Robert Frank: The Americans
from Steidl/National Gallery of Art, Washington
In 1958, the first edition of Robert Frank's The Americans was published in Paris. Les Americains contained Frank's 83 photographs in the same sequence as all subsequent editions, with the image on the right hand page, but juxtaposed with historical texts about American society and politics, gathered by Alain Bosquet. The following year, in the first American edition, the French texts were removed and an introduction by Jack Kerouac was added. Over the subsequent 50 years, The Americans has been republished in many editions, in numerous languages, with a variety of cover designs, and even in a range of sizes. It is the most famous photography book ever published, and it changed the face of the medium forever.
Robert Frank discussed with his publisher, Gerhard Steidl, the idea of producing a new edition using modern scanning and the finest tritone printing. The starting point was to bring original prints from New York to Gottingen, Germany, where Steidl is based.
In July 2007, Frank visited Gottingen. A new format for the book was worked out and new typography selected. A new cover was designed and Frank chose the book cloth, foil for embossing, and the endpaper. Most significantly, as he has done for every edition of The Americans, Frank changed the cropping of many of the photographs, usually including more information. Two images were changed completely from the original 1958 and 1959 editions.
True Norwegian Black Metal
by Peter Beste
from Vice Books
"When we're on the road, all we watch is VBS, and our favorite series is Norwegian Black Metal." (Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters) Documentary photographer Peter Beste has spent the last five years working in the milieu of the Norwegian black metal scene. This scene, with its notorious events of murder, church arson, and self-mythology, is absolutely sealed to outsiders. The international black metal fan base is one of the most devoted, fanatical, and proprietary in the world. Beste's access and insight into this world is unprecedented and has yielded an amazing photographic journey, along with a very popular documentary series on VBS.tv, also available on YouTube. Beste, together with Johan Kugelberg, noted writer, editor, and collector of documentary photography, has brought the images into a hermeneutic narrative that makes for a compelling experience along the lines of Anders Petersen's Café Lehmitz, Ed Van Der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank, or William Klein's Life Is Good and Good for You in New York.
One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey
by Sam Keith
from Alaska Northwest Books
To live in a pristine land . . . roam the wilderness . . . build a home. . . . Thousands have had such dreams, but Richard Proenneke lived them. Here is a tribute to a man who carved his masterpiece out of the beyond.
The BetterPhoto Guide to Digital Nature Photography (Better Photo Guide to)
by Jim Miotke
from Amphoto Books
* Step-by-step lessons cover every aspect of digital nature photography
* Clear text and helpful photos demystify digital photography
* Miotke has taught hundreds of photo workshops
From the tiniest ladybug to a towering glacier, from a horse running in a field to a leaf falling slowly from a tree, nature subjects offer some of the greatest challenges and the greatest rewards to photographers. In the Better Photo tradition, here's a complete photo course in a book. Hands-on lessons cover every aspect of digital nature photography, from buying the right camera for close-ups, landscapes, and movement, to understanding how the camera works, to taking great pictures. Author Jim Miotke uses straightforward text and inspiring yet informative photos to show the best ways to approach nature photography. Everything a beginner or intermediate photographer needs to know is here, including a buyer's guide, full information on camera features, file formats and settings, exposure, low-light photography, filters and white balance, composition and lens choice, creative ideas, manipulating, and printing, along with a glossary and list of useful websites. The Better Photo Guide to Digital Nature Photography helps photographers everywhere get great photos in the great outdoors.
Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs
by Ansel Adams
from Ansel Adams
ANSEL ADAMS: 400 PHOTOGRAPHS presents the full spectrum
The photographs are arranged chronologically into five major periods in order to convey Adams' development as an artist-from his first photographs made in Yosemite and the High Sierra in 1916 to his work in the National Parks in the 1940s up to his last important photographs from the 1960s. An introduction and brief essays on selected images provide information about
Few artists of any era can claim to have produced four hundred images of lasting beauty and significance. It is a testament to
America In Space: NASA's First Fifty Years (Nasa)
by Steven Dick
from Abrams Books
NASA launches a yearlong celebration of its 50th anniversary in the fall of 2007, and Abrams is privileged to publish this visual history of its many achievements in manned and unmanned space travel. Written and edited by a team of experienced NASA staffers, and illustrated with many unpublished and rare photographs from the voluminous NASA archives scattered across the country, America in Space offers an unparalleled vision of half a century of exploration and discovery.
