility in the marketplace thanks to companies like Kodak. Often in photo histories, color is presented as having arrived fully formed in the 1970s; this book reveals a deeper story and uncovers connections in both artistic and commercial practices. A comprehensive chronology and examples of significant moments and movements mark the increasing visibility of color photography. Color Rush brings together photographers and artists such as Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, László Moholy-Nagy, Irving Penn, Eliot Porter, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Laurie Simmons, Edward Steichen, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston and many others, and examines them in a fresh context paying particular attention to color photography's translation onto the printed page. In doing so, it traces a new history that more fully accounts for color's pervasive presence today.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 is among the world's most visually documented revolutions. Coinciding with the birth of filmmaking and the increased mobility offered by the reflex camera, it received extraordinary coverage by photographers and cineastes—commercial and amateur, national and international. Many images of the Revolution remain iconic to this day—Francisco Villa galloping toward the camera; Villa lolling in the presidential chair next to Emiliano Zapata; and Zapata standing stolidly in charro raiment with a carbine in one hand and the other hand on a sword, to mention only a few. But the identities of those who created the thousands of extant images of the Mexican Revolution, and what their purposes were, remain a huge puzzle because photographers constantly plagiarized each other's images. In this pathfinding book, acclaimed photography historian John Mraz carries out a monumental analysis of photographs produced during the Mexican Revolution, focusing primarily on those made by Mexicans, in order to discover who took the images and why, to what ends, with what intentions, and for whom. He explores how photographers expressed their commitments visually, what aesthetic strategies they employed, and which identifications and identities they forged. Mraz demonstrates that, contrary to the myth that Agustín Víctor Casasola was "the photographer of the Revolution," there were many who covered the long civil war, including women. He shows that specific photographers can even be linked to the contending forces and reveals a pattern of commitment that has been little commented upon in previous studies (and completely unexplored in the photography of other revolutions).
'Art and Photography' surveys a rich and important history, from the 1960s to the 21st century. Arranged thematically, it presents works by the most significant international artists who have explored and extended the boundaries of photography. This influential body of work by over 160 artists over four decades is contextualised in the 'Documents' section by original artist's statements and interviews, as well as lucid reflections on photography by major thinkers of the era such as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. Featuring some of the worlds most innovative artists, such as Andy Warhol, Joel Meyerowitz, Wolfgang Tillmans, and John Baldessari, and influential writers, Laura Mulvey, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Marcel Proust, Art and Photography offers a expansive view of some of the key themes and movements associated with this practice such as memoirs, archives, the studio image, the urban, and every day, documentary practice, objects, media, testament, portraiture, land art, feminism and consumerism. Contains interviews, artists writings, bibliography, artists and writers biographies, index, and over 200 illustrations.
Photography Changes Everything offers a provocative rethinking of photography's impact on our culture and our daily lives. Compiling hundreds of images and responses from leading authorities on photography, it offers a brilliant, reader-friendly exploration of the many ways in which photographs package information and values, demand and hold attention, and shape our knowledge of and experience in the world. The volume draws on the extraordinary visual assets of the Smithsonian Institution's museums, science centers and archives to launch an unprecedented interdisciplinary dialogue on photography's capacity to shape and change our experience of the world. Photography Changes Everything features over 300 images and nearly 100 engaging short texts commissioned from experts, writers, inventors, public figures and others--from Hugh Hefner to John Baldessari, John Waters, Robert Adams, Sandra Phillips and many others. Each story responds to images selected by project contributors. Together they engage readers in a timely exploration of the extent to which our lives have been transformed through our interactions with photographic imagery. Edited by leading photography curator and author Marvin Heiferman, Photography Changes Everything provides a unique opportunity to better understand the history, practice and power of photography at this transitional moment in visual culture.
