Book picks similar to
Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation by Shomei Tomatsu
photography
art
japan
asia
Self Portrait
Lee Friedlander - 1992
Here Friedlander focuses on the role of his own physical presence in his images. He writes: "At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings." Here readers can witness this progression as Friedlander appears in the form of his shadow, or reflected in windows and mirrors, and only occasionally fully visible through his own camera. In some photos he visibly struggles with the notion of self-portraiture, desultorily shooting himself in household mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Soon, though, he begins to toy with the pictures, almost teasingly inserting his shadow into them to amusing and provocative effect--elongated and trailing a group of women seen only from the knees down; cast and bent over a chair as if seated in it; mirroring the silhouette of someone walking down the street ahead of him; or falling on the desert ground, a large bush standing in for hair. These uncanny self-portraits evoke a surprisingly full landscape of the artist's life and mind. This reprint edition of Lee Friedlander: Self Portrait contains nearly 50 duotone images and an afterword by John Szarkowski, former Director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.
We're Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy, SF/LA 1978-1980
Jim Jocoy - 2002
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.
India an Introduction
Khushwant Singh - 1990
Khushwant Singh tells the story of the land and its people from the earliest time to the present day. In broad, vivid sweeps he encapsulates the saga of the upheavals of a sub-continent over five millennia, and how their interplay over the centuries has molded the India of today. More, Khushwant Singh offers perceptive insights into everything Indian that may catch one's eye or arouse curiosity: its ethnic diversity, religions, customs, philosophy, art and culture, political currents, and the galaxy of men and women who have helped shape its intricately inlaid mosaic. He is also an enlightening guide to much else: India's extensive and varied architectural splendors, its art and classical literature. Khushwant Singh's own fascination with the subject is contagious, showing through on every page, and in every sidelight that he recounts. India: An Introduction holds strong appeal for just about anyone who has more than a passing interest in the country, Indians as well as those who are drawn to it from farther afield. And for a traveller, it is that rare companion: erudite, intelligent, lively
House of Coates
Brad Zellar - 2012
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.
Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole
Nobuyoshi Araki - 2002
As word began to spread, similar establishments popped up across the country. Men lined up outside these cafés waiting to pay three times the usual cost for coffee served by a panty-free young woman, hoping to catch a fortuitous glimpse. Within a few years, a new craze took hold: the no-panties "massage" parlor. Competition for customers led these new types of businesses to offer an increasingly bizarre range of services: fondling clients through holes in coffins whilst they lie naked inside playing dead, interiors catering to commuter-train fetishists, young virgin role-playing, etc. Amongst these many destinations was a Tokyo club called Lucky Hole. Here, the premise was ridiculously simple: clients stood on one side of a plywood partition, a hostess on the other; in between them was simply a hole big enough for a certain part of the male anatomy to pass through. Nobuyoshi Araki was a frequent visitor to the sex clubs of Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood, and he photographed them profusely until the golden age of Japan's sex industry came to a screeching halt in February 1985, with the enactment of the New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act. In over 800 photos, Tokyo Lucky Hole documents the free-for-all spirit of those clubs via Araki's lens.
Gothic Lolita
Masayuki Yoshinaga - 2007
Influenced by Western fashion trends from the mid 1980s, young teenagers, predominately adolescent girls, congregate in the urban centres of Harajuku, Akihabara and a number of underground clubs in and around Tokyo, dressed head-to-toe in gothic costumes and late-Victorian dress. The psychological characteristics of the average Japanese Goth is one of introversion and exclusivity. The majority of girls in the scene are teenagers and most usually stop dressing and behaving this way by the age of eighteen. The origin of the movement was in Osaka in the mid 1990s when young teenagers adopted Gothic fashion in response to the clothes worn and promoted by Japanese Gothic rock bands. In the ten years since the trend began it has expanded to a number of cities including Tokyo and now boasts many thousands of devotees who dedicate their lives to creating ever more flamboyant and bizarre variations on the Gothic theme.
Eudora Welty: Photographs
Eudora Welty - 1989
It is unusual, remarkable, for a major writer also to be an accomplished photographer. Eudora Welty is one of the very few whose great talent has been expressed in both photographs and fiction. This book, Eudora Welty: Photographs, brings together in one volume about 250 representative photographs from the few thousand that she took during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. Although her camera's view finder compresses much, like the frame in which she conceives her fiction, it finds elements that convey her deep compassion and her artist's sensibilities. From the confines of her native Mississippi these photographs unfold the world of Eudora Welty's art, reaching, extending, and exploring. In the Deep South of Depression times, when she began writing, she discovered the place into which she had been born and which would always be her subject. From here, as these photographs show, she approached and risked the outside world. From rural Mississippi to New Orleans, Charleston, New York City, and Yaddo, and then to Ireland, England, and the Continent, Welty widened her vision and expanded her art. These photographs reveal that both in her fiction and in the pictures she took it has always been in place, in the special qualities of what is local, that she found her impulse.
