Photography Books in Pollack Library: Home

Gathers previously unpublished color photographs of the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, Mount McKinley, Mono Lake, Death Valley, and White Sands National Monument.

An exemplary study of the career of photographer Berenice Abbott that reveals the astonishing range of her artistic, documentary, and scientific production The American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) is known best for her documentation of New York in the 1930s and for her efforts to gain recognition for the work of Eugène Atget in both Europe and the United States. This attractive book features 120 photographs and a series of rarely seen documents (including letters, book layouts, and periodicals), illuminating the three major periods of Abbott's career: her early work in the United States and Paris during the 1920s; her project Changing New York (1935-39), created for the Federal Art Project; and her scientific pictures made between 1939 and 1961. By detailing Abbott's influences and production both home and abroad, Berenice Abbott underscores the photographer's role as one of the 20th century's most remarkable artists. Abbott left the United States in 1921 to study sculpture in Paris, where she was hired by Man Ray in 1923 to be his assistant. She took to photography immediately and by 1926 had set up her own studio. She became famous for her photographs showing bohemian artistic and intellectual life in the city, but in 1929 she returned to the United States and set up a new studio. Her best-known and most influential work, Changing New York, represented both a vast exercise in recording the architecture and urban life of New York and an intensely personal artistic project. Her straightforward method of photography led to her being employed full-time in the 1950s by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston to produce pictures illustrating the laws of physics. Distributed for Editions Hazan, Paris Exhibition Schedule: Jeu de Paume, Paris(02/20/12-04/29/12) Ryerson Image Centre(05/23/12-08/19/12)

In 1979, when African-American photographer Dawoud Bey showed twenty-five photographs at the Studio Museum in Harlem under the heading Harlem U.S.A., the exhibition offered a young artist's vision of a moment in the neighborhood's life. Published here as a complete set for the first time, Dawoud Bey: Harlem U.S.A. also includes five previously unpublished photographs from the same period. Bey's vintage images are given new context in an essay by emerging African-American writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, who undertook her own fascinating study of Harlem in 2011. Bey, who grew up in Queens with family roots in Harlem, has become one of most widely acclaimed portraitists on the contemporary scene. This handsome book, with faithful duotone reproductions, provides a wonderful opportunity to revisit a classic portfolio of images that still resonates in today's culture. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: The Art Institute of Chicago(05/02/12-09/09/12)

When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of 48, she was already a significant influence--even something of a legend--for serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972--along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art--offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented. The monograph, composed of 80 photographs, was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus' friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal in producing the book was to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Arbus judged her own work and to the ways in which she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a photobook classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece with editions in five languages, and remains the foundation of her international reputation. A quarter of a century has done nothing to diminish the riveting impact of these pictures or the controversy they inspire. Arbus' photographs penetrate the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, transform the way we see the world and the people in it.

From 1906 to 1934, Eugene de Salignac shot over twenty thousand 8-by-10-inch glass-plate negatives of New York City. As sole photographer at the Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures during that period of dizzying growth, he documented the creation of the city's modern infrastructure-bridges, major municipal buildings, roads, and subways. For years these remarkably lyrical photographs have been used in books and films, but never credited to de Salignac. New York Rises is the first monograph to present them as an aesthetically coherent oeuvre by a photographer with a unique vision. As meticulous in his record keeping as he was creative in his photography, de Salignac left five handwritten logs that identify each negative by place and exact date. This information is complemented throughout the book by narrative captions expanding on themes such as accidents, bridges, workers, and the Depression. Michael Lorenzini has unearthed primary sources to reconstruct de Salignac's biography. Kevin Moore explores his work in the context of other photographers of the period, including Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott.

In his photographs, Gregory Crewdson presents artfully condensed stories that essentially deal with the penetration of the mysterious into normalcy, often showing something familiar yet unsettling, different, and somewhat inexplicable. This publication is the first to assemble all of the artist's photographic productions in a single volume and includes his most recent, previously unpublished series Beneath the Roses.

German artist John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld, 1891-1968), is known primarily as one of the inventors of photomontage - pictures made from from fragments of photographs and other visual material. This book is a study of the artist's work.