Today's photography is part of our own cultural moment, but it also arises from artistic traditions of the past. Seduced by Art looks at the effects of art and its history on the creation of photographs, tracing continuities in aims, visual style, and technical experimentation. This sumptuous book shows how photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron sought to elevate the status of their work by referencing Old Masters. Similarly, contemporary practitioners look to their photographic predecessors, as well as art history, for inspiration. Among the many photographers featured are Ori Gersht, Luc Delahaye, Thomas Struth, Tom Hunter, and Helen Chadwick, and paintings from Caravaggio, Zurbarán, Delacroix, Ingres, Constable, and others. Each chapter takes a genre—portraiture, the nude, still life, and landscape—and discusses the challenges that each poses for photographers. Interviews with Tina Barney, Rineke Dijkstra, Richard Billingham, Richard Learoyd, Sarah Jones, and Maisie Maud Broadhead focus in-depth on contemporary working practices.
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.
From its inception in the nineteenth century, photography has instigated a series of theoretical debates. In this new text, Jae Emerling therefore argues that the most insightful way to approach the histories of photography is to address simultaneously the key events of photographic history alongside the theoretical discourse that accompanied them.
While the nineteenth century is discussed, the central focus of the text is on modern and contemporary photographic theory. Particular attention is paid to key thinkers, such as Baudelaire, Barthes and Sontag. In addition, the centrality of photography to contemporary art practice is addressed through the theoretical work of Allan Sekula, John Tagg, Rosalind Krauss, and Vilém Flusser. The text also includes readings of many canonical photographers and exhibitions including: Atget, Brassai, August Sander, Walker Evans, The Family of Man, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sebastaio Salgado, Jeff Wall, and others.
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, hundreds of amateur photographers took part in the photographic survey movement in England. They sought to record the material remains of the English past so that it might be preserved for future generations. In The Camera as Historian, the groundbreaking historical and visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards works with an archive of nearly 55,000 photographs taken by 1,000 photographers, mostly unknown until now. She approaches the survey movement and its social and material practices ethnographically. Considering how the amateur photographers understood the value of their project, Edwards links the surveys to concepts of leisure, understandings of the local and the national, and the rise of popular photography. Her examination of how the photographers negotiated between scientific objectivity and aesthetic responses to the past leads her to argue that the survey movement was as concerned with the conditions of its own modernity and the creation of an archive for an anticipated future as it was nostalgic about the imagined past. Including more than 120 vibrant images, The Camera as Historian offers new perspectives on the forces that shaped Victorian and Edwardian Britain, as well as on contemporary debates about cultural identity, nationality, empire, material practices, and art.
Unlike many other artistic media, photography's origins are well documented, as are its ever-changing technologies and applications. Written by an international team of experts, this definitive history of photography looks at every step of the field's dynamic evolution, period by period and movement by movement. Each key genre is chronologically presented within its social, economic, and political context, along with close analysis of specially selected works that best exemplify the characteristics of the period. With more than 500 gorgeous examples in black and white and color, the book explores in-depth virtually every aspect of the medium since its first public demonstration in 1839 to the latest innovations: from early portraits and the birth of photojournalism to travel photography and the mapping of the world; from the Pictorialists to the avant-garde; from celebrity and fashion to documentary and landscape.
By Jean Back, Gabriel Bauret, Antoinette Lorang, Françoise Poos
Publisher : D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers
2012 | 288 pages
The Bitter Years was the title of a seminal exhibition held in 1962 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Edward Steichen, and 2012 marks its fiftieth anniversary. The show featured 209 images by photographers who worked under the aegis of the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1935-41, as part of Roosevelt's New Deal. The FSA, set up to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression, included an ambitious photography project that launched many photographic careers, most notably those of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. The exhibition featured their work as well as that of ten other FSA photographers, including Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans and Arthur Rothstein. Their images are among the most remarkable in documentary photography--testimonies of a people in crisis, hit by the full force of economic turmoil and the effects of drought and dust storms. This volume includes all the photographs in the original show, in a structure and sequence that reflect those devised by Steichen for the exhibition.