Hokusai, First Manga Master
Jocelyn Bouquillard - 2007
This book features a selection of 60 of the master's woodcut prints, culled from the complete series of the 'Manga' volumes.
American Surfaces
Stephen Shore - 1999
It features unpublished photographs from Shore's influential work that has been widely exhibited in the US but never captured in a book for the general public.
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.
Love on the Left Bank
Ed van der Elsken - 1999
Elsken focuses on the Left Bank of Paris in the 1950s—a time when it was recognised as a centre of creative ferment which would determine the cultural agenda of a generation. With its unconventional, gritty, snapshot-like technique the work has been acclaimed as expanding the boundaries of documentary photography.
Henri Cartier-Bresson in India
Henri Cartier-Bresson - 1987
Its images are shaped by an eye and a mind legendary for their empathy and for going to the heart of the matter. Cartier-Bresson's talent, his famous mantle of invisibility and his good connections with such figures as Nehru allowed him to capture the quintessence of India - a land renowned for its contradictions and variety. His pictures of Hindus in refugee camps after the Partition or beggars in Calcutta speak with the same passion and authority as those of the Maharaja of Baroda's sumptuous birthday celebrations or of the Mountbattens on the steps of Government House. Considerable space is given to his famous reportages, such as the astonishing sequence on the death and cremation of Gandhi.
Platon's Republic
Platon . - 2004
Platon's subjects are all leaders in their field and include Al Pacino, Bill Clinton, Vivienne Westwood, Leonard Cohen and David Beckham. A collection of unique portraits by British born, New York based, fashion photographer Platon. Over 120 photographs have been selected from an enormous range of powerful images taken over the last decade and together they constitute a unique and dynamic cross-section through the cult of fame and power. and sometimes overwhelms, us with images of world-wide importance juxtaposed with frivolity. Platon's Republic replicates the same intense and sometimes surreal experience with portraits of Al Pacino, Bill Clinton, Vivienne Westwood, Leonard Cohen as well as more documentary photographs of Jesse Jackson and Bianca Jagger demonstrating against the death penalty and football supporters. Granted extraordinary access to some of the west's most powerful people, Platon's subjects are all leaders in their field. Whether they are from the TV industry, politicians, actors, fashion designers, writers or musicians, they all wield enormous influence within their arena. Platons' portraits are graphic and intimate, but the unusual angles and revealing expressions are his hallmark.
Bushido: The Soul of Japan. A Classic Essay on Samurai Ethics
Inazō Nitobe - 1900
The Way of the Warrior presents a remarkably faithful mirror of many of the characteristics and habits of modern Japanese civilization, as it represents a tradition that enjoyed great power and prestige for centuries. This work was written to provide practical and moral instruction for warriors, and to outline the parameters of personal, social, and professional conduct characteristic of Bushido, or Way of the Warrior, the Japanese chivalric tradition.Personal responsibilities, family relationships, public duties, education, finances and ethics are treated in this text from the perspective of the spirit of Japanese gentlemen. Even the forms of political incompetence and corruption that Japan currently struggles with are accurately described in this more than 400-year-old book; So deep did the feudal and military modes of government that generated them take their roots in Japanese society. This manual is therefore an essential resource for anyone who wishes to understand Japan and the Japanese people in a realistic way.
Winogrand: Figments from the Real World
Garry Winogrand - 1988
Grouped under the following titles-- Eisenhower Years, The Street, Women, The Zoo, On the Road, The Sixties, Etc, The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, Airport and Unfinished Work-- many of the 179 plates are works that had never before been published. The last section includes 25 pictures chosen from the enormous body of work that Winogrand left unedited at the time of his death in 1984. In his essay, Szarkowski, who knew the photographer well during most of his career, describes the development of Winogrand's pictorial strategies during his years as a photojournalist, the increasing complexity of his motifs as he pursued more personal goals, and the challenge posed for other photographers by the powerful and distinctive authority of Winogrand's best work, "with its manic sense of a life balanced somewhere between animal high spirits and an apprehension of moral disaster."