And as with his photographs of the Mississippi, these images are less about natural wonder than human desire. "I went to Niagara for the same reason as the honeymooners and suicide jumpers," says Soth, "the relentless thunder of the Falls just calls for big passion." The subject may be hot, but the pictures are quiet, the rigorously composed and richly detailed products of a large-format 8x10 camera. Working over the course of two years on both the American and Canadian sides of the Falls, Soth edited the results of his labors down to a tight and surprising album. He depicts newlyweds and naked lovers, motel parking lots, pawnshop wedding rings and love letters from the subjects he photographed. We read about teenage crushes, workplace affairs, heartbreak and suicide. Oscar Wilde wrote, "The sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life." Niagara brings viewers both the passion and the disappointment--a remarkable portrayal of modern love and its aftermath.

    It is hard enough to find thesequalities in trained photographers with the benefit of schooling and mentors and a community of fellow artists and aficionados supporting and rewarding their efforts. It is incredibly rare to find it in someone with no formal training and no network of peers.Yet Vivian Maier is all of these things, a professional nanny, who from the 1950s until the 1990s took over 100,000 photographs worldwide—from France to New York City to Chicago and dozens of other countries—and yet showed the results to no one. The photos are amazing both for the breadth of the work and for the high quality of the humorous, moving, beautiful, and raw images of all facets of city life in America’s post-war golden age.It wasn’t until local historian John Maloof purchased a box of Maier’s negatives from a Chicago auction house and began collecting and championing her marvelous work just a few years ago that any of it saw the light of day. Presented here for the first time in print, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer collects the best of her incredible, unseen body of work.

    Featuring brutally compassionate photographs taken from 1990-99, inspired by an overwhelming belief in the human possibility of change, this volume is a definitive selection from Nachtwey's astonishing portfolio. It documents today's conflicts and their victims, from Somalia's famine to genocide in Rwanda, from Romania's abandoned orphans and 'irrecoverables' to the lives of India's 'untouchables', from war in Bosnia to conflict in Chechnya. Inferno is an evocative visual insight into modern history, bringing it disturbingly close to our consciousness.

    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.

    The sense of private mystery that fills these photographs--mostly taken during Koudelka's many years of wandering through Europe and Great Britain since leaving his native Czechoslovakia in 1968--speaks of passion and reserve, of his rage to see. Solitary, moving, deeply felt and strangely disturbing, the images in Exiles suggest alienation, disconnection and love. Exiles evokes some of the most compelling and troubling themes of the twentieth century, while resonating with equal force in this current moment of profound migrations and transience.Josef Koudelka (born 1938) has published ten books of photographs, many of which focus on the relationship between man and the landscape, including Gypsies (1975; revised and enlarged edition in 2011), Exiles (1988), Black Triangle (1994), Invasion 68: Prague (2008) and Wall (2013). Significant exhibitions of his work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, both in New York; Hayward Gallery, London; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Koudelka is the recipient of the Medal of Merit awarded by the Czech Republic (2002) and numerous other awards. In 2012, he was named Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. He is based in Paris and Prague.

    Slight of build, shy by nature, prone to fits of depression, the 28-year-old Beijing photographer was nonetheless at the forefront of Chinese artists' battle for creative freedom. Like his champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and wildly popular in the rest of the world. He said, -I don't really view my work as taboo, because I don't think so much in cultural context, or political context. I don't intentionally push boundaries, I just do what I do.- Why? Because his models, friends, and increasingly, fans, are naked, often outdoors, high in the trees or on the terrifyingly vertiginous rooftops of Beijing, stacked like building blocks, heads wrapped in octopi, body cavities sprouting phone cords and flowers, whatever enters his mind at the moment. He denies his intentions are sexual, and there is a clean detachment about even his most extreme images: the urine, the insertions, the many, many erections. In a 2013 interview VICE magazine asked, -there are a lot of dicks ... do you just like dicks?- Ren responded, -It's not just dicks I'm interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way.- True though that may be, the penises Ren photographed are not just fresh and vivid, but unusually large, making one wonder just where he met his friends. In the same piece, Hang also stated, -Gender isn't important when I'm taking pictures, it only matters to me when I'm having sex, - making him a pioneer of gender inclusiveness. Young fans still eagerly flock to his website, Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts. His photographs, all produced on film, have been the subject of over 20 solo and 70 group shows in his brief six-year career, in cities as disparate as Tokyo, Athens, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Vienna, and yes, even Beijing. He self-published 16 monographs, in tiny print runs, that now sell for up to $600. TASCHEN's Ren Hang is his only international collection, covering his entire career, with well-loved favorites and many never-before-seen photos of men, women, Beijing, and those many, many erections. We take solace remembering Ren's joy when he first held the book, shared by his long-time partner Jiaqi, featured on the cover.Text in English, French, and German

