Marilyn Monroe: A Life in Pictures


Anne Verlhac - 2007
    Marilyn Monroe: A Life in Pictures is the only book to bring together all of the most iconic images of the legendary bombshell. Glamorous shots by celebrity photographers mix with casual snapshots and childhood portraits to span Marilyn's luminous but too-short life. Hundreds of evocative images, both lush and poignant, are interwoven with quotations by and about Marilyn to create an elegant collective portrait like no other. Aesthetically arresting throughout, this volume illuminates the life of a legend, both onscreen and off.

1970s: Decades of the 20th Century


Nick Yapp - 1998
    The Ayatollah Khomeini, Tricky Dicky Nixon, General Amin, Pol Pot, - young Michael Jackson and ageing Elvis - explosively revealed by the Camera's silent witness.

National Geographic Photography Field Guide: Secrets to Making Great Pictures


Peter K. Burian - 1999
    This authoritative guide provides a handy, all-in-one reference for photographers using either medium (or both), combining the practical know-how of more than 50 outstanding professional photographers with National Geographic's world-renowned tradition of excellence and expertise. The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography presents ten easy-to-read chapters exploring every aspect of the digital revolution. With straightforward explanations of both simple, all-but-foolproof equipment like inexpensive autofocus point-and-shoot cameras and of sophisticated, megapixel single lens reflex units boasting interchangeable lenses. It also covers important accessories; provides advice of all kinds, from key facts and basic tips for beginners to advanced techniques for skilled amateurs; and addresses the essentials of PhotoShop editing, scanning and printing, effective archiving, and more. Along with digital information, there's also plenty of material on traditional film, from old techniques to helpful sidebars on when to use film rather than digital. Throughout the book dozens of well-known, highly accomplished photographers showcase some of their most famous shots and share both the human stories behind them and the specific technical details of their creation. This wonderful mix of vivid examples and vital nuts-and-bolts information makes The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography a uniquely useful, indispensable reference for photographers everywhere.

Slightly Out of Focus


Robert Capa - 1947
    He was Robert Capa, the brilliant and daring photojournalist, and Collier's magazine had put him on assignment to photograph the war raging in Europe. In these pages, Capa recounts his terrifying journey through the darkest battles of World War II and shares his memories of the men and women of the Allied forces who befriended, amused, and captivated him along the way. His photographs are masterpieces -- John G. Morris, Magnum Photos' first executive editor, called Capa "the century's greatest battlefield photographer" -- and his writing is by turns riotously funny and deeply moving. From Sicily to London, Normandy to Algiers, Capa experienced some of the most trying conditions imaginable, yet his compassion and wit shine on every page of this book. Charming and profound, Slightly Out of Focus is a marvelous memoir told in words and pictures by an extraordinary man.

Andrew Moore: Detroit Disassembled


Andrew Moore - 2010
    Today, whole sections of the city resemble a war zone, its once-spectacular architectural grandeur reduced to vacant ruins. In Detroit Disassembled, photographer Andrew Moore records a territory in which the ordinary flow of time-or the forward march of the assembly line-appears to have been thrown spectacularly into reverse. For Moore, who throughout his career has been drawn to all that contradicts or seems to threaten America's postwar self-image (his previous projects include portraits of Cuba and Soviet Russia), Detroit's decline affirms the carnivorousness of our earth, as it seeps into and overruns the buildings of a city that once epitomized humankind's supposed supremacy. In Detroit Disassembled, Moore locates both dignity and tragedy in the city's decline, among postapocalyptic landscapes of windowless grand hotels, vast barren factory floors, collapsing churches, offices carpeted in velvety moss and entire blocks reclaimed by prairie grass. Beyond their jawdropping content, Moore's photographs inevitably raise the uneasy question of the long-term future of a country in which such extreme degradation can exist unchecked. (20110821)

On Photography


Susan Sontag - 1973
    Sontag develops further the concept of 'transparency'. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.

Classic Essays on Photography


Alan Trachtenberg - 1980
    Containing 30 essays that embody the history of photography, this collection includes contributions from Niepce, Daguerre, Fox, Talbot, Poe, Emerson, Hine, Stieglitz, and Weston, among others.

The Americans


Robert Frank - 1958
    There is no question that Robert Frank's The Americans is the most famous and influential photography book ever published. It was 1959 when the book first came out: a series of deceptively simple photographs that Frank took on a trip through America in '55 and '56, pictures of normal people, everyday scenes: lunch counters, bus depots, cars, and the stangely familiar faces of people we don't quite know but have seen somewhere. They are pictures that saw the "American way of life" as we hadn't yet quite been able to see it ourselves, photographs that condensed the entire life of a nation in classic images that still speak to us today, forty years and several generations later.

American Photographs


Walker Evans - 1938
    The original edition of American Photographs was a carefully prepared letterpress production, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Evans that captured scenes of America in the early 1930s. As noted on the jacket of the first edition, Evans, "photographing in New England or Louisiana, watching a Cuban political funeral or a Mississippi flood, working cautiously so as to disturb nothing in the normal atmosphere of the average place, can be considered a kind of disembodied, burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers." This seventy-fifth anniversary edition of American Photographs, made with new reproductions, recreates the original 1938 edition as closely as possible to make the landmark publication available for a new generation. American Photographs has fallen out of print for long periods of time since it was first published, and even subsequent editions--two of which altered the design and typography of the book in small but significant ways--are often available only at libraries and rare bookstores. This version, like the fiftieth-anniversary edition produced by the Museum in 1988, captures the look and feel of the very first edition with the aid of new digital technologies.