This gorgeous cornerstone volume celebrating the camera and the art of the photograph, created in collaboration with the George Eastman House, spans almost 200 years, from the first faint image ever caught to today's state-of-the-art digital equipment. The informative narrative by Todd Gustavson--including insightful essays by Steve Sasson (inventor of the digital camera) and Alexis Gerard (visionary founder of Future Image Inc.)--traces the camera's development, the lives of its inventors, and the artists behind the lens. Images of more than 350 cameras from the George Eastman House Collection, plus historic photos, ads, and drawings, complement the text.
From a delivery boy to one of the most important industrialists in American history, George Eastman's career developed in a particularly American way. The founder of Kodak died in 1932, and left his house to the University of Rochester. Since 1949 the site has operated as an international museum of photography and film, and today holds the largest collection of its kind in the world. The continually expanding photography collection contains over 400,000 images and negatives - among them the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams and others - as well as 23,000 cinema films, five million film stills, one of the most important silent film collections, technical equipment and a library with 40,000 books on photography and film. The George Eastman House is a pilgrimage site and a place of worship for researchers, photographers and collectors from all over the world.
This volume shows in chronological order the most impressive images and the most important developments in the art of light that is photography. It provides in its huge collection and themes a unique survey of the medium from its origins until now.
By tracing the history of manipulated photography from the earliest days of the medium to the release of Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, Mia Fineman offers a corrective to the dominant narrative of photography’s development, in which champions of photographic “purity,” such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, get all the glory, while devotees of manipulation, including Henry Peach Robinson, Edward Steichen, and John Heartfield, are treated as conspicuous anomalies. Among the techniques discussed on these pages—abundantly illustrated with works from an international array of public and private collections—are multiple exposure, combination printing, photomontage, composite portraiture, over-painting, hand coloring, and retouching. The resulting images are as diverse in style and motivation as they are in technique. Taking her argument beyond fine art into the realms of politics, journalism, fashion, entertainment, and advertising, Fineman demonstrates that the old adage “the camera does not lie” is one of photography’s great fictions.
The advent of the Kodak camera in 1888 made photography accessible to amateurs as well as to professionals. Artists were not immune to its allure, and many began experimenting with the camera as a means of observing the world and capturing their own images of it. Snapshot investigates seven Post-Impressionist painters and printmakers: Pierre Bonnard, George Hendrik Breitner, Maurice Denis, Henri Evenepoel, Henri Rivière, Félix Vallotton, and Edouard Vuillard. Although celebrated for their works on canvas and paper, these artists also made many personal and informal snapshots. Depicting interiors, city streets, nudes, and portraits, these photographs were kept private and never exhibited. As a result, most have never been seen by the public.
Juxtaposing personal photographs with related paintings and prints by these Post-Impressionist artists, Snapshot offers a new perspective on early photography and on the synthesis of painting, printmaking, and photography at the end of the 19th century.
Artists in the Photo League, active from 1936 to 1951, were known for capturing sharply revealing, compelling moments from everyday life. Their focus centered on New York City and its vibrant streets—a newsboy at work, a brass band on a bustling corner, a crowded beach at Coney Island. Though beautiful, the images harbor strong social commentary on issues of class, child labor, and opportunity. The Radical Camera explores the fascinating blend of aesthetics and social activism at the heart of the Photo League, tracing the group's left-leaning roots and idealism to the worker-photography movement in Europe. Influenced by mentors Lewis Hine, Berenice Abbott, and Paul Strand, artists in the Photo League worked within a unique complex comprising a school, a darkroom, a gallery, and a salon, in which photography was discussed as both a means for social change and an art form. The influence of the Photo League artists on modern photography was enormous, ushering in the New York School.
Presenting 150 works of the members of the Photo League alongside complementary essays that offer new interpretations of the League's work, ideas, and pedagogy, this beautifully illustrated book features artists including Margaret Bourke-White, Sid Grossman, Morris Engel, Lisette Model, Ruth Orkin, Walter Rosenblum, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, and Weegee, among many others.
