Used to confirm identity, to sell products, to reshape the real, to visualize the news, to record and communicate the personal moment, and as an art form in its own right, photography is now one of the most accessible and pervasive of media. "Photography: The Key Concepts" provides an ideal guide to the place of photography in our society and to the extraordinary range of photographic genres. Outlining the history of photography and explaining the body of theory which has built up around its use, the book guides the reader through the genres of documentary, portraiture, landscape, still life, art and global photography. Illustrated with a range of historical and contemporary images and case material, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in photography.

    Each one is unique; you can't paint one wrong! Painted Blossoms will encourage you to welcome creativity with ease as you discover ways to tend the garden within. In addition to watching yourself grow through seven different stepped-out flower projects, you'll learn basic design elements, how to get unstuck from the mud, how to carve your own stamps, cut your own stencils and more.A sampling of what you'll add to your creative toolshed:Techniques for creating a wide variety of flower shapesThe know-how to incorporate key design elements into your floral paintingsHow to absorb inspiration beyond the garden to include your favorite symbols, intentions and storiesTips and advice from over a dozen established artists--each with a unique floral styleNurture today what's waiting to bloom within you with Painted Blossoms!

    This volume, prepared by an expert in the field, is devoted exclusively to just that. With its clear, concise text, its almost 200 excellent illustrations, and its overall life-drawing approach, the book provides valuable guidelines on how best to portray faces, features, and heads. There is probably no better instructor to turn to than George B. Bridgman. He brings to the subject both his expertise as an artist and his fifty years' experience as lecturer and teacher at the Art Students League of New York. Throughout the book, he places as much emphasis on perspective and planes as on anatomy. In this way, you'll develop a more precise understanding of each feature, the head and face in general, the relationship between features, and the relationship between a specific feature and the face or head. Mr. Bridgman's consideration of the head includes such topics as the head at eye level and below eye level; planes of the head; and round and square forms. Four features — eye, nose, mouth, ear — are dealt with in detail. Sections on light and shade, comparative measurements, and principles of cube and oval construction further enhance the scope of the book. The finely executed drawings complement the textual material, illustrating all important concepts.  Of special value is the author's inclusion of the work of famous portrait artists. Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Louise Elisabeth LeBrun — these are the people who made portraiture a master art; and you'll be able to study, up close and at your leisure, the qualities that let their work achieve the status it did.

    Vivid photos capture these historically important machinesincluding the Eniac, Crays 13, Apple I and IIwhile authoritative text profiles each, telling the stories of their innovations and peculiarities. Thirty-five machines are profiled in over 100 extraordinary color photographs, making Core Memory a surprising addition to the library of photography collectors and the ultimate geek-chic gift.

    Yet the great plunder -including a Gainsborough, a Goya, two Rubenses, and a Vermeer- remained at large for years. Cahill taunted the police with a string of other crimes, but in the end it was the paintings that brought him low. The challenge of disposing of such famous works forced him to reach outside his familiar world into the international arena, and when he did, his pursuers were waiting.The movie-perfect sting that broke Cahill uncovered an astonishing maze of banking and drug-dealing connections that redefined the way police view art theft. As if that were not enough, the recovery of the Vermeer-by then worth $200 million-led to a remarkable discovery about the way Vermeer achieved his photographic perspective.The Irish Game places the great theft in Ireland's long sad history of violence and follows the thread that led, as a direct result of Cahill's desperate adventures with the Russborough art, to his assassination by the IRA. With the storytelling skill of a novelist and the instincts of a detective, Matthew Hart follows the twists and turns of this celebrated case, linking it with two other world-famous thefts-of Vermeer's "The Concert" and other famous paintings at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" at the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo. Sharply observed, fully explored, The Irish Game is a masterpiece in the literature of true crime.

    The nineteenth century experienced an explosion of epidemics such as cholera and diphtheria, driven by industrialization, urbanization and poor hygiene. In this pre-color-photography era, accurate images were relied upon to teach students and aid diagnosis. The best examples, featured here, are remarkable pieces of art that attempted to elucidate the mysteries of the body, and the successive onset of each affliction. Bizarre and captivating images, including close-up details and revealing cross-sections, make all too clear the fascinations of both doctors and artists of the time. Barnett illuminates the fears and obsessions of a society gripped by disease, yet slowly coming to understand and combat it. The age also saw the acceptance of vaccination and the germ theory, and notable diagrams that transformed public health, such as John Snow's cholera map and Florence Nightingale's pioneering histograms, are included and explained. Organized by disease, "The Sick Rose" ranges from little-known ailments now all but forgotten to the epidemics that shaped the modern age. It is a fascinating "Wunderkammer" of a book that will enthrall artists, students, designers, scientists and the incurably curious everywhere.

