Wisconsin Death Trip


Michael Lesy - 1973
    Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.

Days With My Father


Phillip Toledano - 2010
    Following the death of his mother, photographer Phillip Toledano was shocked to learn of the extent of his father's severe memory loss. He started a blog on which he posted photographs and accompanying reflections on his father's changing state. Through sometimes sad, often funny, and always loving observations, we follow Toledano as he learns to reconcile the elderly man living in a twilight of half memories with the ambitious and handsome young man he occasionally still glimpses. Days With My Father is an honest and moving reflection about coming to terms with an aging parent.

The Public Library: A Photographic Essay


Robert Dawson - 2014
    Today, the more than 17,000 libraries in America also function as de facto community centers offering free access to the internet, job-hunting assistance, or a warm place to take shelter. And yet, across the country, cities large and small are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operation. Over the last eighteen years, photographer Robert Dawson has crisscrossed the country documenting hundreds of these endangered institutions. The Public Library presents a wide selection of Dawson's photographs— from the majestic reading room at the New York Public Library to Allensworth, California's one-room Tulare County Free Library built by former slaves. Accompanying Dawson's revealing photographs are essays, letters, and poetry by some of America's most celebrated writers. A foreword by Bill Moyers and an afterword by Ann Patchett bookend this important survey of a treasured American institution.

Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude: The Photography Workshop Series


Todd Hido - 2014
    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).

Early Color


Saul Leiter - 2006
    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.

Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004


Richard Avedon - 2007
    This beautifully produced catalogue, designed by the renowned Danish graphic designer Michael Jensen, features deluxe tritone printing and varnish on premium paper. It includes 125 reproductions of Avedon's greatest work from the entire range of his oeuvre--including fashion photographs, reportage and portraits--and spans from his early Italian subjects of the 1940s to his 2004 portrait of the Icelandic pop star Bjork. It also features a small number of color images, including what must be one of the most famous photographic portraits of the twentieth century, -Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent- (1981). Texts by Jeffrey Fraenkel, Judith Thurman, Geoff Dyer, Christoph Ribbat, Rune Gade and curator Helle Crenzien offer a sophisticated and thorough composite view of Avedon's career.

Still Time


Sally Mann - 1994
    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.

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity


Mike Brodie - 2013
    Two weeks later I was gone, witnessing my new world wizz by, especially at dusk, then darkness as I watched the sum of all the city lights cast my silhouette across the pine trees of the Florida panhandle. This was it, I was riding my very first freight train. And soon, what would begin as mere natural curiosity and self-discovery would evolve into a casting call of sorts, taking photographs of my newfound friends. — Mike Brodie11 x 13 Inches60 Four-color Plates104 Pages

Pilgrimage


Annie Leibovitz - 2011
    She wasn't on assignment. She chose the subjects simply because they meant something to her. The first place was Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, which Leibovitz visited with a small digital camera. A few months later, she went with her three young children to Niagara Falls. "That's when I started making lists," she says. She added the houses of Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin in the English countryside and Sigmund Freud's final home, in London, but most of the places on the lists were American. The work became more ambitious as Leibovitz discovered that she wanted to photograph objects as well as rooms and landscapes. She began to use more sophisticated cameras and a tripod and to travel with an assistant, but the project remained personal.Leibovitz went to Concord to photograph the site of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond. Once she got there, she was drawn into the wider world of the Concord writers. Ralph Waldo Emerson's home and Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott and her family lived and worked, became subjects. The Massachusetts studio of the Beaux Arts sculptor Daniel Chester French, who made the seated statue in the Lincoln Memorial, became the touchstone for trips to Gettysburg and to the archives where the glass negatives of Lincoln's portraits have been saved. Lincoln's portraitists--principally Alexander Gardner and the photographers in Mathew Brady's studio--were also the men whose work at the Gettysburg battlefield established the foundation for war photography. At almost exactly the same time, in a remote, primitive studio on the Isle of Wight, Julia Margaret Cameron was developing her own ultimately influential style of portraiture. Leibovitz made two trips to the Isle of Wight and, in an homage to the other photographer on her list, Ansel Adams, she explored the trails above the Yosemite Valley, where Adams worked for fifty years.The final list of subjects is perhaps a bit eccentric. Georgia O'Keeffe and Eleanor Roosevelt but also Elvis Presley and Annie Oakley, among others. Figurative imagery gives way to the abstractions of Old Faithful and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Pilgrimage was a restorative project for Leibovitz, and the arc of the narrative is her own. "From the beginning, when I was watching my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, it was an exercise in renewal," she says. "It taught me to see again."