Buildings inhabit and symbolize time, giving form to history and making public space an index of the past. Photographs are made of time; they are literally projections of past states of their subjects. This visually striking meditation on architecture in photography explores the intersection between these two ways of embodying the past. Photographs of buildings, Joel Smith argues, are simultaneously the agents, vehicles, and cargo of social memory. In The Life and Death of Buildings photographers as canonical as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laura Gilpin, Lewis W. Hine, and William Henry Fox Talbot enter into visual dialogue with amateurs, architects, propagandists, and insurance adjusters. Rather than examine photographers' aims in isolation, Smith considers how their images reflect and inflect the passage of time. Much as a building's shifting function and circumstances substantially alter its significance, a photograph comes to be coauthored by history, growing layers of meaning to which its maker had no access.

Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson belonged to the same generation and shared an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Their works had been exhibited together in 1935 at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York and they shared a period working in America when Cartier-Bresson spent eighteen months between 1946 and 1947 preparing his show at The Museum of Modern Art. This book draws a parallel between the work about America made by Evans and Cartier-Bresson in the period from 1930 to 1947. As John Szarkowski argued, 'Evans defined in his work the essence of the documentary aesthetic.' Cartier-Bresson, on the other hand, was making a fresh start, leaving behind his work in moving imagery and fully embracing a career as a stills photographer. But they were both approaching their work as a form of social criticism, imbued with references to literature and painting. Photograph America presents an opportunity to confront and compare the visions of both of these seminal photographic masters at once.

Piercing Time examines the role of photography in documenting urban change by juxtaposing contemporary "rephotographs" taken by the author with images of nineteenth century Paris taken by Charles Marville, who worked under Georges Haussmann, and corresponding photographs by Eugène Atget taken in the early twentieth century. Revisiting the sites of Marville's photographs with a black cloth, tripod, and view camera, Peter Sramek creates here a visually stunning book that investigates how urban development, the use of photography as a documentary medium, and the representation of urban space reflect attitudes towards the city. The essays that run alongside these fascinating images discuss subjects such as the aesthetics of ruins and the documentation of the demolitions that preceded Haussmannization, as well as the different approaches taken by Marville and Atget to their work. The book also includes contemporary interviews with local Parisians, extracts from Haussmann's own writing, and historical maps that allow for an intriguing look at the shifting city plan.Sure to be of interest to lovers of the city, be they Parisians or visitors, Piercing Time provides a unique snapshot of historical changes of the past 150 years. But it will also be of enduring value to scholars. The accurate cataloguing and high quality reproductions of the images make it a resource for a significant portion of the Marville collection in the Musée Carnavalet, and it will aid further research in urban history and change in Paris over the past century and a half. Photographers will also be drawn to the book for its new thinking in relation to documentary methodologies.

The Swiss photographer and filmmaker Rudolph Burckhardt (1914-99) came to New York City in 1935 and experienced the awe that many first-time visitors to the city share. The grandeur, the energy, the vitality, the sheer movement of this American metropolis all drew Burckhardt in, and he made New York his home for the rest of his life. Equally inflecting his career as a photographer and filmmaker, the city and its vibrant cultural life became Burckhardt's muse.  Rudy Burckhardt--New York Moments is a rare collection of his photographs from the 1940s and 1950s. It includes not only street scenes and details of city life--"The tremendous difference in scale between the soaring buildings and the people in the street astonished me," he wrote--but also the portraits he made of the New York School painters, most notably Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. As a photographer for ArtNews in the 1950s, Burckhardt had an insider's view of the burgeoning art scene. But he also recognized the limits of photography--"a photograph, when it gets printed and comes out a picture, becomes like a fact, you know"--and turned his hand to filmmaking. For the rest of his career, photography and film would work together to capture his unique vision.  Including photographs, film stills, and interpretive essays, Rudy Burckhardt accompanies an exhibition of Burckhardt's work at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel, Switzerland, and is a fitting tribute to the Swiss photographer who most poignantly captured the energy of mid-century New York.

Presents the history of photography. This title covers production values, and rare and unusual prints.

