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ISBN: B000HL1C2C

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Price: £4.99

ISBN: 3833110813

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Price: 9.95

ISBN: 071484151X

Summary: AARON SISKIND (1903-1991) was an acclaimed photographer and teacher who sought to develop a new pictorial language for photography. Best known for his remarkable abstract images, Siskind sought inspiration for his photographs in music, poetry, and painting. Siskind's aptitude for teaching led him to become one of the most important photography teachers in America in the twentieth century, influencing generations of photographers at the Chicago Institute of Design and the Rhode Island School of Design over a forty-year period.

Price: 7.95

ISBN: 0316338796

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Price: 75.00

ISBN: 3829602154

Summary: Broodingly powerful, intensely emotional, seductively erotic, and always dramatic, this collection of 142 truly extraordinary images bears witness to the career of one of our greatest photographers. Albert Watson has made his mark as one of the world's most successful fashion and commercial photographers during the last three decades, while creating his own art along the way. Over the years, his striking images have appeared on more than 250 covers of Vogue and have been featured in countless other publications - many of the photographs iconic portraits of rock stars, actors and other celebrities. Albert Watson is an artist who greatly enriches our perception by his unique photographic view. His visual language follows his own distinctive rules and concepts of quality. With their brilliance, urgency, even grandeur, his photographs stand out so clearly against the world of today's images. His camera conveys the kaleidoscope of human emotion with glamour, drama, and crystal clarity.

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Price: 39.95

ISBN: 0262025809

Summary: In An American Lens, Jay Bochner looks at a series of milestones in the development of the American avant-garde that capture a pivotal period in artistic consciousness. He focuses on the multiple roles of Alfred Stieglitz -- as influential gallery owner, photographer, and impresario of the emerging art scene -- at a series of significant moments in his career. These close-ups offer a more intense and expanded understanding of the subject than the familiar long view.

Bochner uses these scenes to recreate for today's readers the birth of modernism in America--what it was like to be an audience for the art of the early avant-garde. Moving from frame to frame, he shows us, for example, a single photograph by Stieglitz of a snowy night in 1893 and a short description by Stephen Crane of just such a snowfall; the preparation, the reception, and the aftermath of the famous Armory Show of modern art in 1913; Gertrude Stein's portraits in prose; New York at the dawn of Dada, with Paul Strand, Francis Picabia, and others; and the intersecting paths of Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, and Marcel Duchamp in 1917. Bochner also examines Stieglitz's three great photographic series: his photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe, of clouds, and of skyscrapers. These sections of the book include many Stieglitz photos, including some rarely seen portraits of O'Keeffe.

Stieglitz as impresario and artist achieved an almost mythical status, which some recent critics have worked to deflate -- casting him, for example, as Svengali to Georgia O'Keeffe's spellbound Trilby. Engaging in neither idolatry nor demolition, Bochner looks instead for the truth about the man and the myth. The scenes from American art in An American Lens create a new version of Stieglitz's biography, allowing us to reread his life and the life of his times by focusing intently on what is visible and not so visible in the art he left behind.

Price: 32.50

ISBN: 1881616126

Summary: Armed with a camera and a fresh cache of film and bankrolled by a Guggenheim Foundation grant, Robert Frank crisscrossed the United States during 1955 and 1956. The photographs he brought back form a portrait of the country at the time and hint at its future. He saw the hope of the future in the faces of a couple at city hall in Reno, Nevada, and the despair of the present in a grimy roofscape. He saw the roiling racial tension, glamour, and beauty, and, perhaps because Frank himself was on the road, he was particularly attuned to Americans' love for cars. Funeral-goers lean against a shiny sedan, lovers kiss on a beach blanket in front of their parked car, young boys perch in the back seat at a drive-in movie. A sports car under a drop cloth is framed by two California palm trees; on the next page, a blanket is draped over a car accident victim's body in Arizona.
Robert Frank's Americans reappear 40 years after they were initially published in this exquisite volume by Scalo. Each photograph (there are more than 80 of them) stands alone on a page, while the caption information is included at the back of the book, allowing viewers an unfettered look at the images. Jack Kerouac's original introduction, commissioned when the photographer showed the writer his work while sitting on a sidewalk one night outside of a party, provides the only accompanying text. Kerouac's words add narrative dimension to Frank's imagery while in turn the photographs themselves perfectly illustrate the writer's own work.

