Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art


Scott McCloud - 1993
    Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a seminal examination of comics art: its rich history, surprising technical components, and major cultural significance. Explore the secret world between the panels, through the lines, and within the hidden symbols of a powerful but misunderstood art form.

Annie Leibovitz at Work


Annie Leibovitz - 2008
    Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it." —Annie LeibovitzAnnie Leibovitz describes how her pictures were made, starting with Richard Nixon's resignation, a story she covered with Hunter S. Thompson, and ending with Barack Obama's campaign. In between are a Rolling Stones Tour, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, The Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keith Haring, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patti Smith, George W. Bush, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. The most celebrated photographer of our time discusses portraiture, reportage, fashion photography, lighting, and digital cameras.

Paul Strand: Masters of Photography Series


Paul Strand - 1987
    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.

Yosemite and the Range of Light


Ansel Adams - 1979
    Full page B&W photos

Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking


David Bayles - 1993
    Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people; essentially-statistically speaking-there aren't any people like that. Geniuses get made once-a-century or so, yet good art gets made all the time, so to equate the making of art with the workings of genius removes this intimately human activity to a strangely unreachable and unknowable place. For all practical purposes making art can be examined in great detail without ever getting entangled in the very remote problems of genius."--from the Introduction

The Story of Art


E.H. Gombrich - 1950
    Attracted by the simplicity and clarity of his writing, readers of all ages and backgrounds have found in Professor Gombrich a true master, and one who combines knowledge and wisdom with a unique gift for communicating his deep love of the subject. The Story of Art, one of the most famous and popular books on art ever written, has been a world bestseller for over four decades. Attracted by the simplicity and clarity of his writing, readers of all ages and backgrounds have found in Professor Gombrich a true master, and one who combines knowledge and wisdom with a unique gift for communicating his deep love of the subject.For the first time in many years the book has been completely redesigned. The illustrations, now in colour throughout, have all been improved and reoriginated, and include six fold-outs. The text has been revised and updated where appropriate, and a number of significant new artists have been incorporated. The bibliographies have been expanded and updated, and the maps and charts redrawn. The Story of Art has always been admired for two key qualities: it is a pleasure to read and a pleasure to handle. In these respects the new edition is true to its much-loved predecessors: the text runs as smoothly as ever and the improved illustrations are always on the page where the reader needs them. In its new edition, this classic work continues its triumphant progress tirelessly for yet another generation, to remain the title of first choice for any newcomer to art or the connoisseur. The Story of Art has always been admired for two key qualities: it is a pleasure to read and a pleasure to handle. In these respects the new edition is true to its much-loved predecessors: the text runs as smoothly as ever and the improved illustrations are always on the page where the reader needs them. In its new edition, this classic work continues its triumphant progress tirelessly for yet another generation, to remain the title of first choice for any newcomer to art or the connoisseur.

Alfred Stieglitz: Camera Work - The Complete Photographs 1903-1917


Pam Roberts - 1978
    Around the turn of the 20th century, he founded the Photo-Secession, a progressive movement concerned with advancing the creative possibilities of photography, and by 1903 began publishing Camera Work, an avant-garde magazine devoted to voicing the ideas, both in images and words, of the Photo-Secession. Camera Work was the first photo journal whose focus was visual, rather than technical, and its illustrations were of the highest quality hand-pulled photogravure printed on Japanese tissue. This book brings together all photographs from the journal’s 50 issues.

Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators and Creatives


Richard Brereton - 2009
    Intimate and often unseen, sketchbooks document the sources of inspiration as well as the journey to final execution. They showcase ideas and how these evolve and change into accomplished works. Fresh and spontaneous, their style connects directly with current illustration trends. The material is complemented by interviews where artists explain how they use their sketchbooks and how these relate to finished works. These, along with the sketchbooks themselves, will give readers a direct and unmediated insight into the process of research and creation.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century


Henri Cartier-Bresson - 2010
    His inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography. Following World War II, he helped found the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines such as Life while retaining control over their work. Cartier-Bresson would go on to produce major bodies of photographic reportage, capturing such events as China during the revolution, the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, the United States in the postwar boom and Europe as its older cultures confronted modern realities. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this is the first major publication to make full use of the extensive holdings of the Fondation Cartier-Bresson--including thousands of prints and a vast resource of documents relating to the photographer's life and work. The heart of the book surveys Cartier-Bresson's career through 300 photographs divided into 12 chapters. While many of his most famous pictures are included, a great number of images will be unfamiliar even to specialists. A wide-ranging essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum, offers an entirely new understanding of Cartier-Bresson's extraordinary career and its overlapping contexts of journalism and art. The extensive supporting material--featuring detailed chronologies of the photographer's professional travels and of spreads of his picture stories as they appeared in magazines--will revolutionize the study of Cartier-Bresson's work.

Type Rules!: The Designer's Guide to Professional Typography


Ilene Strizver - 2001
    Covering history of design, along with current trends, methods for customizing fonts, techniques for setting type, common mistakes to avoid, and guidelines for selecting the right type for the job, the book is fully illustrated with smart, relevant images.

Atget's Paris


Eugène Atget - 2001
    His skilled, wonderfully atmospheric photos of Paris's parks, buildings, streets, store windows, prostitutes, workers, and even door handles are a joy to behold. This abbreviated volume contains a selection of Atget's best photographs and is the perfect introduction to this master photographer's work.

Soviet Bus Stops


Christopher Herwig - 2014
    From the shores of the Black Sea to the endless Kazakh steppe, the bus stops show the range of public art from the Soviet era and give a rare glimpse into the creative minds of the time. Herwig’s series attracted considerable media interest around the world, and now with the 12 year project complete, the full collection will be presented in Soviet Bus Stops as a deluxe, limited edition, hard cover photo book. The book represents the most comprehensive and diverse collection of Soviet bus stop design ever assembled.

Wall and Piece


Banksy - 2005
    Not only did he smuggle his pieces into four of New York City's major art museums, he's also "hung" his work at London's Tate Gallery and adorned Israel's West Bank barrier with satirical images. Banksy's identity remains unknown, but his work is unmistakable with prints selling for as much as $45,000.

Girl in the Moonlight


Charles Dubow - 2015
    But none affected him more than the enchanting Cesca, a girl blessed with incandescent beauty and a wild, irrepressible spirit.Growing up, Wylie’s friendship with her brother, Aurelio, a budding painter of singular talent, brings him near Cesca’s circle. A young woman confident in her charms, Cesca is amused by Wylie’s youthful sensuality and trusting innocence. Toying with his devotion, she draws him closer to her fire—ultimately ruining him for any other woman.Spanning several decades, moving through the worlds of high society, finance, and art, and peopled with poignant characters, Girl in the Moonlight takes us on a whirlwind tour, from the wooded cottages of old East Hampton to the dining rooms of Upper East Side Manhattan to the bohemian art studios of Paris and Barcelona. As he vividly brings to life Wylie and Cesca’s tempestuous, heart wrenching affair, Charles Dubow probes the devastating depths of human passion and the nature of true love.

Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information


Manuel Lima - 2011
    Finding patterns and making meaningful connections inside complex data networks has emerged as one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century. In recent years, designers, researchers, and scientists have begun employing an innovative mix of colors, symbols, graphics, algorithms, and interactivity to clarify, and often beautify, the clutter. From representing networks of friends on Facebook to depicting interactions among proteins in a human cell, Visual Complexity presents one hundred of the most interesting examples of information-visualization by the field's leading practitioners.