Although he was a contemporary of Alfred Eisenstaedt and Erich Salomon--and was just as smart and foolhardy--James Abbe is by no means as famous as his legendary colleagues. American-born Abbe published superb photo documentaries featuring Stalin's Moscow, the last years of the Weimar Republic and the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. Obsessive and fearless, Abbe got close to the dictators of Europe--Hitler, Mussolini, Franco--and in 1932, he was the only American given permission to photograph Stalin. Eventually, photographing world leaders became his specialty. In pursuit of various interests, Abbe made contact with Russian film directors and artists such as Sergej Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Vsevolod Meyerhold, indulging his passion for film, theater, dance and, above all, the mysteries of whatever happened backstage. Many of his pictures--portraits of Rudolph Valentino, Mae West, Josephine Baker and Charlie Chaplin--have become icons of modern photography. Others, like his portrait of Thomas Mann, remained unknown until their recent discoveries. Shown here is a cross-section of the rich catalogue of Abbe's work, in more than 300 tritones.

Crewdson's most recent series of photographs, Twilight, are created as elaborately constructed film stills, catching the mysterious moment of time between before and after, revealing unknowable or unimaginable aspects of domestic reality. A cow lies on its back on the lawn between two houses while firemen secure the area and a man searches the sky. Could the cow have rained down from above? In another image stacks and stacks of inedible slices of bread - bearing an odd resemblance to the mysterious monoliths at Stonehenge - are watched over by a gathering of birds. Both entirely foreign and oddly familiar, these images are carefully orchestrated events that challenge our very notions of familiarity, undermining our sense of certainty. These eerie and evocative photographs pair beauty with horror, obsession with disgust, and the real with the surreal, suggesting narratives open to endless interpretations. The book includes an essay written by fiction writer Rick Moody. The book and exhibitions are comprised of the forty images from his Twilight series which was begun in 1998 - these exhibitions and this book chronicle the completion of the series and mark the first time it will be seen in its entirety.

A renowned critic and historian offers a radically new account of the meaning of ambitious art photography since the Bechers From the late 1970s onward, serious art photography began to be made at large scale and for the wall. Michael Fried argues that this immediately compelled photographers to grapple with issues centering on the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it that until then had been the province only of painting. Fried further demonstrates that certain philosophically deep problems--associated with notions of  theatricality, literalness, and objecthood, and touching on the role of original intention in artistic production, first discussed in his contro­versial essay "Art and Objecthood" (1967)--have come to the fore once again in recent photography. This means that the photo­graphic "ghetto" no longer exists; instead photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art as never before. Among the photographers and video-makers whose work receives serious attention in this powerfully argued book are Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Luc Delahaye, Rineke Dijkstra, Patrick Faigenbaum, Roland Fischer, Thomas Demand, Candida Höfer, Beat Streuli, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, James Welling, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Future discussions of the new art photography will have no choice but to take a stand for or against Fried's conclusions.   

From the camera lucida to the latest in digital image making and computer manipulation, photographic technology has dramatically changed throughout its nearly 200-year history, as succinctly explained and powerfully illustrated inA World History of Photography. Thanks to the unique immediacy with which photography captures perspective and history, the popularity and use of the camera spread rapidly around the globe. Today, photography is ubiquitous: from newspapers and fashion magazines to billboards and the film industry, cultures worldwide have embraced this malleable artistic medium for a limitless variety of purposes. Naomi Rosenblum's classic text investigates all aspects of photography -- aesthetic, documentary, commercial, and technical -- while placing photos in their historical context. Included among the more than 800 photographs by men and women are both little-known and celebrated masterpieces, arranged in stimulating juxtapositions that illuminate their visual power. Authoritative and unbiased, Rosenblum's chronicle of photography both chronologically and thematically traces the evolution of this still-young art form. Exploring the diverse roles that photography has played in the communication of ideas, Rosenblum devotes special attention to topics such as portraiture, documentation, advertising, and photojournalism, and to the camera as a means of personal artistic expression. The revised fourth edition includes updates on technical advances as well as a new chapter on contemporary photographers. Armed with the expressive vigor of its images, this thorough and accessible volume will appeal to all.