Chicago Then and Now


Elizabeth McNulty - 2000
    Chicago's change and growth over the last century is captured in this photographic history. Modern color photos sit side by side with black and white archival photographs. Every important building, avenue, neighborhood, and point of interest is documented. It covers all of Chicago's landmarks from Navy Pier to the Stockyards and from the Southside all the way up the Magnificent Mile. Take in a game at Wrigley Field, then take it all in from the top of the Sear's Tower. The Water Tower and all the other architectural features that make Chicago great are also included.

Betty Page Confidential


Stan Corwin Productions - 1994
    Betty Page Confidential includes a biography of the reclusive goddess, an official Betty Page trivia quiz and 100 photos.Betty Page Confidential is the ultimate book on this 1950s icon.

Lost New York


Nathan Silver - 1967
    Now expanded and updated, with 118 new photographs, the book reveals a fresh, true picture of New York as it has lived and grown, with startling reminders of how much that has vanished remains part of us. From the grandeur of the old Metropolitan Opera and Pennsylvania Station to the fabulous lost night clubs of 52nd Street and Harlem, from the opulence of the old Vanderbilt mansions to the Madison Square Garden rooftop where architect Stanford White was shot, this is both a unique testament to New York's past and a story of the vitality that makes the city continue to connect with us.Illustrated with rare and stunning photographs and marked by engaging, lively text, this new edition of LOST NEW YORK provides a unique and unforgettable look at the places in New York that are no more. Beyond that, it evokes the significant moments in time and memory that make us reflect on our passions about change and the reasons we remain concerned about the future of cities.

Derelict London


Paul Talling - 2008
    The Victorian Concrete House in East Dulwich, for example - a once magnificent example of an early concrete-built house but now a shell. Palmers in Camden Town, formerly the most famous pet shop in London, where Ken Livingstone bought his newts. Strand Tube Station, which featured in films as diverse as Battle of Britain, Superman IV and An American Werewolf in Paris. To mention only a few of the myriad houses, pubs, cinemas, bomb shelters, cemeteries and shops meticulously recorded and celebrated here.If you've ever peeped curiously through a gap in a boarded-up window or wondered why the building you pass every day is looking distinctly the worse for wear, this is very definitely the book for you.

Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet


Jennifer Homans - 2010
    Its traditions serve as a record of our past. A ballerina dancing The Sleeping Beauty today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps and gestures are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and culture that followed. Ballet has been shaped by the Renaissance and Classicism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Bolshevism, Modernism, and the Cold War. Apollo’s Angels is a groundbreaking work—the first cultural history of ballet ever written, lavishly illustrated and beautifully told.Ballet is unique: It has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. The steps are never just the steps—they are a living, breathing document of a culture and a tradition. And while ballet’s language is shared by dancers everywhere, its artists have developed distinct national styles. French, Italian, Danish, Russian, English, and American traditions each have their own expression, often formed in response to political and societal upheavals.From ballet’s origins in the Renaissance and the codification of its basic steps and positions under France’s Louis XIV (himself an avid dancer), the art form wound its way through the courts of Europe, from Paris and Milan to Vienna and St. Petersburg. It was in Russia that dance developed into the form most familiar to American audiences: The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker originated at the Imperial court. In the twentieth century, émigré dancers taught their art to a generation in the United States and in Western Europe, setting off a new and radical transformation of dance. Jennifer Homans is a historian and critic who was also a professional dancer: She brings to Apollo’s Angels a knowledge of dance born of dedicated practice. She traces the evolution of technique, choreography, and performance in clean, clear prose, drawing readers into the intricacies of the art with vivid descriptions of dances and the artists who made them. Her admiration and love for the ballet shines through on every page. Apollo’s Angels is an authoritative work, written with a grace and elegance befitting its subject.

The Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens


Tamara Staples - 2001
    But few meet the standard of perfection of the American poultry show, the beauty pageant of the barnyard and the true test of poultry pulchritude. In The Fairest Fowl, photographer Tamara Staples celebrates the champions of the chicken world at their best. Dozens of stunning portraits capture the quirky personality and undeniable grace of these noble birds as you've never seen them before. Location photography of the shows, details of the judging process, strategies from poultry farmers, and profiles of each prize breed set the scene and offer insight for the discerning chicken aficionado. And an appreciation of Staples' photography by public radio's Ira Glass of This American Life explores the finer points of chicken portraiture. Finally, chickens receive the respect they're due.

The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia


Brian Hall - 1994
    . . presented with sympathy and frequently with humor . . . [of] a disparate people who were never united except by their resentment of a foreign conqueror." - Atlantic MonthlyIn The Impossible Country, Brian Hall relates his encounters with Serbs, Croats, and Muslims-- "real people, likeable people" who are now overcome with suspicion and anxiety about one another. Hall takes the standard explanations, the pundits' predictions, and the evening news footage and inverts our perceptions of the country, its politics, its history, and its seemingly insoluble animosities.

Handcrafted Modern: At Home with Mid-century Designers


Leslie Williamson - 2010
    Among significant mid-century interiors, none are more celebrated yet underpublished as the homes created by architects and interior designers for themselves. This collection of newly commissioned photographs presents the most compelling homes by influential mid-century designers, such as Russel Wright, George Nakashima, Harry Bertoia, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eva Zeisel, among others. Intimate as well as revelatory, Williamson’s photographs show these creative homes as they were lived in by their designers: Walter Gropius’s historic Bauhaus home in Massachusetts; Albert Frey’s floating modernist aerie on a Palm Springs rock outcropping; Wharton Esherick’s completely handmade Pennsylvania house, from the organic handcarved staircase to the iconic furniture. Personal and breathtaking by turn—these homes are exemplary studies of domestic modernism at its warmest and most creative.

Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera


Ron Schick - 2009
     Working alongside skilled photographers, Rockwell acted as director, carefully orchestrating models, selecting props, and choosing locations for the photographs -- works of art in their own right -- that served as the basis of his iconic images. Readers will be surprised to find that many of his most memorable characters -- the girl at the mirror, the young couple on prom night, the family on vacation -- were friends and neighbors who served as his amateur models. In this groundbreaking book, author and historian Ron Schick delves into the archive of nearly 20,000 photographs housed at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Featuring reproductions of Rockwell's black-and-white photographs and related full-color artworks, along with an incisive narrative and quotes from Rockwell models and family members, this book will intrigue anyone interested in photography, art, and Americana.

Bosnia: A Short History


Noel Malcolm - 1994
    Malcolm examines the different religious and ethnic inhabitants of Bosnia, a land of vast cultural upheaval where the empires of Rome, Charlemagne, the Ottomans, and the Austro-Hungarians overlapped. Clarifying the various myths that have clouded the modern understanding of Bosnia's past, Malcolm brings to light the true causes of the country's destruction. This expanded edition of Bosnia includes a new epilogue by the author examining the failed Vance-Owen peace plan, the tenuous resolution of the Dayton Accords, and the efforts of the United Nations to keep the uneasy peace.What went wrong in the country where Christians and Muslims mingled and tolerated each other for over five centuries? It was a land with a vibrant political and cultural history, unlike any other in Europe, where great powers and religions-the empires of Rome, Charlemagne, the Ottomans; the faiths of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Islam overlapped and combined. In this first English-language history of Bosnia, Noel Malcolm provides a narrative chronicle of the country from its beginnings to its tragic end. Clarifying the various myths that have clouded the modern understanding of Bosnia's past, Malcolm brings to light the true causes of the country's destruction: the political strategy of the Serbian leadership, the conflict between the city and the countryside, the fatal inaction and miscalculations of Western politicians.Putting the Bosnia war into perspective, this volume celebrates the complex history of a country whose past, as well as its future, has been all but erased. At last, here is the guide for the general reader seeking a comprehensive and accessible account of the war in the former Yugoslavia.

