Book picks similar to
Portraits by Steve McCurry
photography
art
non-fiction
nonfiction
You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes
Chris Hadfield - 2014
. .In You Are Here, bestselling author and celebrated astronaut Chris Hadfield creates a virtual orbit of Earth, giving us the really big picture: this is our home, from space. The millions of us who followed Hadfield's news-making Twitter feed from the ISS thought we knew what we were looking at when we first saw his photos. But we may have caught the beauty and missed the full meaning. Now, through photographs - many of which have never been shared - Hadfield unveils a fresh and insightful look at our planet. He sees astonishing detail and importance in these images, not just because he's spent months in space but because his in-depth knowledge of geology, geography and meteorology allows him to reveal the photos' mysteries.Featuring Hadfield's favourite images, You Are Here is divided by continent and represents one (idealized) orbit of the ISS. This planetary photo tour - surprising, playful, thought-provoking and visually delightful - provides a breathtakingly beautiful perspective on the wonders of the world. You Are Here opens a singular window on our planet, using remarkable photographs to illuminate the history and consequences of human settlement, the magnificence of newly uncovered landscapes, and the power of the natural forces shaping our world and the future of our species.
The Art of Frozen
Charles Solomon - 2013
Encountering Everest-like conditions, mystical trolls, and a hilarious snowman named Olaf, Anna and Kristoff battle the elements in a race to save the kingdom.Taking inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Snow Queen" and the culture and landscape of Norway, the artists of Frozen have created a dynamic, other-worldly icy setting filled with striking background work and detailed costumes. Featuring stunning artwork from the film's creation—including sketches, storyboards, colorscripts, and much more—The Art of Frozen is the ultimate behind-the-scenes look at the research and artistry that went into the making of this wintry action-packed adventure.
Poster Art of the Disney Parks
Daniel Handke - 2012
All of the telltale signs are there: the sound of joyful music pipes across the promenade; the smells of popcorn and cookies waft through the air; and the colorful attraction posters depict all the wonderful rides and shows created for Guests by the Imagineers. Poster Art of the Disney Parks is a tribute to those posters, which begin telling the story of each attraction even before Guests have entered the queue area. Disney attraction posters have been an important means of communication since Disneyland began displaying them in 1956. Not only are they eye-catching pieces of artwork that adorn the Parks with flair and style, they are also displayed to build excitement and disseminate information about the newest additions to the Disney landscape. When the first attraction posters made their debut at Disneyland, one such piece of art proclaimed that Guests could have a “true-life adventure” on the Jungle Cruise. And in 2012 at Disney California Adventure, a poster announced the grand opening of Cars Land—the newest thrill-filled destination at the Disneyland Resort. Both of those posters are reproduced within this book, along with posters from every decade in between. As evidenced by the evolution of the attraction posters, art styles and design techniques have certainly changed over the years. These characteristics also differ from continent to continent. Posters from Tokyo Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland, and Disneyland Paris exhibit the nuances in presentation that give each Park’s pantheon of posters its signature look. But while artistic interpretations and color palettes may vary from Park to Park and from year to year, the spirit of Disney storytelling is a constant that ties them all together.
Linda McCartney. Life in Photographs
Linda McCartney - 2011
On May 11, 1968, when her portrait of Eric Clapton was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone, she entered the record books as the first woman to have that honor. During her tenure as the leading photographer of the late 1960s’ musical scene, she captured many of rock’s most important musicians on film, including Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Simon & Garfunkel, The Who, The Doors, and the Grateful Dead. In 1967, Linda went to London to document the "Swinging Sixties," where she met Paul McCartney at the Bag ’o Nails club and subsequently photographed the Beatles during a launch event for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Paul and Linda fell in love, and were married on March 12, 1969. For the next three decades, until her untimely death, she devoted herself to her family, vegetarianism, animal rights, and photography. From her early rock ’n’ roll portraits, through the final years of the Beatles, via touring with Wings to raising four children with Paul, Linda captured her whole world on film. Her shots range from spontaneous family pictures to studio sessions with Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, as well as artists Willem de Kooning and Gilbert and George. Always unassuming and fresh, her work displays a warmth and feeling for the precise moment that captures the essence of any subject. Whether photographing her children, celebrities, animals, or a fleeting moment of everyday life, she did so without pretension or artifice.This retrospective volume—selected from her archive of over 200,000 images—is produced in close collaboration with Paul McCartney and their children. As such, it is a moving personal journal and a lasting testament to Linda’s talent.Additional to our limited and art editions, this book is also available as unlimited trade edition.
HR Giger
Taschen - 2002
Born in 1940 in Chur Switzerland, he studied architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich. By 1964 he was producing his first artworks, mostly ink drawings and oils, leading to his first solo exhibition in 1966, followed by the world-wide distribution of his first published posters in 1969. Shortly after, he discovered the airbrush and his own signature freehand style, and created his most well known works, the Biomechanical dreamscapes which formed the cornerstone of his fame. Giger's first book, Necronomicon, published in 1977, servers as the visual inspiration for director Ridley Scott's blockbuster movie Alien, Giger's first film assignment, earning him the 1980 Oscar for "Best Achievement in Visual Effects," for his designs of the film's title character and otherworldly environment. Giger's album covers for Debbie Harry and the band ELP were voted among the 100 best in music history in a survey of rock journalists. Throughout his career, Giger also worked in sculpture and, in 1992, created his first total environment, the Giger Bar in Chur. The Museum H.R. Giger in Chateau Saint-Germain was opened in Gruyeres in 1998. Today, Giger continues to live and work in Zurich with his companion in life Carmen, where his current projects include the realization of his museum bar in Gruyeres.
