Book picks similar to
Dear Photograph by Taylor Jones


non-fiction
photography
art
nonfiction

Images


David Lynch - 1994
    200 b/w illustrations. Two 16-page 4-color inserts.

Polar Obsession


Paul Nicklen - 2009
    Raised on Baffin Island, Nunavut, he grew up in one of the only non-Inuit families in a tiny native settlement amid the ice fields, floes, and frigid seas of Northern Canada. At an age when most children are playing hide-and-seek, he was learning life-and-death lessons of survival: how to read the weather, find shelter in a frozen snowscape, or live off the land as his Inuit neighbors had done for centuries.Today Nicklen is a naturalist and wildlife photographer uniquely qualified to portray the impact of climate change on the polar regions and their inhabitants, human and animal alike. In a wise and wonderful intertwining of art and science, his bold expeditions plunge him into freezing seas to capture unprecedented, up-close documentation of the lives of leopard seals, whales, walruses, polar bears, bearded seals, and narwhals. Bathed in polar light, his images, inspiring and amazing, break new ground in photography and provide a vivid, timely portrait of two extraordinary, endangered ecosystems.

The Great American Read: The Book of Books: Explore America's 100 Best-Loved Novels


Jessica Allen - 2018
    What are America's best-loved novels? PBS will launch The Great American Read series with a 2-hour special in May 2018 revealing America's 100 best-loved novels, determined by a rigorous national survey. Subsequent episodes will air in September and October. Celebrities and everyday Americans will champion their favorite novel and in the finale in late October, America's #1 best-loved novel will be revealed. The Great American Read: The Book of Books will present all 100 novels with fascinating information about each book, author profiles, a snapshot of the novel's social relevance, film or television adaptations, other books and writings by the author, and little-known facts. Also included are themed articles about banned books, the most influential book illustrators, reading recommendations, the best first-lines in literature, and more. Beautifully designed with rare images of the original manuscripts, first-edition covers, rejection letters, and other ephemera, The Great American Read: The Book of Books is a must-have book for all booklovers.

Tasha Tudor's Garden


Tovah Martin - 1994
    Her nineteenth-century New England lifestyle is legendary. Gardeners are especially intrigued by the profusion of antique flowers -- spectacular poppies, six-foot foxgloves, and intoxicating peonies -- in the cottage gardens surrounding her hand-hewn house. Until now we've only caught glimpses of Tasha Tudor's landscape. In this gorgeous book, two of her friends, the garden writer Tovah Martin and the photographer Richard Brown, take us into the magical garden and then behind the scenes. As we revel in the bedlam of Johnny-jump-ups and cinnamon pinks, the intricacy of the formal peony garden, and the voluptuousness of her heirloom roses, we also learn Tasha's gardening secrets. How does she coax forth her finicky camellia blossoms in the dead of a Vermont winter? How does she train that fantastic topiary to model for her artwork? How can she keep her crown imperials from tumbling in the winds? Tasha's garden reflects a wealth of family lore, perfected through the years and years of working the soil. We may be dazzled by the beauty of the garden, but we come away from this book with practical ideas about improving our own plots of land. "Paradise on earth" is how Tasha describes her garden, and along with the flowers and the vegetables that provide her food, her paradise is filled with an enchanting menagerie -- corgies, Nubian goats, cats, chickens, fantail doves, and forty or more exotic finches, cockatiels, canaries, nightingales, and parrots, which inhabit her collection of antique cages. Tasha's beautiful watercolors and her enchanting anecdotes color this sublimely beautiful book.

Happy Home: Everyday Magic for a Colorful Life


Charlotte Hedeman Guéniau - 2013
    Happy Home brims with useful ideas for transforming a ho-hum home with relaxed contemporary style featuring bright colors, cheerful patterns, and varying textures and scale inspired by designer Charlotte Hedeman Gueniau and her home furnishings company Rice, which are well-known among design fans for innovative home furnishings and houseware collections featuring ethically sourced and produced products. The book shows how the basics of everyday life can be enlivened by bringing color and a sense of fun to daily living, whether by using brightly colored accessories or by introducing fabrics with patterns, textures, and hints of humor throughout the home. Included are practical suggestions that add informal charm to any room, as well as do-it-yourself projects ranging from brightly colored throws and cushions, storage ideas to hide clutter, hand-painted furniture, and decorative motifs for walls and other surfaces.

Sad Animal Facts


Brooke Barker - 2016
    Have you ever wondered how expensive a jar of honey would be if a minimum wage for bees applied, or whether a dog cares what's on television when they sit next to you?This book pairs the sweet and sad facts of animal life with their imagined thoughts and reactions.

Francesca Woodman


Francesca Woodman - 1991
    David Levi Strauss writes in his essay: "The constitutive facts of Francesca Woodman's life are by now well known. We know that she was born in 1958, that she began taking photographs seriously at age thirteen or fourteen and continued this involvement into her twenty-second year, building up, in this brief time, a remarkably coherent and affecting body of work. And we know that on January 19, 1981, just two and a half months before her twenty-third birthday, she took her own life, leaping from a window on the Lower East Side in Manhattan to her death". This volume, containing many unpublished images, finally allows us to discover the full body of work of this artist, created in Rhode Island, Rome, New York, MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire: self-portraits, mise-en-scenes, nudes, and deeply emotional collage-like images. They all show her intense relation with the camera and her own self, long before this kind of picture-making became fashionable.