By Walter Guadagnini, Quentin Bajac, Elizabeth Siegel, Francesco Zanot
Publisher : Rizzoli
2011 | 304 pages
The Skira History of Photography series will be released in four separate volumes: 1839-1890; 1890-1939; 1939-1980; and 1980-2010. Each volume is made up of essays by specialists, including a series of short monographic essays dedicated to individual photographers written by a single author, providing a narrative voice that ensures continuity throughout and a historical framework that adopts a strictly chronological approach.
This first volume (1839-1890) considers the years of the invention of photography and those immediately following-extraordinary years from both the point of view of history and of the development of the inventions. Including the great early forebears, like Daguerre and Talbot, and the great photographic expeditions that placed the world before the eyes of an ever-increasing number of people, this first volume also stresses the fundamental links between photography and the world of science. The volume concludes by examining the burgeoning relationship between photography and the traditional arts disciplines, a point of fundamental importance in the development of a photographic language.
Since its first publication in 1937, this lucid and scholarly chronicle of the history of photography has been hailed as the classic work on the subject. No other book and no other author have managed to relate the aesthetic evolution of the art of photography to its technical innovations with such an absorbing combination of clarity, scholarship and enthusiasm. Through more than 300 works by such master photographers as William Henry Fox Talbot, Timothy O'Sullivan, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugene Atget, Peter Henry Emerson, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Man Ray, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, Minor White, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, author Beaumont Newhall presents a fascinating, comprehensive study of the significant trends and developments in the medium since the first photographs were made in 1839. New selections added to the fifth edition include photographs made in color, from hand-tinted daguerreotypes of 1850 to turn-of-the-century autochromes by Edward Steichen, to works by contemporary masters such as Eliot Porter, Ernst Haas, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz.Beaumont Newhall (1908-1993) was an influential curator, art historian, writer and photographer. In 1935 he became the Librarian at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1940, he became the first Director of MoMA's Photography Department. He served as Curator of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House from 1948 to 1958, then as its Director from 1958 to 1971. While at the Eastman House, Newhall was responsible for amassing one of the greatest photographic collections in the world.
The book was written to introduce students to photography. It does not require that students possess any technical know-how and can be taught without referring to techniques in photography. Incorporating the latest research and international uses of photography, the text surveys the history of photography in such a way that students can gauge the medium's long-term multifold developments and see the historical and intellectual contexts in which photographers lived and worked. It also provides a unique focus on contemporary photo-based work and electronic media.
The atomic age began at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, with the explosion of “the Gadget” at Trinity near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Prelude to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which forced the capitulation of Japan and ended World War II, the Trinity test was the culmination of herculean efforts by scientists, civilians, and the military of the United States to tap the potential of the atom for a wartime emergency. If Nazi Germany could engineer the bomb first, an Allied victory against Hitler was all but lost. Historic Photos of the Manhattan Project is a look back at the epic struggle to build the world's first atomic bomb. Nearly 200 images in vivid black-and-white reveal the project as it unfolded, from its secretive origins at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos, to the day Americans celebrated triumph over the Axis powers with victory over Japan. A pinnacle moment in the history of the United States, the Manhattan Project's application of Einstein's famous equation E = MC2 shows, perhaps better than any other single endeavor, what can be achieved by human ingenuity when the citizens of a great nation are united in freedom against a fearsome and despotic foe.
Seizing the Light: A Social History of Photography provides a thought-provoking, accurate, and accessible introduction to the photographic arts for all readers. With stunning images and commentary by hundreds of international artists, the text clearly and concisely provides the building blocks necessary to critically explore photographic history from the photographers' eye, an aesthetic point of view.
The Printed Picture traces the changing technology of picture-making from the Renaissance to the present, focusing on the vital role of images in multiple copies. The book surveys printing techniques before the invention of photography; the photographic processes that began to appear in the early nineteenth century; the marriage of printing and photography; and the rapidly evolving digital inventions of our time. From woodblocks to chromolithographs, from engravings to bar codes, from daguerreotypes to contemporary color photographs, the book succinctly examines the full range of pictorial processes.
