History of Photography Books

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Piercing 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.

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.

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.