French ladies slender and chic, French men wearing berets and riding bicycles with baguettes clamped under their arms when they are not flirting outrageously, and all the while the sun shines down benevolently upon uniform rows of ripening vegetables. Dreams are strange and unpredictable, and sometime so is la vie en rose. A pick from some of the best bits of the popular travel author's blog diaries reveal the minutiae of expat day to day life in rural France. A must-read for Susie Kelly fans and anybody thinking of, or dreaming of, moving to France.

    Revolutionary in their day, Group f.64 was one of the first modern art movements equally defined by women. From the San Francisco Bay Area, its influence extended internationally, contributing significantly to the recognition of photography as a fine art.The group-first identified as such in a 1932 exhibition-was comprised of strongly individualist artists, brought together by a common philosophy, and held together in a tangle of dynamic relationships. They shared a conviction that photography must emphasize its unique capabilities-those that distinguished it from other arts-in order to establish the medium's identity. Their name, f.64, they took from a very small lens aperture used with their large format cameras, a pinprick that allowed them to capture the greatest possible depth of field in their lustrous, sharply detailed prints. In today's digital world, these “straight” photography champions are increasingly revered.Mary Alinder is uniquely positioned to write this first group biography. A former assistant to Ansel Adams, she knew most of the artists featured. Just as importantly, she understands the art. Featuring fifty photographs by and of its members, Group f.64 details a transformative period in art with narrative flair.

    Abandoning the well-trodden “best of” routes that can be found in any tourist guide, Mayle highlights local features vital to an authentic Provençal experience. From ruminations on the unique charms of each season to the art of the siesta, Mayle brings the warmth and beauty of the province vividly to life. And, of course, food and wine also get their due, as Mayle expounds the merits of pastis and a good rosé, explores the mystery of traditional market shopping, and more. Evocative and intimate, Provence in Ten Easy Lessons is charming yet practical reading for ticketed passengers and armchair travelers, alike.

    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."

    Here is everything you need to know: from the most practical advice (the fundamental facts about light sources) to the most sophisticated nuances (how light is measured through photometry), from the basics of the camera (which button controls which function) to the finer points of framing with an LCD viewfinder, featuring a selection of Ang’s most inspiring images. For users of film cameras, Ang explains the differences between types of film and details the various methods of processing and darkroom techniques.Ang delves into the development and transformation of photography by digital techniques. For the digital-camera contingent, there’s a specificity of previously unavailable information about the cameras and about processing, digitizing, and outputting the images. Ang also discusses subjects usually ignored in manuals but of interest to all photographers, including critical theory, the presentation of images, the function of the human eye in the perception of images, and ethical and copyright issues.Fundamentals of Photography is an essential book for every photographer.

    This is Coyote's country--a landscape of the imagination, where nothing is as it appears.

    Broken down by region, this unusual guide features 70 aerial photographs; a fold-out map of North America showing major flight paths; profiles of each region covering its landforms, waterways, and cities; tips on spotting major sights, such as the Northern Lights, the Grand Canyon, and Disney World; tips on spotting not-so-major sights such as prisons, mines, and Interstates; and straightforward, friendly text on cloud shapes, weather patterns, the continent's history, and more. A terrific book for kids, frequent flyers, and armchair travelers alike, Window Seat is packed with curious facts and colorful illustration, proving that flying doesn't have to be a snooze. When it's possible to "read" the landscape from above, a whole world unfolds at your feet.

    

    Including articles by photographers from Edward Weston to Jo Spence, as well as key thinkers like Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin and Susan Sontag, the essays trace the development of ideas about photography. Each themed section features an editor's introduction setting ideas and debates in their historical and theoretical context.Sections include: Reflections on Photography; Photographic Seeing; Coding and Rhetoric; Photography and the Postmodern; Photo-digital; Documentary and Photojournalism; The Photographic Gaze; Image and Identity; Institutions and Contexts.

    It is an outrageously funny, often touching, and continuously shocking tale of a modern sea gypsy. Cap'n Fatty's story is too bizarre to be fiction. Father wears floral skirts; mother is a tad vague. Sister Carole isn't interested in her millionaire suitor; she's too busy smooching with the kid in the cesspool truck. Their strange live-aboard boat caravan includes Mort the Mortician, Backwards Bernie, Ruby Red the Conman, Barefoot Benny, Geeper Creeper, Para the Paranoid, Lusty Laura, Xlax, Shark Boy, the Pawtucket Pirate, Bait Broad, Colonel Crispy, Scupper Lips, Bob the Broker, the Pirate Queen, Otto the Owner, the Twin Slaves of Green Slime-and even a terribly long-winded fellow named (Hurricane) Hugo. All seem hell-bent on avoiding the cops, the creeps, each other, and especially the Dreaded Dream Crushers. Dive in!

    As the crossroads between Europe and Asia, Istanbul has lived through several empires and has a character that is as many layered as its history – something that Güler’s photographs convey with great sensitivity. In these remarkable black-and-white images, the city’s melancholy aesthetic oscillates between tradition and modernity. Both writer and photographer were born in Istanbul, and each in his youth held the ambition of becoming a painter. Here, each in his own way paints a picture of his home town and captures its very soul.

    Created in the 1890s by George Washington Vanderbilt, a member of one of America's wealthiest families, the estate combined a 250-room French Renaissance-style chateau with 125,000 acres of gardens, forests, and working farms. Biltmore House served as Vanderbilt's primary residence for almost 20 years. After Mr. Vanderbilt's death in 1914, life at Biltmore continued for his wife Edith and daughter Cornelia. In 1930, Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil and her husband, Hon. John Francis Amherst Cecil, opened Biltmore House--the largest private home in the United States--to the public, firmly establishing the Asheville area as a major tourist destination.

    From day one, the magazine has maintained a Tokyo bureau, which today also encompasses a Monocle shop and radio studio.Over the past decade, the magazine and its team have continued to build upon their appreciation for and understanding of the nation of Japan. Monocle’s stories have covered everything from a live journey on the emperor’s jet and the tastiest places to eat in Kagoshima to the fashion designers challenging conventions and the businesses with remarkable stories untold outside Japan.The Monocle Book of Japan reveals the best of the country in the run-up to the 2021 Olympics. Complete with striking photography and captivating essays, this volume showcases some of Japan’s most intriguing splendors.

    Part of the highly successful Then & Now series, each spread shows an image of Las Vegas as it was, and how it is currently.

    An internationalist and pacifist, Kahn believed that he could use the new autochrome—the world's first portable, true-color photographic process—to create a global photographic archive that would promote cross-cultural understanding and peace. Over the next twenty years, he sent a group of photographers to more than fifty countries around the world, amassing more than 72,000 images. Until recently his collection was all but forgotten. Now, a century after he began his "Archives of the Planet" project, this book—richly illustrated in color throughout—and the BBC series it follows are bringing Kahn's dazzling early twentieth-century pictures to a wide audience for the first time, and putting color into what we usually think of as a monochrome world.Kahn's photographers captured times, places, and people we simply do not expect to see in color photographs. They documented age-old cultures on the brink of being changed forever by war, modernization, and Westernization, recording the last years of Ireland's traditional Celtic villages and the late days of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. They photographed First World War soldiers in their trenches as well as the postwar celebrations in London. In the course of their travels, they also took the earliest color photographs in countries as varied as Vietnam and Brazil, Mongolia and Norway, Benin and the United States.After being financially ruined in the Great Depression, Kahn was forced to bring his project to a premature end, but today his collection of early color photographs is recognized as one of the world's most important. The Dawn of the Color Photograph makes it easy to see why.