Book picks similar to
Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life by Mildred Constantine
photography
biography
mexico
art
First Lady from Plains
Rosalynn Carter - 1984
It is “a readable, lively and revealing account of the Carters and their remarkable journey from rural Georgia to the White House in a span of ten years” (The New York Times).
Nero
Jacob Abbott - 1853
In his life we are presented with an astonishing picture of human greed, cunning, and selfishness at its worst. And thanks to his prominent position, Nero's example of monstrosity has stood as a lesson and a warning to all men since. Born of Agrippina, of whom only such a son was worthy, he ran the gamut of every human crime and folly, making the Roman Empire minister to his atrocities. When he died, escaping human vengeance at the end, he lamented that so splendid a genius should have to pass away.This thrilling biography—written by Jacob Abbott and newly edited for younger readers—offers a glimpse into the life of this spoiled prince who became a royal monster. Nero is part of Makers of History, a 19th century biography series by two brothers—Jacob and John S.C. Abbott. Reprinted by Canon Press, these biographies have been edited and brought up-to-date for readers twelve and up. Not only are these editions given vintage style paperback covers, but they also include introductions that explain where these men and women fit into the timeline of history.
The Perfect House: A Journey with the Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio
Witold Rybczynski - 2002
Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form, and he not only designed and built, he wrote. His late-sixteenth-century architectural treatises were read and studied by great thinkers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Inigo Jones, profoundly influencing the design of Monticello, the tidewater plantation houses of Virginia, and the White House. All across America today, Palladio's influence is evident in ample porches and columned porticoes, in grand ceiling heights and front-door pediments.In The Perfect House, Witold Rybczysnki, whose books on domestic and landscape architecture have transformed our understanding of parks and buildings, looks at Palladio's famous villas, not with the eye of an art historian but with the eye of an architect. He wanted to know why a handful of houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe.More than just a study of one of history's seminal architectural figures, "The Perfect House" reflects Rybczynski's intimacy with and enthusiasm for his subject. He not only reveals why the villas were so architecturally and culturally influential, he also imparts his enormous affection and admiration for the man who designed them. Embracing the elements of Rybczynski's most successful books on domestic architecture, Home and The Most Beautiful House in the World, this charming, revelatory meditation explores the dawn of domestic architecture and provides a new way of looking at everybuilding we inhabit or visit today.
My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz
Sarah Greenough - 2011
Between 1915, when they first began to write to each other, and 1946, when Stieglitz died, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged over 5,000 letters (more than 25,000 pages) that describe their daily lives in profoundly rich detail. This long-awaited volume features some 650 letters, carefully selected and annotated by leading photography scholar Sarah Greenough.In O'Keeffe's sparse and vibrant style and Stieglitz's fervent and lyrical manner, the letters describe how they met and fell in love in the 1910s; how they carved out a life together in the 1920s; how their relationship nearly collapsed during the early years of the Depression; and how it was reconstructed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the same time, the correspondence reveals the creative evolution of their art and ideas; their friendships with many of the most influential figures in early American modernism (Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Paul Strand, to name a few); and their relationships and conversations with an exceptionally wide range of key figures in American and European art and culture (including Duncan Phillips, Diego Rivera, D. H. Lawrence, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Marcel Duchamp). Furthermore, their often poignant prose reveals insights into the impact of larger cultural forces—World Wars I and II; the booming economy of the 1920s; and the Depression of the 1930s—on two articulate, creative individuals.
Audrey Hepburn: Fair Lady of the Screen
Ian Woodward - 1984
Ranked number 50 in Empire Magazine's 'Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time', her appeal as a screen icon is set to last for years to come.From her roles in such legendary films as Breakfast at Tiffany's and her Oscar-winning performance in Roman Holiday, to her lovers and the pain of losing a child, this revealing biography is essential reading for Hepburn and film fans alike.
A World History of Photography
Naomi Rosenblum - 1984
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.
Lynch on Lynch
David Lynch - 1997
Over the course of his career, he has remained true to a vision of the innocent lost in darkness and confusion, balancing hallucination and surrealism with a sense of Americana that is as pure and simple as his compelling storylines. In this volume, Lynch speaks openly about his films as well as about his lifelong commitment to painting, his work in photography, his television projects, and his musical collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti.
Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger
Laurence Leamer - 2005
Universe, and the Terminator. Now he answers to "Governor." From humble beginnings in a small Austrian village, Arnold Schwarzenegger pumped himself into the greatest bodybuilder in history, the biggest movie star in the world, and a political force to be reckoned with--all with raw ambition and driving self-confidence. In Fantastic, esteemed biographer Laurence Leamer captures Arnold's amazing story as no one else could. Drawing on unprecedented interviews with Arnold, his wife Maria Shriver, and Arnold's friends, family, lovers, competitors, business partners, and political adversaries, Leamer offers a brilliant, uniquely detailed portrait of this self-made man who married a Kennedy princess and scaled the heights of America's elite. Readers will discover:· A troubled youth: growing up the son of a strict former Nazi and overcoming adversity by discovering the potential of weight training· The superhuman: the arrogant showman who revolutionized bodybuilding--and his astounding string of Mr. Olympia titles· Blockbuster stardom: why a heavy accent and wooden acting style couldn't keep Arnold and his publicist from marketing him into the world's largest grossing film icon · The unlikeliest Kennedy: his marriage to Maria Shriver and her role in Arnold's rise to governor of the Golden State...and more!