    These different ways of describing and interpreting art are the methodologies of artistic analysis, the divining rods of meaning. Regardless of a work’s perceived difficulty, an art object is, in theory, complex. Every work of art is an expression of its culture (time and place) and its maker (the artist) and is dependent on its media (what it’s made of). The methodologies discussed here—formal analysis, iconology and iconography, Marxism, feminism, biography and autobiography, psychoanalysis, and structuralism—reflect the multiplicity of meanings in an artistic image.

    A new version of Phaidon classic published in 1937, this evocative and fascinating book presents 500 of the world's greatest self portraits, arranged in a simple chronological sequence from ancient time to the late 20th century.

    Contemplation of time and the discoveries of modern science lead to the assertion that the mind is paramount and limitless.

    Whether you are printing by hand on your kitchen table or on a press in a print studio, this book gets you started and goes on to explore the myriad creative applications of linocut. It encourages you to experiment with different approaches to image making and explores new ways of thinking about how linocut can be used. Nick Morley shares his experience and specialist knowledge to make this practical guide an essential companion for everyone interested in this addictive and absorbing medium.

    Bitten by Witch Fever presents facsimile samples of 275 of the most sumptuous wallpaper designs ever created by designers and printers of the age, including Christopher Dresser and Morris & Co. For the first time in their history, every one of the samples shown has been laboratory tested and found to contain arsenic. Interleaved with the wallpaper sections, evocative commentary guides you through the incredible story of the manufacture, uses and effects of arsenic, and presents the heated public debate surrounding the use of deadly pigments in the sublime wallpapers of a newly industrialized world.

    Even today remembered primarily as the mentor and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, the once infamous photographer, Wagstaff, in fact, had an incalculable—and largely overlooked—influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century.  Born in New York City in 1921 into a notable family, Wagstaff followed an arc that was typical of a young man of his class. He attended both Hotchkiss and Yale, served in the navy, and would follow in step with his Ivy League classmates to the "gentleman's profession," as an ad executive on Madison Avenue. With his unmistakably good looks, he projected an aura of glamour and was cited by newspapers as one of the most eligible bachelors of the late 1940s. Such accounts proved deceiving, for Wagstaff was forced to live in the closet, his homosexuality only revealed to a small circle of friends. Increasingly uncomfortable with his career and this double life, he abandoned advertising, turned to the formal study of art history, and embarked on a radical personal transformation that was in perfect harmony with the tumultuous social, cultural, and sexual upheavals of the 1960s.Accordingly, Wagstaff became a curator, in 1961, at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, where he mounted both "Black, White, and Gray"—the first museum show of minimal art—and the sculptor Tony Smith's first museum show, while lending his early support to artists Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson, and Richard Tuttle, among many others. Later, as a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, he brought the avant-garde to a regional museum, offending its more staid trustees in the process.After returning to New York City in 1972, the fifty-year-old Wagstaff met the twenty-five-year-old Queens-born Robert Mapplethorpe, then living with Patti Smith. What at first appeared to be a sexual dalliance became their now historic lifelong romance, in which Mapplethorpe would foster Wagstaff's own burgeoning interest in contemporary photography and Wagstaff would help secure Mapplethorpe's reputation in the art world. In spite of their profound class differences, the artistic union between the philanthropically inclined Wagstaff and the prodigiously talented Mapplethorpe would rival that of Stieglitz and O’Keefe, or Rivera and Kahlo, in their ability to help reshape contemporary art history.Positioning Wagstaff's personal life against the rise of photography as a major art form and the simultaneous formation of the gay rights movement, Philip Gefter's absorbing biography provides a searing portrait of New York just before and during the age of AIDS. The result is a definitive and memorable portrait of a man and an era.

    The book introduces two basic art historical methods formal analysis and contextual analysis revealing how to use these methods in writing papers and in class discussion.

    This volume presents the work of Edward Gorey, the American artist and writer perhaps best known for his witty opening credits for PBS's Myster! series and for such books as Amphigorey, The Doubtful Guest and The Unstrung Heart.

    The global cast includes Marina Abramovic , Matthew Barney, Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Cristina Iglesias, On Kawara, Jeff Koons, Ernesto Neto, Gerhard Richter, Pipilotti Rist, Kara Walker, and Ai Weiwei. Many of the pieces reflect the cultural upheavals of recent times, from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the blossoming of the Arab Spring.A daring yet convincing analysis of which artworks best capture the zeitgeist of our time, Grovier’s list also provides a much-needed map through the landscape of contemporary art. Illustrations of key works are supplemented by comparative images, and short texts offer a biography of each artwork, tracing its inception and impact, and offering a view not only into the imagination of the artist but into the age in which we live.