Yet in 1979, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, daringly commissioned him to do just that.The resulting 1985 exhibition and book, In the American West, was a milestone in American photography and Avedon's most important body of work. His unflinching portraits of oilfield and slaughterhouse workers, miners, waitresses, drifters, mental patients, teenagers, and others captured the unknown and often-ignored people who work at hard, uncelebrated jobs. Making no apologies for shattering stereotypes of the West and Westerners, Avedon said, "I'm looking for a new definition of a photographic portrait. I'm looking for people who are surprising—heartbreaking—or beautiful in a terrifying way. Beauty that might scare you to death until you acknowledge it as part of yourself."Photographer Laura Wilson worked with Avedon during the six years he was making In the American West. In Avedon at Work, she presents a unique photographic record of his creation of this masterwork—the first time a major photographer has been documented in great depth over an extended period of time. She combines images she made during the photographic sessions with entries from her journal to show Avedon's working methods, his choice of subjects, his creative process, and even his experiments and failures. Also included are a number of Avedon's finished portraits, as well as his own comments and letters from some of the subjects.Avedon at Work adds a new dimension to our understanding of one of the twentieth century's most significant series of portraits. For everyone interested in the creative process it confirms that, in Laura Wilson's words, "much as all these photographs may appear to be moments that just occurred, they are finally, in varying degrees, works of the imagination."

    This work reveals the growth of an artist who saw no artificial boundary between art and the paying job and who succeeded in putting her indelible stamp on the visual imagination.

    But photography has surely changed during these many decades. The rigs and gear of old have given way-first slowly, then all at once-to sleek miracle machines that process pixels and have made the darkroom obsolete. The casual photog puts eye to lens, sets everything on auto and captures a photograph that is . . . perfectly fine. One of LIFE's master shooters-in fact, the final in the long line of distinguished LIFE staff photographers-was Joe McNally, and he has always believed that with a little preparation and care, with a dash of enthusiasm and daring added to the equation, anyone can make a better photo-anyone can turn a "keeper" into a treasure. This was true in days of yore, and it's true in the digital age. Your marvelous new camera, fresh from its box, can indeed perform splendid feats. Joe explains in this book how to take best advantage of what it was designed to do, and also when it is wise to outthink your camera or push your camera-to go for the gold, to create that indelible family memory that you will have blown up as large as the technology will allow, and that will hang on the wall forevermore. As the storied LIFE photographer and photo editor John Loengard points out in his eloquent foreword to this volume, there are cameras and there are cameras, and they've always been able to do tricks. And then there is photography. Other guides may give you the one, two, three of producing a reasonably well exposed shot, but Joe McNally and the editors of LIFE can give you that, and then can show you how to make a picture. In a detailed, friendly, conversational, anecdotal, sometimes rollicking way, that's what they do in these pages. Prepare to click.

    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.

    Even though apartheid itself had no virtue, the author, himself a young black man who spent his childhood under apartheid, insists that it was not a vast moral desert in the lives of those living in townships. In this deep meditation on the experiences of those who lived through apartheid, it points out that despite the poverty and crime, there was still art, literature, music, and morals that, when combined, determined the shape of black life during that era of repression.

    "Babe" includes work by Collins as well as over 30 artists who have been part of her online collective "The Ardorous". Though their work is aesthetically varied, it all represents a current zeitgeist characterized by explorations of female identity, scrutinization of the role of the Internet and social media, and a penchant for pastel colors. The artists in the book, such as Arvida Bystrom, Sandy Kim, Harley Weir, Jeanette Hayes, and Kristie Muller, hail from a variety of places, including New York, London, Moscow, Stockholm, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Toronto. Together they reflect an all-accepting, affirming, distinctly female point of view that teens and young women everywhere can respond to. With a Foreword by Tavi Gevinson, writer, actress, fashion blogger, and creator of the online magazine Rookie, this is an inspiring collection for a new generation of creative, forward thinking women.

    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).

    Each volume is dedicated to the work of one key photographer who, through a series of bite-sized lessons and ideas, tells you everything you always wanted to know about their approach to taking photographs. From their influences, ideas and experiences, to tech tips and best shots. The series begins with Joel Meyerowitz, who will teach you, among other essentials: How to use a camera to reclaim the streets as your own, why you need to watch the world always with a sense of possibility, how to set your subjects at ease, and the importance of being playful and of finding a lens that suits your personality.