Los Alamos


William Eggleston - 2003
    --"Andy Grundberg"~The world is so visually complicated that the word "banal" scarcely is very intelligent to use. All days are similar, no matter what part of this planet we're in. --"William Eggleston"

Photographing Shadow and Light: Inside the Dramatic Lighting Techniques and Creative Vision of Portrait Photographer Joey L.


Joey L. - 2012
    Photographer Joey L. found his vision early, drawing critical acclaim as a brilliant commercial photographer with a distinctive technical expertise for lighting.             In Photographing Shadow and Light, Joey lifts the curtain on his dramatic, creatively fearless approach to portraiture, sharing his personal philosophy and a behind-the-scenes look at 15 striking photo sessions—from personal projects shot in Africa, India, and Brooklyn to commercial shoots for 50 Cent, the Jonas Brothers, and Project Runway All Stars. Joey provides readers with a step-by-step description of how he visualized each shoot, formed meaningful connections with his subjects, and “built” his signature dramatic lighting effects—one light at a time.            Featuring more than 85 stunning portraits, detailed lighting diagrams, and a foreword from industry icon David Hobby (aka Strobist), Photographing Shadow and Light shares the creative process behind one of today’s most exciting photography talents, providing serious amateurs and professionals a fresh perspective on creating compelling, professional quality portraits. “Joey Lawrence is . . . the future of photography. Get used to it.” —David Hobby (Strobist) Get inside the images of commercial and fine art portrait photographer Joey L. with this behind-the-lens guide to his fearless approach, creative vision, and signature lighting techniques.Also available as an ebook

Larry Fink on Composition and Improvisation: The Photography Workshop Series


Larry Fink - 2014
    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 volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, Larry Fink--well-known for his layered pictures in social settings--explores composing photographs and improvising within a scene to create images with both feeling and meaning. Through words and photographs, he reveals insight into his own practice and discusses a wide range of creative issues, from connecting with the subject in front of the lens to shaping a vision that is authentic. Photographer Lisa Kereszi, a student of Larry Fink, provides the introduction.Larry Fink (born 1941) has been a professor at Yale University School of Art; Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture; Parsons the New School for Design; and Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Currently, he is a tenured professor of photography at Bard College. His work has been widely exhibited in the United States, including solo exhibitions at Light Gallery, New York; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Lisa Kereszi is a photographer and educator. She is now the director of undergraduate studies at the Yale University School of Art, where she has taught since 2004. She has published five books, including "Fun and Games" and "Joe's Junk Yard." Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Brooklyn Museum, and has appeared in the "New Yorker," "Harper's" and the "New York Times Magazine."

Diane Arbus: Magazine Work


Diane Arbus - 1985
    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.

Subway


Bruce Davidson - 1980
    Originally published in 1986, this dark, democratic environment provided the setting for photographer Bruce Davidson's first extensive series in color. Subway riders are set against a gritty, graffiti-strewn background, displayed in tones Davidson described as "an iridescence like that I had seen in photographs of deep-sea fish." Never before has the subway been portrayed in such detail, revealing the interplay of its inner landscape and out vistas. The images include lovers, commuters, tourists, families, and the homeless. From weary straphangers to languorous ladies in summer dresses to stalking predators, Davidson's compassionate vision illuminates the stubborn survival of humanity. From the spring of 1980 to 1985, Davidson explored and shot six hundred miles of subway tracks. In his own words, "I wanted to transform this subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the color, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day." Now nearly 25 years later, and on the eve of the subway's 100th anniversary, St. Ann's Press is publishing a new edition of Davidson's classic book. This edition adds forty unseen images to the original book, and includes a new introduction by Arthur Ollman of the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego, and a foreword by Fred Braithwaite (aka Fab Five Freddy), the original graffiti artist. It also includes Bruce Davidson and Henry Geldzahler's original essays.

Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past


Ransom Riggs - 2012
    Each image in Talking Pictures reveals a singular, frozen moment in a person’s life, be it joyful, quiet, or steeped in sorrow. Yet the book’s unique depth comes from the writing accompanying each photo: as with the caption revealing how one seemingly random snapshot of a dancing couple captured the first dance of their 40-year marriage, each successive inscription shines like a flashbulb illuminating a photograph’s particular context and lighting up our connection to the past.