    In the years that followed, she published other notable monographs, including "Aila" (2004), "The Eyes, the Ear" (2005) and "Semear" (2007). And now, ten years after her precipitous entry onto the international stage, Aperture has published "Illuminance," the latest volume of Kawauchi's work and the first to be published outside of Japan. Kawauchi's photography has frequently been lauded for its nuanced palette and offhand compositional mastery, as well as its ability to incite wonder via careful attention to tiny gestures and the incidental details of her everyday environment. As Sean O'Hagan, writing in "The Guardian" in 2006, noted, "there is always some glimmer of hope and humanity, some sense of wonder at work in the rendering of the intimate and fragile." In "Illuminance," Kawauchi continues her exploration of the extraordinary in the mundane, drawn to the fundamental cycles of life and the seemingly inadvertent, fractal-like organization of the natural world into formal patterns. Gorgeously produced as a clothbound volume with Japanese binding, this impressive compilation of previously unpublished images is proof of Kawauchi's unique sensibility and her ongoing appeal to lovers of photography.

    This spectacular book brings together the most beautiful, memorable and evocative pictures of Steve McCurry's extraordinary career.

    This book, the permanent embodiment of Edward Steichen's monumental exhibition, reproduces all of the 503 images that Steichen described as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world. Photographs made in all parts of the world, of the gamut of life from birth to death. A classic and inspiring work, The Family of Man has been in print for more than 40 years. The New York Times once wrote that it symbolizes the universality of human emotions. First produced by a magazine publisher and sold by the hundreds of thousands on newsstands and in airport shops, The Family of Man has been in more recent years published by the Museum. It has been continuously in print since 1955; the present thirtieth-anniversary edition was prepared from original photographs with all new duotone plates in 1986.

    Cologne's Museum Ludwig was the first museum of contemporary art to devote a substantial section to international photography. The L. Fritz Gruber collection, from which this book is drawn, is one of the most important in Germany and one of the most representative anywhere in the world, constituting the core of the museum's holdings. This book provides a fascinating insight into the collection's rich diversity; from conceptual art to abstraction to reportage, all of the major movements and genres are represented via a vast selection of the century's most remarkable photographs. From Ansel Adams to Piet Zwart, over 850 works are presented in alphabetical order by photographer, with descriptive texts and photographers' biographical details.

    He made pilgrimages to true time capsules like a remote lagoon in Western Australia, spent time in research collections photographing forms of microscopic life, and even found ways to create visual parallels between the growth of organs in the human body and the patterns seen on the surface of the earth. The resulting volume is a glorious picture book of planet earth depicting the amazing biodiversity that surrounds us all. Lanting's true gift lies beyond his technical mastery: it is his eye for geometry in the beautiful chaos of nature that allows him to show us the world as it has never been seen before. From crabs to jellyfish, diatoms to vast geological formations, jungles to flowers, monkeys to human embryos, LIFE is a testament to the magical beauty of life in all its forms and is Lanting's most remarkable achievement to date. The photographer: Dutch-born Frans Lanting has been hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. For the past two decades he has documented wildlife and our relationship with nature in environments from the Amazon to Antarctica. Exhibits of his photographs have been shown at major museums in Paris, Milan, Tokyo, New York, Madrid, and Amsterdam. Lanting's previous TASCHEN titles include Eye to Eye, Jungles, and Penguin. The editor: Christine Eckstrom is a writer and editor specializing in natural history. She collaborates with Lanting on fieldwork, books, and other publishing projects from their home base in California.

    Accompanying the images are the photographers' accounts of the techniques they used and their adventures in the field -- sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying, and always vividly compelling. National Geographic The Photographs also includes an introductory chapter that chronicles the evolution of the photographic principles that have kept National Geographic at the forefront of the field and presents the visionaries who believed that photography had the power to tell important truths.ContentsForewordThen and nowFaraway placesIn the wildUnderwaterThe SciencesIn the U.S.A.Index

    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."

    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).

    The unprecedented scope of this collection provides the opportunity to study his more composed, aesthetically structured images alongside his snapshots, which offer a more anecdotal account of Doisneau's Paris. Organized thematically, the book leads us on an entrancing tour through the gardens of Paris, along the Seine, and through the crowds of Parisians who define their beloved city. More than 600 photographs-many rare, forgotten, and previously unpublished-are assembled in this beautiful volume to create a unique portrait of Paris. From toddlers scrambling to cross rue de Rivoli to fresh-faced accordionists, from elegant dog walkers to exuberant roller skaters, and from the indelible kiss in front of the Hétel de Ville to cyclists beneath the Eiffel Tower, the magic of Paris in black and white is a timeless treasure. The photographs, edited by Doisneau's daughter, are complemented by citations from the photographer himself, which reveal his profound fascination with the city where he lived and worked.