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.
Encompasses the entire range of the photographic medium, from the camera lucida to up-to-date computer technology, and from Europe and the Americas to the Far East. The text investigates all aspects of photography - aesthetic, documentary, commercial and technical - while placing it in historical context. It includes three technical sections with detailed information about equipment and processes. This edition also updates important new international work from the 1980s and 1990s.
Street photography is perhaps the best-loved and most widely known of all photographic genres, with names like Cartier-Bresson, Brassai and Doisneau familiar even to those with a fleeting knowledge of the medium. Yet what exactly is street photography? From what viewpoint does it present its subjects, and how does this viewpoint differ from that of documentary photography? Looking closely at the work Atget, Kertesz, Bovis, Rene-Jacques, Brassai, Doisneau, Cartier- Bresson and more, this elegantly written book unpicks Parisian street photography's complex relationship with parallel literary trends -- from Baudelaire to Soupault -- as well as its more evident affinity with Impressionist art. Street Photography reveals the genre to be poetic, even "picturesque," looking not to the type but to the individual, not to the reality of the street but to its "romance."
While the history of photography is a well-established canon, much less critical attention has been directed at the phenomenon of the photobook, which for many photographers is perhaps the most significant vehicle for the display of their work and the communication of their vision to a mass audience. In the second of two volumes, both co-edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, the history of the photobook is brought fully up to date. This volume covers company photobooks, artists' photobooks, photobooks that have been compiled by editors (rather than photographers), as well as the most recent photobooks, which chronicle contemporary life. This study provides an important corrective to the traditional history of photography. The selection of photographers made by Badger and Parr challenges the popular canon, and their survey of the history of the photobook reveals a secret web of influence and interrelationships between photographers and photographic movements around the world. The book is divided into a series of thematic chapters, each featuring a general introductory text providing background information and highlighting the dominant political and artistic influences on the photobook in the period, followed by more detailed discussion of the individual photobooks. The chapter texts are followed by spreads and images from over 200 books, which provide the central means of telling the history of the photobook. Chosen by Parr and Badger, these illustrations show the most artistically and culturally important photobooks in three dimensions, with the cover or jacket and a selection of spreads from the book shown.
Since it was first developed by Daguerre in the 1840s, photography has followed an interesting and varied course in its progress from a practical means of documentation to an art form with its own icons, heroes, galleries and collectors. This eye-catching and engrossing book contains every sort of photography, all of it arranged in an easily accessible and fun format. Pictures of famous events such as the Royal Wedding and the first landing on the moon are here, next to familiar shots by the masters of photography such as Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cecil Beaton and Robert Doisneau. There is fashion, sport, natural history, reportage and society portraiture, as well as social documentary and art. The 500 photographers features range from William Henry Fox Talbot and Julia Margaret Cameron to Larry Clarke and Herb Rittz, from Robert Capa and Josef Kondelka to Nan Goldin and Pierre et Gilles. Arranged alphabetically, each full-page photograph is accompanied by an illuminating text which gives useful insight into the work and its creator, as well as extensive cross-references to others working in the same field or the same style. Glossaries of technical terms and movements and a directory of museums and galleries are included in the back of the book to provide a fully comprehensive and self-contained volume.