Dark Girls


Bill Duke - 2014
    In Dark Girls, celebrities such as Lupita Nyong'o, Vanessa Williams, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Judge Mablean Ephriam, Brandi and Karli Harvey, and over seventy-five other outstanding women share intimate insights into what their dark skin means to them.Filled with gorgeous photographs, this thoughtful, sophisticated, alluring, and uplifting collection captures the elegance of dark skin—joyfully showcasing that we truly are beautiful for who we are.

SuicideGirls: Beauty Redefined


Missy Suicide - 2008
    This giant tome provides a timely look at the fascinating women who created and inhabit the SG community. With an introduction by SG founder, Missy Suicide and images of hundreds of SuicideGirls world-wide, this title shines a light on a new female aesthetic - a look reminiscent of vintage Betty Page and Bunny Yeager photos, but with a decisively 21st century edge. "There's no other place in the media to see girls (like these) who are tremendously smart and beautiful in their own way" says Missy, "Everywhere you look you just see the super-thin, super-tall, bleach blonde Baywatch babe. There are a lot of people out there who want to see a different kind of beauty."

A Bowl of Olives: On Food and Memory


Sara Midda - 2014
    Drawn from the artist’s wealth of impressions and memories, it is a book for lovers of food and art and fine gift books—a book for anyone who, upon arriving in a new town, seeks first the local market, or who believes the best thing to do on a given night is to share a table with friends. Sara Midda is a watercolorist whose delicate and beautiful paintings shine like jewels, evoking the sweet purple taste of a summer raspberry or the silvery greens and gnarled burnt umber of an olive grove. And she is also a collagist, weaving together photographs, line drawings, her personal swatches—all the hues of a spice cabinet, or the sensations of a picnic, the colors of the breeze, sunshine, laughter, the cooling grass. And a poet, in love with words that sing, like podding and wicker, nettle and snug. By turns reverent and playful, A Bowl of Olives is a work of pure enchantment, celebrating food—of the seasons, of family, of travel and memory. It is as richly layered as a favorite meal. The book is cloth-bound, jacketed, and printed on uncoated stock to convey the feeling of an artist’s sketchbook.

Carry This Book


Abbi Jacobson - 2016
      With bright, quirky, and colorful line drawings, Jacobson brings to life actual and imagined items found in the pockets and purses, bags and glove compartments of real and fantastical people—whether it’s the contents of Oprah’s favorite purse or Harry Potter’s duffel bag, Amelia Earhart’s pencil case or Bernie Madoff’s suitcase.   How many self-tanning lotions are in Donald Trump’s weekender? What’s inside Martha Stewart’s hand-knit fanny pack? What kind of protein bars does Michelle Obama hide in her tiny clutch at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner? Carry This Book provides a humorous and insightful look into how the things we carry around every day can make up who we are.

Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters: Inside His Films, Notebooks, and Collections


Jim Shedden - 2016
    This book will be the perfect accompaniment to the exhibition, which focuses on del Toro’s creative process, including the well-defined themes that he obsessively returns to in all his films, the journals in which he logs his ideas, and the vast and inspiring collection of art and pop culture ephemera that he has amassed at his private “man cave,” Bleak House. Filled with imagery from the exhibit, including favorite pieces of art that del Toro has chosen for the exhibit, and pertinent journal pages, the book will further delve further into the director’s world through exclusive in-depth interviews and commentary from notable figures in the art world. Forming a perfect companion to the exhibition, this book will deliver an engrossing look into the mind of one of the great creative visionaries of our time.

I Am Hutterite: The Fascinating True Story of a Young Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Heritage


Mary-Ann Kirkby - 2007
     I Am Hutterite takes readers into the hidden heart of the little-known Hutterite colony in southern Manitoba where author Mary-Ann Kirkby spent her childhood. When she was ten years old her parents packed up their seven children and a handful of possessions and left the security of the colony to start a new life. Overnight they were thrust into a world they didn't understand, a world that did not understand them.Before she left the colony Mary-Ann had never tasted macaroni and cheese or ridden a bike. She had never heard of Walt Disney or rock-and-roll. She was forced to reinvent herself, denying her heritage to fit in with her peers. With great humor, Kirkby describes how she adapted to popular culture; and with raw honesty her family's deep sense of loss for their community. More than a history lesson, I Am Hutterite is a powerful tale of retracing steps and understanding how our beginnings often define us. Controversial and acclaimed by the Hutterite community, Kirkby's book unveils the rich history and traditions of her people, giving us a rare and intimate portrait of an extraordinary way of life.

The Bird King and Other Sketches


Shaun Tan - 2010
    What do they all have in common? Nothing! Except for the fact that they all come from the sketchbooks of Shaun Tan, acclaimed creator of The Lost Thing, the Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia.Also selected by the artist are preliminary drawings for book, film and theatre projects, portrait and landscape studies, along with pages from travelling notebooks. All off a special insight into the daydreams of a celebrated author and illustrator.

Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology


Caroline Paul - 2013
    But then her beloved cat Tibia disappeared. She and her partner, illustrator Wendy MacNaughton, mourned his loss. Yet weeks later, Tibia waltzed back into their lives. His owners were overjoyed. But they were also...jealous? Betrayed? Where had their sweet anxious cat disappeared to? Had he become a swashbuckling cat adventurer? Did he love someone else more? His owners were determined to find out.Using GPS technology, cat cameras, psychics, the web, and animal communicators, the authors of Lost Cat embarked on a quest to discover what their cat did when they weren't around. Told through writer Caroline Paul's rich and warmly poignant narrative and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton's stunning and hilarious 4-color illustrations, Lost Cat is a book for animal lovers, pet owners, and anyone who has ever done anything desperate for love.