Price: 60.00

ISBN: 0691121141

Summary: Hungarian photographer André Kertész eventually became famous for his wryly poetic images of everyday life. But achieving that distinction was a long slog, and Kertész--who emigrated to Paris in 1925 and New York in 1936--struggled for decades in near-obscurity and despair. Andre Kertész traces the artist's career with an engaging text and 250 exquisitely reproduced black-and-white photographs that span his long career. Throughout, he used his camera to create a visual diary of his life—haunting images suffused with a loner's sensibility. As a young man imbued with the romantic ideals of Hungarian nationalism, he photographed his handsome brother Jeno as Icarus, his exultant body silhouetted against the sky. Unable to find work after returning from the battlefields of World War I, Kertész tried his luck in Paris. It was the best move of his life. The City of Light was hungry for photographers to fill the new illustrated magazines. Avant-garde painters and sculptors opened up a new world of experimentation that prompted Kertész to photograph a series of female nudes seen in a funhouse mirror. And the new, lightweight Leica camera enabled him to snap scenes on the sly—a bum inspecting his toes on the banks of the Seine or a legless flower seller trying to tempt a passerby.

After marrying his Hungarian girlfriend, he sailed to New York, lured by the promise of steady work as a fashion photographer and a climate more hospitable to a Jewish artist. But the agency job didn't suit him, and his emotional style had little appeal for American magazines. In photographs like "Lost Cloud"--a tiny white puff suspended next to the impersonal face of a skyscraper--he mirrored his own sense of dislocation. In succeeding years, he would make classic photographs of the city, including "Washington Square," an elegant aerial view of a lone pedestrian in a snowy landscape of bare branches and benches. Major recognition finally came in the early 1960s, when Kertész was in his late sixties. Fortunately, he lived and worked for twenty more years, basking in the newly exalted status of art photography. Andre Kertész serves as the catalog for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (through May 15, 2005) that travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 12-Sept. 5, 2005). —Cathy Curtis

Price: 19.00

ISBN: 0805058354

Summary: In his 1985 autobiography, Ansel Adams presented a life almost as neatly cropped and printed as his magnificent pictures. Here, Mary Street Alinder--who collaborated with Adams on his memoir and was his assistant in later life--is not reticent about the major emotional episodes in Adams's life, including his marriage and extramarital affairs, and his not-altogether-successful fatherhood. She explores the major artistic influences on his work and gives in-depth profiles of the significant figures in his circle. She also explains the technique and style Adams developed to obtain his unique vision, as well as his uneasiness at becoming a commodity. Ansel Adams: A Biography is an intimate and provocative portrait of the world's most famous photographer.

Price: 40.00

ISBN: 0823002845

Summary: Art Deco New York takes readers on a historically rich and visually spectacular journey through New York in the early decades of the 20th century, when the style known as art deco, with its emphasis on machine-tooled elegance and sleekness of line, replaced the voluptuous beaux arts style that preceded it. It was an era when floating art deco palaces like the Normandie and the Queen Mary, and elegant, speedy trains like Henry Dreyfuss' redesigned Twentieth Century Limited transformed the way people perceived travel. There are dazzling photographs-many never before published-of such art deco icons as Schultze and Weaver's soaring Waldorf Astoria, Jospeh Urban's Zeigfeld Theater and Central Park Casino, and the sky-piercing spire of William Van Alen's Chrysler Building. This book takes a wise, witty, and intimate look at a style that came to New York via Paris in the 1920s and almost overnight became a quintessential symbol of modernity.

Price: 78.00

ISBN: 0262192489

Summary: A landmark in the history of photography, Citizens of the Twentieth Century completes August Sander's most important and sustained photographic enterprise, an "archive" of twentieth-century man. These emphatically objective photographs from the years of the Kaisers, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and the early Federal Republic make up an unprecedented document of both the individual and the collective recent history of the Germans.

Sander had intended to create a rank ordered portrait collection of the German people, an ambitious undertaking which remained incomplete at the time of his death. This reconstruction by Ulrich Keller, professor of art history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, in collaboration with Gunther Sander, the photographer's son, has been compiled from Sander's notes and negatives.

Keller's introductory essay discusses the development of Sander's photographic aesthetic, his studio practices, his notions of class structure, his technical virtuosity, and his approach to portraiture. The 431 photographs following Keller's text are presented in 45 portfolios each divided into seven sections on farmers, workers, women, occupations, artists, the big city, and the last people.

Price: 9.95

ISBN: 0140051856

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Price: 12.50

ISBN: 0893818259

Summary: Barbara Morgan was a remarkable pioneer in photography. Although she has been most celebrated for her extraordinary studies of modern dance in the late 1930s and early forties, her entire artistic career was fluid, searching, and embraced a wide range of philosophical and aesthetic influences. Morgan captured, through a variety of photographic processes, a new, enduring, understanding of what it means to dance. Her studies of pioneering dancers such as Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Erick Hawkins, and Merce Cunningham, have created a body of images that capture for posterity the spiritual essence of a temporal art. A former painter, she used montage and manipulated imagery to express the visual and kinetic energy of New York City. Combining photograms and light drawing, she experimented with moving light patterns to denote an ethereal momentum.

