I want there to be a combination of the past juxtaposed with the modern. I use nature to symbolize the search, saving a tree, watering the earth. In this fabricated world, strange clouds of smog float by; there are holes in the sky. These mythic images mirror our world, where nature is domesticated, controlled, and destroyed. Through my work I explore technology and a poetry of existence. These can be very heavy, overly didactic issues to convey in art, so I choose to portray them through a more theatrically absurd approach.--Robert ParkeHarrison

    Now available in paperback, this volume celebrates an artist whose acute perceptions and imagination embrace not only the photographs of children for which she is renowned, but also earlier landscapes and some unexpected, compelling forays into color and abstract photography. The 60 images include abstract platinum prints, Cibachromes and Polaroids, landscapes, portraits of women and 12-year-olds and her celebrated family pictures. Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, where she continues to live and work. Among her many awards are three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Corcoran Museum of Art, to name just a few. Her books of photographs include Immediate Family and At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women.

    His 1976 exhibition, Photographs by William Eggleston, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, marked a turning point in the history of photography: this was when color photography gained recognition as a medium of artistic expression. His intense and dramatic use of color and "democratic" approach to mundane subject matter continue to have an enormous impact on contemporary photographic practice. Published to accompany a French exhibition, this book brings together Eggleston's most significant works, from his first experiments in black-and-white to a series of photographs of Kyoto produced specifically for the exhibit. Drawing on public and private collections in Europe and the United States, the book includes vintage prints executed in the technique most characteristic of his work, the dye transfer process, as well as many lesser-known and previously unseen photographs. From Mississippi to Berlin, Kenya to Asia, Eggleston has tirelessly explored the wider world, transforming, through his camera, the ordinary into the extraordinary. Distributed on behalf of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. 160 color photographs.

    Richard Avedon introduces the volume with an essay on his working method and portrait philosophy, and Laura Wilson, who accompanied Avedon and his team, provides a journal of their travels, between 1979 and 1984.

    Slight of build, shy by nature, prone to fits of depression, the 28-year-old Beijing photographer was nonetheless at the forefront of Chinese artists' battle for creative freedom. Like his champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and wildly popular in the rest of the world. He said, -I don't really view my work as taboo, because I don't think so much in cultural context, or political context. I don't intentionally push boundaries, I just do what I do.- Why? Because his models, friends, and increasingly, fans, are naked, often outdoors, high in the trees or on the terrifyingly vertiginous rooftops of Beijing, stacked like building blocks, heads wrapped in octopi, body cavities sprouting phone cords and flowers, whatever enters his mind at the moment. He denies his intentions are sexual, and there is a clean detachment about even his most extreme images: the urine, the insertions, the many, many erections. In a 2013 interview VICE magazine asked, -there are a lot of dicks ... do you just like dicks?- Ren responded, -It's not just dicks I'm interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way.- True though that may be, the penises Ren photographed are not just fresh and vivid, but unusually large, making one wonder just where he met his friends. In the same piece, Hang also stated, -Gender isn't important when I'm taking pictures, it only matters to me when I'm having sex, - making him a pioneer of gender inclusiveness. Young fans still eagerly flock to his website, Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts. His photographs, all produced on film, have been the subject of over 20 solo and 70 group shows in his brief six-year career, in cities as disparate as Tokyo, Athens, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Vienna, and yes, even Beijing. He self-published 16 monographs, in tiny print runs, that now sell for up to $600. TASCHEN's Ren Hang is his only international collection, covering his entire career, with well-loved favorites and many never-before-seen photos of men, women, Beijing, and those many, many erections. We take solace remembering Ren's joy when he first held the book, shared by his long-time partner Jiaqi, featured on the cover.Text in English, French, and German

    It is a celebration of the singularity and connectedness of each and every one of us. It demands of us what it demanded of her: the courage to see things as they are and the grace to permit them to simply be. For Diane Arbus, this is what making pictures was all about.These photographs achieve a lyricism, an emotional purity that sets them apart from all her other accomplishments. "Finally what I've been searching for, " she wrote at the time. The product of her consistently unflinching regard for reality as she found it, the images in this book have less in common with the documentary than with the mythic.

    The sense of private mystery that fills these photographs--mostly taken during Koudelka's many years of wandering through Europe and Great Britain since leaving his native Czechoslovakia in 1968--speaks of passion and reserve, of his rage to see. Solitary, moving, deeply felt and strangely disturbing, the images in Exiles suggest alienation, disconnection and love. Exiles evokes some of the most compelling and troubling themes of the twentieth century, while resonating with equal force in this current moment of profound migrations and transience.Josef Koudelka (born 1938) has published ten books of photographs, many of which focus on the relationship between man and the landscape, including Gypsies (1975; revised and enlarged edition in 2011), Exiles (1988), Black Triangle (1994), Invasion 68: Prague (2008) and Wall (2013). Significant exhibitions of his work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, both in New York; Hayward Gallery, London; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Koudelka is the recipient of the Medal of Merit awarded by the Czech Republic (2002) and numerous other awards. In 2012, he was named Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. He is based in Paris and Prague.