This book provides a unique perspective on the story of photography through the particular history of the photobook. The first of two extensive volumes, it is a study of the major trends and movements that have shaped the photobook genre since the birth of photography in the early nineteenth century. It represents a valuable catalogue of rare and important photobooks. This volume covers the history of photobooks from the earliest examples of the genre from the nineteenth century, through the modernist and propaganda books of the 1930s and 40s, to the radical Japanese photobooks of the 60s and 70s. While the history of photography is a well-established canon, much less critical attention has been directed at the phenomenon of the photobook, which for many photographers is perhaps the most significant vehicle for the display of their work and the communication of their vision to a mass audience. In the first of two volumes, both co-edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the photobook, from its inception at the dawn of photography in the early nineteenth century through to the radical Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and 70s, by way of the modernist and propaganda books of the 1930s and 40s. In his introduction, Badger argues that the photobook is one of the most significant photographic genres due to the extent of its distribution and level of availability, and contests the traditional notion that the history of photography is best represented by the original print. This study provides an important corrective to the traditional history of photography. The selection of photographers made by Badger and Parr challenges the popular canon, and their survey of the history of the photobook reveals a secret web of influence and interrelationships between photographers and photographic movements around the world. The book is divided into a series of thematic and broadly chronological chapters, each featuring a general introductory text providing background information and highlighting the dominant political and artistic influences on the photobook in the period, followed by more detailed discussion of the individual photobooks. The chapter texts are followed by spreads and images from over 200 books, which provide the central means of telling the history of the photobook. Chosen by Parr and Badger, these illustrations show around 200 of the most artistically and culturally important photobooks in three dimensions, with the cover or jacket and a selection of spreads from the book shown. Volume One also features an illuminating and provocative introduction, 'The Photobook: Between the Film and the Novel' by Badger, which is accompanied by a preface written by Parr.
1428A charismatic stage and screen actress. A model whose beauty inspired some of the most arresting images of the twentieth century. A visionary photographer. A revolutionary with deep commitments to communism. A woman whose life, loves, and death were controversial. Tina Modotti (1896-1942) was all of these. Her life was one of almost unimaginable glamor, scandal, and turmoil. This biography portrays Modotti accurately and fairly, cutting through the distortions of myth and rumor that surround her. Perhaps best known as the lover, model, and apprentice of American photographer Edward Weston, Modotti emerges in these pages as a complex woman, deeply passionate in her relationships as well as her art and politics.
Historian Letizia Argenteri examines an array of international historical documents and letters as she traces the path of Modotti's life and career through Italy, California, Mexico, Germany, Moscow, and Spain. Argenteri tells the dramatic story in full detail, casting light on the mysteries of Modotti's life and carefully placing her in the political and social milieu of her time. The many fascinating illustrations in this book further illuminate Modotti's life.
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.
6"Read this book if you want to understand me."--Pablo Picasso
Conversations with Picasso offers a remarkable vision of both Picasso and the entire artistic and intellectual milieu of wartime Paris, a vision provided by the gifted photographer and prolific author who spent the early portion of the 1940s photographing Picasso's work. Brassaï carefully and affectionately records each of his meetings and appointments with the great artist, building along the way a work of remarkable depth, intimate perspective, and great importance to anyone who truly wishes to understand Picasso and his world.
The history of photography in Mexico was a largely untold story until the 1994 publication of Olivier Debroise's Fuga Mexicana, un recorrido por la fotografía en México. Based on ten years' research in public and private photographic archives in Mexico, the United States, Guatemala, and Europe, Fuga Mexicana provided the first comprehensive survey of Mexican photography from the advent of the daguerreotype in 1839 to the present.
1069Illustrated with a compelling image from each photographer, Witness in Our Time traces the recent history of social documentary photography in the words of twenty-two of the genre's best photographers, editors, and curators, showing that the profession remains vital, innovative, and committed to social change. Featuring interviews with Hansel Mieth, Walter Rosenblum, Michelle Vignes, Wayne Miller, Peter Magubane, Matt Herron, Jill Freedman, Mary Ellen Mark, Earl Dotter, Eugene Richards, Susan Meiselas, Sebastião Salgado, Graciela Iturbide, Antonin Kratochvil, Donna Ferrato, Joseph Rodriguez, Dayanita Singh, Fazal Sheikh, Gifford Hampshire, Peter Howe, Colin Jacobson, and Ann Wilkes Tucker
Hear the World is a visually compelling and heartwarming collection of over 120 portraits by musician and photographer Bryan Adams, created in collaboration with the Hear the World Foundation. This beautifully curated book brings together some of the most recognizable faces from the worlds of film, music, fashion, and beyond—including Julianne Moore, Bruce Springsteen, The Weeknd, Priyanka Chopra, Jared Leto, Léa Seydoux, and Lenny Kravitz—all captured through Adams' distinctive lens. Each subject strikes the signature "Hear the World" pose, with a hand cupped behind one ear, symbolizing their support for hearing awareness.