Alchemy & Mysticism
Alexander Roob - 1996
This unique selection of illustrations with commentaries and source texts guides us on a fascinating journey through the representations of the secret arts.
Treehouses of the World
Pete Nelson - 2004
20,000 first printing.
Walt Disney's EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow
Richard R. Beard - 1982
Offers a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of EPCOT, a showcase of urban planning, technological developments, and world cultures
Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics
Heather Busch - 1990
Those seminal books in feline aesthetics are now offered in new pocket-size editions filled with the best from each volume, making purrfect gifts for cat lovers and art lovers alike.
Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World
Ella Frances Sanders - 2014
Did you know that the Japanese language has a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there’s a Finnish word for the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to rest? Lost in Translation brings to life more than fifty words that don’t have direct English translations with charming illustrations of their tender, poignant, and humorous definitions. Often these words provide insight into the cultures they come from, such as the Brazilian Portuguese word for running your fingers through a lover’s hair, the Italian word for being moved to tears by a story, or the Swedish word for a third cup of coffee. In this clever and beautifully rendered exploration of the subtleties of communication, you’ll find new ways to express yourself while getting lost in the artistry of imperfect translation.
Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz - 1969
"Death as a Friend," showing a man greeting his death as an old friend, with a hysterical mixture of joy and terror. "The People," in which a mother shields her offspring from phantoms of hate, poverty, and ignorance — and symbolizes woman as creator, begetter of the human race, link between past and future.These works represent the recurrent themes which most characterize the work of Käthe Kollwitz: social consciousness and a sense of the suffering of mankind, an urge to voice the basic maternal attitude, and a preoccupation with death. She has been called a propagandist, a crusader, yet her art is essentially apolitical. Her concern was not with partisan causes, but rather with universal rights.Fundamentally a dramatic artist, Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) brought to each of her works an uncanny ability to evoke human emotions through subtle gestures and facial expressions. The reactions of her characters were psychologically true primarily because she tested them on herself.The present collection contains 83 of Mrs. Kollwitz's finest works, including the last great print cycles: "The Weavers" of 1898; "The Peasant War" of 1908; "War" of 1925; and "Death" of 1935. These selections provide a full panorama of Mrs. Kollwitz's development as a master of the graphic techniques of etching, woodcutting and lithography. Over 69 of the illustrations have been rephotographed from the original works specially for this edition, and new techniques in photolithography and a larger format have resulted in reproductions that are as close as possible to the prints and drawings themselves.
M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work
M.C. Escher - 1954
Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden (Netherlands). He received his first drawing lessons during secondary school from F.W. van der Haagen, who also taught him the block printing, thus fostering Escher's innate graphic talents. From 1912 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita, who greatly influenced Escher's further artistic development. Between 1922 and 1934 the artist lived and worked in Italy. Afterwards Escher spent two years in Switzerland and five in Brussels before finally moving back to Barn in Holland, where he died in 1972. M.C. Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confrontation with the limitations of our sensory perception. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions
The Oldest Living Things in the World
Rachel A. Sussman - 2014
Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way. Her work is both timeless and timely, and spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. It is underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by Sussman’s relentless curiosity. She begins at “year zero,” and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present. These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that’s the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet—and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world’s most extreme environments, yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths by human hands. Alongside the photographs, Sussman relays fascinating – and sometimes harrowing – tales of her global adventures tracking down her subjects and shares insights from the scientists who research them. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future.
Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife
Pamela Bannos - 2017
They revealed her to be an inadvertent master of twentieth-century American street photography. Not long after, the news broke that Maier had recently died and had no surviving relatives. Soon the whole world knew about her preternatural work, shooting her to stardom almost overnight. But, as Pamela Bannos reveals in this meticulous and passionate biography, this story of the nanny savant has blinded us to Maier’s true achievements, as well as her intentions. Most important, Bannos argues, Maier was not a nanny who moonlighted as a photographer; she was a photographer who supported herself as a nanny. In Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, Bannos contrasts Maier’s life with the mythology that strangers—mostly the men who have profited from her work—have created around her absence. Bannos shows that Maier was extremely conscientious about how her work was developed, printed, and cropped, even though she also made a clear choice never to display it. She places Maier’s fierce passion for privacy alongside the recent spread of her work around the world, and she explains Maier’s careful adjustments of photographic technique, while explaining how the photographs have been misconstrued or misidentified. As well, Bannos uncovers new information about Maier’s immediate family, including her difficult brother, Karl—relatives that once had been thought not to exist. This authoritative and engrossing biography shows that the real story of Vivian Maier, a true visionary artist, is even more compelling than the myth.