Included in this volume are the finest examples of Morgan's vision: her dance photographs, photomontages, light drawings, and other works from her long and varied photographic career. In the accompanying essay, Deba P. Patnaik, photo-historian and art critic, provides and overview of the development of her career, and unique insight into the deeply held beliefs that informed her work.

Price: 51.65

ISBN: 0297645560

Summary: The 1960s contains some of the very best set pieces, including Churchill's funeral. He has just completed making the film, My Fair Lady, which included rows with the director George Cukor, Rex Harrison's fondness for watching live sex, Cukor on Audrey Hepburn's figure etc. (Cecil was also the master at slicing up Hollywood social life at that period. He loathed it). His partner Kin, who has spent a year with him in England, returns to the USA, leaving Cecil to loneliness - but not for long. He is soon travelling aboard Cecile de Rothschild's yacht with Garbo - his former lover - as a fellow traveller. He visits Picasso at his home, the Rolling Stones in Marrakech; Andy Warhol in New York. Here is the young David Hockney, Peter Sellers being beastly, Paul Getty being mean. Cecil is fascinated by this new generation testing the boundaries as he and his friends had done in the 1920s. Friendships remain important - the Avons, Lady Juliet Duff, Lady Diana Cooper, Mrs Heinz. He also sees off all younger competition as photographer royal and as in the previous volume there are some very funny and often very pointed entries about the Queen, the Queen Mother, Princess Marina, Princess Margaret etc. Roy Strong, the extrovert young director, puts on a massive retrospective of Beaton's work at the National Portrait Gallery. Then, in 1969, Cecil endures a miserable phase (described in detail) working on Coco with Katharine Hepburn, bringing us to the point where The Unexpurgated Beaton took the story into the new decade. The diaries are as lively, if not livelier, than the ones for the 1970s.

Price: 55.00

ISBN: 0300102895

Summary: Sir Cecil Beaton (1904--1980) was one of the most renowned photographers of his generation. A major contributor to Vogue and Vanity Fair in Britain, France, and America, Beaton captured for posterity such admired subjects as artists Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, and Richard Avedon; actresses Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Greta Garbo; statesmen and politicians Winston Churchill and Robert Kennedy; and, of course, Britain's Royal Family. This sumptuously illustrated book--published on the centenary of Beaton's birth--brings together many of his evocative portraits in celebration of his remarkable life and work. Gifted in an extraordinary range of fields, Beaton was noted for his flamboyant sense of style. His portraits, fashion photographs, book jacket designs, war reportage, designs for theater and film, and diaries mark him as one of the first international multi-media artists. This book features an illustrated essay discussing the wide range of the photographer's career as well as a portfolio of 160 beautiful reproductions of his most famous portraits and an extended illustrated chronology. Beaton: Portraits is an exciting and comprehensive look at a tour-de-force photographer and is an essential book for anyone interested in photography, fashion, or twentieth-century style and design.

Price: 29.95

ISBN: 0500277265

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Price: 25.95

ISBN: 0312315643

Summary: "It does seem to me that Capa has proved beyond all doubt that the camera need not be a cold mechanical device," John Steinbeck wrote of photojournalist Robert Capa in a quote that launches this well-written, exhaustively researched biography. "Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart." That's quite a compliment coming from an author like Steinbeck, but then Capa won the respect and friendship of some of the brightest talents of his generation; other admirers and poker buddies included Ernest Hemingway and John Huston, and among his many loves was actress Ingrid Bergman. Capa won fame slogging through the blood and grime to capture vivid images of five different wars, from the Spanish Civil War (where he wasn't above staging some of his photographs), through the landings at Omaha Beach on D-Day (which he chronicled for Life magazine as the only journalist to wade ashore with the first wave of G.I.s), to the early days of the Vietnam conflict (where he was killed in action at the age of 41 while covering the French army, soon to be replaced with disastrous results by the Americans). Born a Hungarian Jew named André Friedmann, another great writer, John Hersey, famously dubbed the swarthy chain-smoking photographer "the Man Who Invented Himself," and author Alex Kershaw contends that one of his greatest achievements was the legend that he created for himself. A California journalist who contributes to The Guardian and The Sunday Times Magazine, among others, Kershaw brings Capa and his times to life with bright, vivid writing and telling anecdotes, using a fascinating personal odyssey to put the man's professional accomplishments in perspective. "Capa was the first photographer to make photojournalism appear glamorous and sexy," he writes. Of course, that distinction and all others take a back seat to the photos themselves, and this book's only shortcoming is that it does not include any examples of the great man's work.--Jim DeRogatis

Price: 50.00

ISBN: 0821227386

Summary: Luminous photographs by Brassa reveal the mysterious allure of nocturnal Paris in a new edition of this classic volume. Beautifully presented, Paris by Night is a stunning portrait of nighttime in the City of Light, as captured by its most articulate observer.