The Hear the World Foundation, which focuses on supporting children with hearing loss in low- and middle-income countries, is grounded in the belief that every child deserves the opportunity to hear and live life to its fullest. Adams has been a passionate collaborator with the foundation since 2007, and Hear the World is the culmination of their shared vision to highlight the importance of conscious hearing and advocate for global accessibility to hearing care.
The portraits in Hear the World offer more than just familiar faces—they capture the humanity, individuality, and solidarity of renowned ambassadors uniting for a vital cause. Each image stands as a reminder of the preciousness of sound and the often-overlooked gift of hearing. Through this striking visual anthology, Adams not only showcases his skill behind the camera but also raises awareness of hearing loss and celebrates the foundation's mission.
This book is a testament to the power of art, philanthropy, and collaboration, making Hear the World a touching and meaningful contribution to both the world of photography and the cause of hearing health.
Playful yet haunting, Mary Ellen Mark’s photographs of Indian circus performers depict a world on the brink of disappearance. In 1969, Mark first traveled to India and photographed a circus, captivated by its "beauty and innocence." Two decades later, she returned for six months to document 18 circuses across the country, from bustling cities to remote villages.
Ranging from large troupes with hundreds of performers—both human and animal—to small, intimate acts, Mark's lens captures not the spectacle of the shows, but the quiet moments in between: scenes of practice, rest, and life beyond the spotlight. Her focus is on the human experience—marked by the contradictions of humor and sadness, beauty and hardship. By the time of Mark’s project, Indian circuses were already fading, holding onto an innocence long lost in the West, as they struggled against the pressures of the modern world.
This new edition of her 1993 book preserves the original text and images but reimagines the sequence and design, staying true to Mark’s poignant vision of a dying art form.
Peter Lindbergh photographed Dior’s most exceptional muses, Marion Cotillard and Charlize Theron among them, and signed campaigns for Lady Dior and J'Adore with his inimitable style. Throughout his career, the photographer was one of the house’s closest collaborators. This final book was an original cocreation that was close to the artist’s heart—and to ours.
Seventy years of Dior history projected against the effervescence of Times Square, New York: this was the concept behind Lindbergh’s project, extraordinary both in scope and dimension, for which Dior, in an unusual move, allowed an unprecedented number of priceless garments to be taken from its vaults in Paris and shipped across the Atlantic.
The result is electric. Amid the frenzy of Times Square, Alek Wek glows in the immaculate 1947 Bar suit, the storied ensemble that launched the House of Dior. In snatches of street scenes, models Saskia de Brauw, Karen Elson, and Amber Valletta flit through crowds and scaffolding, are reflected in building façades, and draped in haute couture, from pieces hand-sewn by Christian Dior to more recent designs by Maria Grazia Chiuri. Lindbergh’s trademark monochrome and color photographs masterfully highlight the intricacies, silhouettes, and textures of each garment.
Lindbergh himself is present in every aspect of this publication designed by his long-time collaborator and friend Juan Gatti. This volume features 165 never-before-published images from the shoot, including an introduction by Martin Harrison, and pays homage to Lindbergh’s profound relationship with the Parisian House by curating more than 100 of his photographs of Dior creations, from haute couture to ready-to-wear, men’s and women’s, originally published in some of the world’s most prestigious magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. A breathtaking tribute to two pillars of fashion and photography and their timeless collaborations.
By Alex Prager, Maurizio Cattelan, Pierpaolo Ferrari
Publisher : Damiani
2024 | 40 pages
A captivating fusion of the surreal worlds of Toilet Paper and the striking imagery of artist, director, and screenwriter Alex Prager, the latest issue of Toilet Paper magazine presents a visual dialogue between these creative forces. The issue showcases 12 of Prager’s evocative images alongside 12 conceived by the Toilet Paper team. Known for its vibrant aesthetics and playful visual twists, Toilet Paper enters into a dynamic exchange with Prager’s technicolor universe, where the line between reality and fiction is artfully blurred. Her signature use of archetypes, everyday objects, humor, and allegory creates a provocative and mysterious journey throughout the pages.