     In Believing Is Seeing Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography. In his inimitable style, Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs, from the ambrotype of three children found clasped in the hands of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg to the indelible portraits of the WPA photography project. Each essay in the book presents the reader with a conundrum and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. During the Crimean War, Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death-one of a road covered with cannonballs, the other of the same road without cannonballs. Susan Sontag later claimed that Fenton posed the first photograph, prompting Morris to return to Crimea to investigate. Can we recover the truth behind Fenton's intentions in a photograph taken 150 years ago? In the midst of the Great Depression and one of the worst droughts on record, FDR's Farm Service Administration sent several photographers, including Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, to document rural poverty. When Rothstein was discovered to have moved the cow skull in his now-iconic photograph, fiscal conservatives-furious over taxpayer money funding an artistic project-claimed the photographs were liberal propaganda. What is the difference between journalistic evidence, fine art, and staged propaganda? During the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006, no fewer than four different photojournalists took photographs in Beirut of toys lying in the rubble of bombings, provoking accusations of posing and anti-Israeli bias at the news organizations. Why were there so many similar photographs? And were the accusers objecting to the photos themselves or to the conclusions readers drew from them? With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris reveals in these and many other investigations how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Part detective story, part philosophical meditation, Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception from one of America's most provocative observers.

    It developed concurrently everywhere, and every region had it's own identity. But it was in San Francisco and L.A. where the most radical behavior in stateside punk rock style and attitude was exhibited. It was anti-hippie, anti-disco, anti-parent and anti-"nice". And it was shockingly new. These photos are ground zero of punk rock style—delirious innovation and a snarling takeover of youth culture still resonating more than 20 years hence.

    In the years that followed, she published other notable monographs, including "Aila" (2004), "The Eyes, the Ear" (2005) and "Semear" (2007). And now, ten years after her precipitous entry onto the international stage, Aperture has published "Illuminance," the latest volume of Kawauchi's work and the first to be published outside of Japan. Kawauchi's photography has frequently been lauded for its nuanced palette and offhand compositional mastery, as well as its ability to incite wonder via careful attention to tiny gestures and the incidental details of her everyday environment. As Sean O'Hagan, writing in "The Guardian" in 2006, noted, "there is always some glimmer of hope and humanity, some sense of wonder at work in the rendering of the intimate and fragile." In "Illuminance," Kawauchi continues her exploration of the extraordinary in the mundane, drawn to the fundamental cycles of life and the seemingly inadvertent, fractal-like organization of the natural world into formal patterns. Gorgeously produced as a clothbound volume with Japanese binding, this impressive compilation of previously unpublished images is proof of Kawauchi's unique sensibility and her ongoing appeal to lovers of photography.

    Society may label them bums, homeless, or pariahs, but Zellar's empathetic writing allows the reader to get inside one broken man, and therefore all."—Jim Walsh, MinnPostWashed up in the shadow of a refinery, Lester B. Morrison, legendary recluse, documents his life in a series of photographs taken with a disposable camera. In a landscape of off ramps, warehouses, and SRO hotels occupied by terminally lonely men, love and faith break in, quietly offering human connection and the possibility of redemption.Brad Zellar has worked as a writer and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, as well as for both regional and national magazines. He is the author of Suburban World: The Norling Photos, The 1968 Project, Conductors of the Moving World, and House of Coates.Alec Soth is a photographer whose first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004. Since then Soth has published over a dozen books including Niagara (2006), Dog Days, Bogotá (2007), The Last Days of W (2008), and Broken Manual (2010). Soth's work has been exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.

    This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.

    Written by an international team of experts, this definitive history of photography looks at every step of the field's dynamic evolution, period by period and movement by movement. Each key genre is chronologically presented within its social, economic, and political context, along with close analysis of specially selected works that best exemplify the characteristics of the period. With more than 500 gorgeous examples in black and white and color, the book explores in-depth virtually every aspect of the medium since its first public demonstration in 1839 to the latest innovations: from early portraits and the birth of photojournalism to travel photography and the mapping of the world; from the Pictorialists to the avant-garde; from celebrity and fashion to documentary and landscape. Along the way readers will learn why some photographs are considered iconic, and why the medium as an art form continues to challenge and enthrall us.

    Including articles by photographers from Edward Weston to Jo Spence, as well as key thinkers like Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin and Susan Sontag, the essays trace the development of ideas about photography. Each themed section features an editor's introduction setting ideas and debates in their historical and theoretical context.Sections include: Reflections on Photography; Photographic Seeing; Coding and Rhetoric; Photography and the Postmodern; Photo-digital; Documentary and Photojournalism; The Photographic Gaze; Image and Identity; Institutions and Contexts.