    Purity, elegance, and passion are the hallmarks of Strand's imagery. This inaugural volume of Aperture's "Masters of Photography" series presents 41 of Strand's greatest photographs, drawn from a career that spanned six decades. Included are his earliest experimental efforts, created from 1915 to 1917, which Alfred Stieglitz declared had begun to redefine the medium. Subsequent photographs reveal the artist's impeccable vision in locales as diverse as New England and the Outer Hebrides, France and Ghana. During Strand's last years, he concentrated on still lifes and the poignant beauty of his own garden at Orgeval, France.In an introductory essay, Mark Haworth-Booth, Curator of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, provides an overview of the artist's life and his enduring contribution to photography.

    A member of the prestigious Magnum agency since 1954, he has photographed all over the world and his images have been the subject of many books and exhibitions.Containing over 500 pictures, over half of which have never been published before, Elliott Erwitt Snaps is a unique and comprehensive survey of his work. From famous images such as Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon arguing in Moscow in 1959 and Marilyn Monroe with the cast of the movie The Misfits, to his many more personal images of places, things, people and animals, Erwitt's unmistakable, often witty, style gives us a snapshot of the famous and the ordinary, the strange and the mundane over a period of more than half a century, through the lens of one of the period's finest image-makers.The book is arranged in nine chapters, each with a one-word title: Look, Move, Play, Read, Rest, Touch, Tell, Point, Stand. For Erwitt, whose photography is a study and celebration of life, these are the basic actions of life - the things people do. The photographs are not intended to illustrate the words, but the words act as a means of grouping and organizing, making broad connections and also playing with pun and ambiguity, in keeping with the visual games Erwitt plays.

    Its goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each book features the creative process and core thinking of a photographer told in their own words and through pictures of their choosing, and is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, Todd Hido explores the genres of landscape, interior and nude photography, with emphasis on creating images from a personal perspective and with a sense of intimacy. Through words and photographs, he also offers insight into his own practice and discusses a wide range of creative issues, including mining one's own memory and experience as inspiration; using light, texture and detail for greater impact; exploring the narrative potential activated when sequencing images; and creating powerful stories with emotional weight and beauty.Todd Hido (born 1968) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist. He is well known for his photography of urban and suburban housing across the United States, and for his use of detail and luminous color. His previous books include House Hunting (2001), Outskirts (2002), Roaming (2004) and Between the Two (2007). He is a recipient of a Eureka Fellowship and a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Visual Arts Award, and is represented by Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. He is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts.Gregory Halpern received a BA in history and literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. His third book of photographs, entitled A, is a photographic ramble through the streets of the American Rust Belt. His other books include Omaha Sketchbook and Harvard Works Because We Do. He currently teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is the coeditor of The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture 2013).

    David Levi Strauss writes in his essay: "The constitutive facts of Francesca Woodman's life are by now well known. We know that she was born in 1958, that she began taking photographs seriously at age thirteen or fourteen and continued this involvement into her twenty-second year, building up, in this brief time, a remarkably coherent and affecting body of work. And we know that on January 19, 1981, just two and a half months before her twenty-third birthday, she took her own life, leaping from a window on the Lower East Side in Manhattan to her death". This volume, containing many unpublished images, finally allows us to discover the full body of work of this artist, created in Rhode Island, Rome, New York, MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire: self-portraits, mise-en-scenes, nudes, and deeply emotional collage-like images. They all show her intense relation with the camera and her own self, long before this kind of picture-making became fashionable.

    Robert Mapplethorpe's black-and-white Polaroid photographs from the 1970s--a medium in which he established the style that would bring him international acclaim--are brought together in this exquisite volume for the first time.Prestel Publications

    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.

    An all-new selection from the outrageous "enfant terrible" of contemporary photography, this volume is even sexier, funnier, and more fantastical than the bestselling "LaChapelle Land." 158 full-color photos.

    Although Edward Steichen had exhibited some of Leiter's color photography at The Museum of Modern Art in 1953, it remained virtually unknown to the world thereafter. Leiter moved to New York in 1946 to become a painter, but through his friendship with Richard Pousette-Dart he quickly recognized the creative potential of photography. Leiter continued to paint, exhibiting with Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, but the camera remained his ever-present means of recording life in the metropolis. None of Leiter's contemporaries, with the partial exception of Helen Levitt, assembled a comparable body of work: subtle, often abstract compositions of lyrical, eloquent color.