This collaboration follows in the footsteps of ToiletMartin PaperParr (2018), a special edition that celebrated the iconic work of internationally acclaimed photographer Martin Parr, along with the creative minds of Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. Like its predecessor, this issue brings together distinctive visual worlds in a way that delights and intrigues.
Drawn to the ineffable and the curious nature of the real, DeLuise works with a large-format 8x10 camera to produce luminous imagery that explores the visual complexities and everyday poetry of contemporary experience through portraiture, landscape, and still life. DeLuise is moved by the photograph’s uncanny ability to embody the depth and richness of human perception and experience. Her images reveal a great love of the medium, an embrace of light, circumstance, and the beauty and mystery of the quotidian. Emphasizing the etymological root of the word photography as drawing with light, and the collaborative nature of making photographs, The Hands of My Friends represents four decades of elegant and tender images.
For decades, photographer Kate Sterlin has made an artistic practice of examining the boundaries between individual, family, and community. In her first book, Still Life: Photographs & Love Stories, she uses intimacy in all its forms to tell a story of life, death, family, and race in America. Pairing lyrical photography with poetic writings, Still Life is a dreamlike narrative examining kinship and romance, friendships and tragedies, the complexities of Black identity, and personal and generational loss across a lifetime. It is a testament to one artist's commitment to creation and a profound blend of the personal and the universal.
A new photobook, by photographer Juan Brenner, explores the people and culture of the Guatemalan Highlands.
Genesis, published by Guest Editions, is the culmination of five years' work, in which Brenner documented the Highland area and people of his home country.
With a focus on youth culture in the region, Brenner captures a new generation of Guatemalans, the first to establish an intelligible dialogue with their contemporaries around the world.
In the ongoing evolution of my artistic journey, I find myself engaged in a profound process of self-examination, mental health and sadness - using the camera to explore the essence of who I am and my connection to the art of photography. My roots lie in a small town. Within this space, I grappled with a pervasive sense of loneliness that transcended both the physical boundaries and the emotional confines of my surroundings. Even in the company of others, I felt a profound solitude that echoed within and beyond those walls.
'Work in Progress' is a powerful exploration of Peter Essick's four-year journey capturing aerial photographs of construction sites across the Atlanta Metro area. This body of work offers a dynamic portrayal of human-altered landscapes, where the clash between nature and man-made structures creates a stunning visual narrative. Essick's unique perspective, gained through low-level drone flights, has revealed the ever-changing beauty of construction sites—spaces that are often overlooked or dismissed as mundane.
Aperture announces the release of Robert Frank:
The Americans, marking the centennial of Frank’s birth, and concurrent with a major
exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art this fall. First published in
France in 1958 and then in the US in 1959, Robert Frank: The Americans is one of the
most influential and enduring works of American photography.
When Caroline Furneaux’s father Colin died suddenly in 2011, she discovered an archive of 35mm slides that he had shot during the 1960s. They were a beguiling series of beautiful women photographed in idyllic locations, mostly in Sweden, where he was working and living. It was during this time that he had first met Caroline’s Swedish mother, Barbro, yet hardly any of the photographs were of her.
'Glendalis' is a vivid narrative centered around the youngest daughter of a family, revealing intimate and universal human experiences and a poignant glimpse into the vibrant life of a lower-middle-class family, showcasing resilience, love, and the universal human experience. The photographs resonate deeply, portraying the spirit of Glendalis as she grows from a fierce child into a determined young woman.
Street Walker saunters stylishly with never-before-seen eye-popping photographs spiced with iconic classics from the ‘70s and ‘80s USA cultural hotspots: New York City, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Fire Island, Miami Beach, and more.