Hollywood Frame by Frame: The Unseen Silver Screen in Contact Sheets, 1951-1997


Karina Longworth - 2014
    You look directly through the photographer s eyes as each photo gets closer to that perfect shot. And yet, it s often the photos not chosen that best capture the true spirit of their subjects and the life they lead after the director yells cut. This was never truer than in the classic Hollywood era, where behind-the-scenes photos were carefully vetted for marketing purposes and unapproved shots were never expected to be seen again. Hollywood Frame by Frame presents hundreds of never-before-published photos from the sets of some of the greatest films of the twentieth century. Hollywood s biggest stars are caught with their guard down behind the scenes of movie classics from Some Like It Hot and Breakfast at Tiffany's to Taxi Driver and The Silence of the Lambs. A treasure trove for any fan of Hollywood s Golden Age, this rare glimpse of the unseen silver screen will intrigue even movie buffs who think they ve seen everything. First book of movie contact sheets, features never-before-seen photos of screen legends at work, including Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Robert De Niro, and Alfred Hitchcock Provides insight into the art of moviemaking, the science of movie marketing, and the nature of stardom Karina Longworth is an author, film critic, and journalist based in Los Angeles and Paris. She has contributed to numerous publications, including the Guardian, LA Weekly, Village Voice, Slate,and many more.

The Arcades Project


Walter Benjamin - 1982
    In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Andrew Moore: Detroit Disassembled


Andrew Moore - 2010
    Today, whole sections of the city resemble a war zone, its once-spectacular architectural grandeur reduced to vacant ruins. In Detroit Disassembled, photographer Andrew Moore records a territory in which the ordinary flow of time-or the forward march of the assembly line-appears to have been thrown spectacularly into reverse. For Moore, who throughout his career has been drawn to all that contradicts or seems to threaten America's postwar self-image (his previous projects include portraits of Cuba and Soviet Russia), Detroit's decline affirms the carnivorousness of our earth, as it seeps into and overruns the buildings of a city that once epitomized humankind's supposed supremacy. In Detroit Disassembled, Moore locates both dignity and tragedy in the city's decline, among postapocalyptic landscapes of windowless grand hotels, vast barren factory floors, collapsing churches, offices carpeted in velvety moss and entire blocks reclaimed by prairie grass. Beyond their jawdropping content, Moore's photographs inevitably raise the uneasy question of the long-term future of a country in which such extreme degradation can exist unchecked. (20110821)

New York


Ric Burns - 1999
    Chronicling the story of New York from its establishment as a Dutch trading post in 1624 to its global preeminence today, the book is at once the biography of a great city and a vivid exploration of the myriad forces -- commercial, cultural, demographic -- that converged in New York to usher in the contemporary world.Weaving the strands of the city's sweeping history into a single compelling narrative, New York carries us through nearly four centuries of turbulent growth and change -- from the first settlement on the tip of "Manna-hata" Island to the destruction wrought by the Revolutionary War; to the city's stunning emergence in the nineteenth century as the nation's premier industrial metropolis; to the waves of early-twentieth-century immigration that forever transformed the city and the nation; to New York's transfiguration as the world's first modern city -- pioneering skyscrapers, apartment houses, subways, and highways -- and its role as the birthplace of so much of American popular culture. Along the way, we witness the building of the city's celebrated landmarks and neighborhoods, from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building and the United Nations; from Wall Street and Times Square to the Lower East Side, Harlem, and SoHo.The book brims with vibrant illustrations, including hundreds of rare photographs, paintings, lithographs, prints, and period maps. The narrative incorporates the voices and stories of men and women -- statesmen, entrepreneurs, artists, and visionaries -- who have lived in and built the city: an extraordinary cast of characters that includes Peter Stuyvesant, Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, Walt Whitman, Boss Tweed, Jacob Riis, Emma Lazarus, J. P. Morgan, Al Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Gershwin, Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, and Jane Jacobs.Accompanying the book's narrative are interviews with Robert A. Caro, David Levering Lewis, and Robert A. M. Stern, and essays by a group of distinguished New York historians and critics -- Kenneth T. Jackson, Mike Wallace, Marshall Berman, Phillip Lopate, Carol Berkin, and Daniel Czitrom -- who add their insights about the city to this splendid history.From the Hardcover edition.

Evidence


Luc Sante - 1992
    Simultaneous.