Learning to See
Elise Hooper - 2019
Now, in this riveting new novel by the author of The Other Alcott, we see the world through her eyes…In 1918, a fearless twenty-two-year old arrives in bohemian San Francisco from the Northeast, determined to make her own way as an independent woman. Renaming herself Dorothea Lange she is soon the celebrated owner of the city’s most prestigious and stylish portrait studio and wife of the talented but volatile painter, Maynard Dixon. By the early 1930s, as America’s economy collapses, her marriage founders and Dorothea must find ways to support her two young sons single-handedly. Determined to expose the horrific conditions of the nation’s poor, she takes to the road with her camera, creating images that inspire, reform, and define the era. And when the United States enters World War II, Dorothea chooses to confront another injustice—the incarceration of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans. Learning to See is a gripping account of the ambitious woman behind the camera who risked everything for art, activism, and love. But her choices came at a steep price…
Frida Kahlo
Elizabeth Carpenter - 2007
During her lifetime, she was best known as the flamboyant wife of celebrated muralist Diego Rivera. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship: Rivera declared himself to be "unfit for fidelity." As if to assuage her pain, Kahlo recorded the vicissitudes of her marriage in paint. She also recorded the misery of her deteriorating health--the orthopedic corsets that she was forced to wear, the numerous spinal surgeries, the miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. The artist's sometimes harrowing imagery is mitigated by an intentional primitivism and small scale, as well as by her sardonic humor and extraordinary imagination. In celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Kahlo's birth, this major new monograph is published on the occasion of the 2007-08 traveling exhibition. It features the artist's most renowned work--the hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits--as well as a selection of key portraits and still lifes; more than 100 color plates, from Kahlo's earliest works, made in 1926, to her last, in 1954; critical essays by Elizabeth Carpenter, Hayden Herrera and Victor Zamudio-Taylor; and a selection of photographs of Kahlo and Rivera by preeminent photographers of the period, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti and Nickolas Muray. The catalogue also contains snapshots from the artist's own photo albums of Kahlo with family and friends such as Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky--some of which have never been published, and several of which Kahlo inscribed with dedications, effaced with self-deprecating marks or kissed with a lipstick trace--plus an extensive illustrated timeline, selected bibliography, exhibition history and index.
Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting
Bert Stern - 1982
The three-day session yielded nearly 2,600 pictures-fashion, portrait, and nude studies-of indescribable sensual and human vibrancy, of which no more than 20 were published. And yet these few photographs ineradicably shaped our image of Marilyn Monroe.This book presents the complete set of 2,571 photos. The monumental body of work by the master photographer and the Hollywood actress marks a climax in the history of star photography, both in quantity and quality. It is a unique affirmation of the erotic dimension of photography and the eroticism of taking photos, and it is the world's finest and largest tribute to Marilyn Monroe.In front of the camera, Marilyn was known to possess an incredible chameleon-like ability to transform herself into whatever role she was meant to play. In these pages she is goddess, siren, child, woman, femme fatale and dream date. Yet there is an air of desperation about these photos as well. In his fascinating foreword to the book. Bert Stern looks back on that momentous sitting, offering a revealing, naked portrait of Marilyn the person -- of a vulnerable, confused woman who although at the apex of her career, had relinquished control of her life -- and of the fashion world of the early 1960s, with its new openness towards drugs, sex, and art.From the glamorous, sophisticated photos which Vogue would publish in a black-and-white "memorial" spread, to the less restrained color shots which Stern coaxed out of Marilyn during an intense, exhausting session, this collection covers nearly every aspect of modern photography: portraiture, fashion-driven, erotic, and artistic. But more than a comprehensive display of Stern's immeasurable talents, these photographs combine to create an homage to America's first goddess. A woman we invented, but whom we could never really know.
One Of Us: Life Of Margaret Thatcher
Hugo Young - 1989
It traces her life from being an apprentice under Harold Macmillan and her participation in the government of Edward Heath, to her unquestioning destruction of the Conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s and her emergence as a senior stateswoman of the western world.
Kiki's Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930
Billy Kluver - 1989
Presenting photographs of legendary figures, among them the model Kiki, Modigliani, Picasso, Satie, Matisse, Leger, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Miro. Gossip and anecdotes aim to bring this world alive.
Guy Debord
Anselm Jappe - 1992
Anselm Jappe rejects recent attempts to set Debord up as a "postmodern" icon, arguing that he was a social theorist in the Hegelian-Marxist traditionnot a precursor of Jean Baudrillard but an heir of the young Georg Lukács of History and Class Consciousness (1923). Neither hagiographical nor sectarian, Guy Debord places its subject squarely in his historical context: the politicizing Letterist and Situationist "anti-artists" who, in the European aftermath of World War II, sought to criticize and transcend the Surrealist legacy. The book offers a lively, critical, and unusually reliable account of Debord's "last avant-garde" on its way from radical bohemianism to revolutionary theory. Jappe also discusses Debord's films, which are largely inaccessible at present. This English language edition of the book has been revised by the author and features an updated critical bibliography of Debord and the Situationists.»
Women in the Material World
Faith D'Aluisio - 1996
The rewarding result is a multicultural portrait in words and images that illuminates the hopes, dreams, sorrows, and joys of women around the world. 375 color photos.