Simply Beautiful Photographs


Annie Griffiths - 2010
    Award-winning photographer Annie Griffiths culled the images to reflect the many variations on the universal theme of beauty. Chapters are organized around the aesthetic concepts that create beauty in a photograph: Light, Composition, Moment (Gesture and Emotion), Motion, Palette, and Wonder.Beyond the introduction and brief essays about each featured concept, the text is light. The photographs speak for themselves, enhanced by lyrical quotes from scholars and poets. In the chapter on Light, for example, we read these words of whimsical wisdom from songwriter Leonard Cohen: "Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the lights get in." And then the images flow, of light entering scenes via windows, clouds, and spotlights, from above, alongside, and behind, casting radiance upon young ballerinas and weathered men, into groves of autumn trees and island-dotted seas, revealing everything it touches to be beautiful beyond expectation.To illuminate the theme of Wonder, Griffiths chose a wish from Andre Bazin: "If I had influence with the good fairy...I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life." This thought is juxtaposed with an exquisite vision in white, a frame filled with the snowy-pure dots and rays of a bird's fan tail. And on it goes, picture after tantalizing picture, alive with wondrous beauty.When she created National Geographic Simply Beautiful Photographs, Annie Griffiths set two goals: to maximize visual delight, and to create a book unique in the world of publishing--one in which many of the photographs could be purchased as prints. She has succeeded on both counts. Many of these stunning images are available for order, and there can be no doubt as to the visual delight. You must open this book for yourself, and take in its radiant beauty.

Björk


Björk - 2001
    She has always been at the vanguard, exploding convention and leading her listeners down the uncharted paths of a haunting and harmonic trip through sound. Last year, she starred in Lars von Trier's acclaimed Dancer in the Dark, and took home the coveted Best Actress award at Cannes. A true artist whose work has consistently transcended creative and geographic borders, Björk turns every medium she touches to gold.Her next project is a gorgeously produced, stunningly beautiful collection of photographs and text that is being published simultaneously around the world. Designed by Björk and m/m, the celebrated Paris design firm that has already collaborated Balenciaga, Visionaire, and Yohji Yamamoto, the book boasts contributions from the world's top photographers, fashion designers and video makers as well as original writing and artwork by Björk herself.A breathtaking photographic odyssey through Björk's career, a stunning visual and literary companion to one of the most original performers of our time, Björk promises to be like no book you've ever seen. Coinciding with the release of her new album, Vespertine, and the supporting tour, this book is a must-have for Björk's admirers as well as anyone craving a touch of beauty for their bookshelf.

America


Andy Warhol - 1985
    Exploring his greatest obsessions - including image and celebrity - he photographs wrestlers and politicians, the beautiful wealthy and the disenfranchised poor, Capote with the fresh scars of a facelift and Madonna hiding beneath a brunette bob. He writes about the country he loves, wishing he had died when he was shot, commercialism, fame and beauty.An America without Warhol is almost as inconceivable as Warhol without America, and this touching, witty tribute is the great artist of the superficial at his most deeply personal.

Street Photography Now


Sophie Howarth - 2010
    Four thought-provoking essays put the work into the wider context of what has gone before, while quotes from the photographers expand and illuminate their work and draw attention to their influences and ways of working.Included are luminaries such as Magnum grandmasters Bruce Gilden, Martin Parr, and Alex Webb, as well as an international group of emerging photographers whose views of New York or Tokyo, Mumbai or Bournemouth, Istanbul or Dakar, all record moments in time that will never be repeated.

How New York Breaks Your Heart


Bill Hayes - 2018
    Now he presents an exquisite collection that captures the full range of his work and the magic of chance encounters in New York City. Hayes's "frank, beautiful, bewitching" street photographs "unmask their subjects' best and truest selves" (Jennifer Senior, New York Times): A policeman pauses at the end of a day. Cooks sneak in cigarette breaks. A pair of movers plays cards on the back of a truck. Friends claim the sidewalk. Lovers embrace. A flame-haired girl gazes mysteriously into the lens. And park benches provide a setting for a couple of hunks, a mom and her baby, a stylish nonagenarian . . . How New York Breaks Your Heart reveals ordinary New Yorkers at their most peaceful, joyful, distracted, anxious, expressive, and at their most fleeting--bringing the texture of the city to vivid life. Woven through with Hayes's lyric reflections, these photos will, like the city itself, break your heart by asking you to fall in love.

Creative Nature and Outdoor Photography


Brenda Tharp - 2003
    Author Brenda Tharp’s inspiring approach has garnered fans all over the world, as she teaches that magical skill no camera can do for you: learn how to “see.” Readers expand their photographic vision and discover deep wellsprings of creativity as they learn to use light, balance, color, design, pattern, texture, composition, and many simple techniques to take a photo from ordinary to high-impact.Featuring more than 150 stunning, all-new images, Creative Nature & Outdoor  Photography, Revised Edition is for anyone who understands the basic technical side to photography but wants to wake up their creative vision.