The story of AmericaÂ’s space age is told with more than 400 carefully selected images. The story begins in the 1950s with intrepid test pilots venturing ever faster and higher, and opens out into the now-legendary Mercury and Apollo missions of the 1960s that made astronauts into national heroes. The space shuttle era shows us what everyday space travel might look like, while grand vistas of the universe expand our sense of wonder. The large format of the book captures both the human drama and the vast scale of NASAÂ’s projects. America in Space is a photographic record of the greatest adventure of our time.
Poolside with Slim Aarons
from Abrams Books
Like its predecessors, Once Upon a Time and A Place in the Sun, Poolside with Slim Aarons offers images of jet-setters and the wealthy, of beautiful, glittering people living the glamorous life. Yet this new collection of stunning photographs of the rich and well-connected “doing attractive things” in their favorite playgrounds has a new twist.
The main character is pools and everything that goes with them—magnificent, suntanned bodies; well-oiled skin; bikini-clad women; yachts; summer cocktails; sumptuous buffets; spectacular locations; and most of all: fun. Poolside is not so much a Who’s Who of society, aristocracy, and celebrity—although C. Z. Guest, Lilly Pulitzer, Cheryl Tiegs, Peter Beard, and many who have appeared in the previous books are here—as it is about leisure time and how the rich make use of it. This is a more intimate peek into very private lives, to which Slim Aarons was given unprecedented access in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties.
From the Caribbean to Italy and Mexico to Monaco, Poolside with Slim Aarons whisks the reader away to an exclusive club where taste, style, luxury, and grandeur prevail.
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats
by Peter Menzel
from Ten Speed Press
It's an inspired idea--to better understand the human diet, explore what culturally diverse families eat for a week. That's what photographer Peter Menzel and author-journalist Faith D'Alusio, authors of the equally ambitious Material World, do in Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, a comparative photo-chronicle of their visits to 30 families in 24 countries for 600 meals in all. Their personal-is-political portraits feature pictures of each family with a week's worth of food purchases; weekly food-intake lists with costs noted; typical family recipes; and illuminating essays, such as "Diabesity," on the growing threat of obesity and diabetes. Among the families, we meet the Mellanders, a German household of five who enjoy cinnamon rolls, chocolate croissants, and beef roulades, and whose weekly food expenses amount to $500. We also encounter the Natomos of Mali, a family of one husband, his two wives, and their nine children, whose corn and millet-based diet costs $26.39 weekly.
We soon learn that diet is determined by largely uncontrollable forces like poverty, conflict and globalization, which can bring change with startling speed. Thus cultures can move--sometimes in a single jump--from traditional diets to the vexed plenty of global-food production. People have more to eat and, too often, eat more of nutritionally questionable food. Their health suffers.
Because the book makes many of its points through the eye, we see--and feel--more than we might otherwise. Issues that influence how the families are nourished (or not) are made more immediate. Quietly, the book reveals the intersection of nutrition and politics, of the particular and universal. It's a wonderful and worthy feat. --Arthur Boehm
The age-old practice of sitting down to a family meal is undergoing unprecedented change as rising world affluence and trade, along with the spread of global food conglomerates, transform eating habits worldwide. HUNGRY PLANET profiles 30 families from around the world--including Bosnia, Chad, Egypt, Greenland, Japan, the United States, and France--and offers detailed descriptions of weekly food purchases; photographs of the families at home, at market, and in their communities; and a portrait of each family surrounded by a week's worth of groceries. Featuring photo-essays on international street food, meat markets, fast food, and cookery, this captivating chronicle offers a riveting look at what the world really eats.
The Photographer's Eye
by John Szarkowski
from The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Photographer's Eye by John Szarkowski is a twentieth-century classic--an indispensable introduction to the visual language of photography. Based on a landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1964, and originally published in 1966, the book has long been out of print. It is now available again to a new generation of photographers and lovers of photography in this duotone printing that closely follows the original. Szarkowski's compact text eloquently complements skillfully selected and sequenced groupings of 172 photographs drawn from the entire history and range of the medium. Celebrated works by such masters as Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Steichen, Strand, and Weston are juxtaposed with vernacular documents and even amateur snapshots to analyze the fundamental challenges and opportunities that all photographers have faced. Szarkowski, the legendary curator who worked at the Museum from 1962 to 1991, has published many influential books. But none more radically and succinctly demonstrates why--as U.S. News & World Report put it in 1990--"whether Americans know it or not," his thinking about photography "has become our thinking about photography."
Beneath The Roses
from Abrams
Beneath the Roses features an essay by acclaimed fiction writer Russell Banks, as well as many never-before-seen photographs, including production stills, lighting charts, sketches, and architectural plans, that serve as a window into Crewdson’s working process. The book is published to coincide with exhibitions in New York, London, and Los Angeles.
+++
