The Americans
from Steidl/National Gallery of Art, Washington
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.
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.
Annie Leibovitz at Work
by Annie Leibovitz
from Random House
“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it."
—Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz describes how her pictures were made, starting with Richard Nixon's resignation, a story she covered with Hunter S. Thompson, and ending with Barack Obama's campaign. In between are a Rolling Stones Tour, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, The Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keith Haring, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patti Smith, George W. Bush, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. The most celebrated photographer of our time discusses portraiture, reportage, fashion photography, lighting, and digital cameras.
Madonna Confessions
by Guy Oseary
from powerHouse Books
Ansel Adams 2009 Wall Calendar
from Ansel Adams
The latest edition of the Ansel Adams wall calendar reproduces, in impeccably printed duotone, thirteen breathtaking images by the master photographer, chosen to reflect the changing seasons. With a mix of well-known and less familiar photographs of the American West, this splendid calendar will delight loyal fans of the previous twenty-four calendars, as well as attract new buyers.
Performance: Richard Avedon
by John Lahr
from Abrams
--Richard Avedon, 1974
The preeminent stars and artists of the performing arts from the second half of the 20th century offered their greatest gifts—and, sometimes, their inner lives—to Richard Avedon. More than 200 are portrayed in Performance, many in photographs that have been rarely or never seen before. Of course, the great stars light the way: Hepburn and Chaplin, Monroe and Garland, Brando and Sinatra. But here too are the actors and comedians, pop stars and divas, musicians and dancers, artists in all mediums with public lives that were essentially performances, who stand at the pinnacle of our cultural achievement.
The celebrated author and critic John Lahr offers an elegant assessment of Avedon’s achievement. Four supremely talented artists from the performing arts—Mike Nichols, AndrĂ© Gregory, Mitsuko Uchida, and Twyla Tharp—contribute lively and moving memoirs about their collaborations with Avedon.
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
A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005
from Random House
“I don’t have two lives,” Annie Leibovitz writes in the Introduction to this collection of her work from 1990—2005. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Portraits of well-known figures–Johnny Cash, Nicole Kidman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Keith Richards, Michael Jordan, Joan Didion, R2-D2, Patti Smith, Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, William Burroughs, George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet–appear alongside pictures of Leibovitz’s family and friends, reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early Nineties, and landscapes made even more indelible through Leibovitz’s discerning eye. The images form a narrative rich in contrasts and continuities: The photographer has a long relationship that ends with illness and death. She chronicles the celebrations and heartbreaks of her large and robust family. She has children of her own. All the while she is working, and the public work resonates with the themes of her life.
Wisdom: 50 Unique and Original Portraits
by Andrew Zuckerman
from Abrams
Each one of us can be an oasis of peace.—Desmond Tutu
Inspired by the idea that wisdom is the greatest gift one generation can give to another, award-winning photographer and filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman interviewed, photographed and filmed 50 of the world’s great writers, actors, artists, designers, politicians, musicians and religious and business leaders of our time. He posed seven questions to each of his subjects—all over 65 years of age—and their candid responses offer uniquely inspirational and often surprising insights.
Thoughts from Nelson Mandela, Frank Gehry, Judi Dench, The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Clint Eastwood, Ted Kennedy, Robert Redford, Vaclav Havel, Terence Conran, Buzz Aldrin, Lou Reed, Willie Nelson, Madeline Albright, Jane Goodall, Burt Bacharach, Andrew Wyeth, Vanessa Redgrave, Nadine Gordimer and many more reveal lifetimes of adversity and triumph, and present intimate insights into very public lives.
Beautifully photographed and accompanied by a documentary DVD, Wisdom is above all a timeless gift and a deeply revealing portrait of the common experiences that unite generations.
Silent Exodus: Portraits of Iraqi Refugees in Exile
by Khaled Hosseini
from Aperture/UNHCR
In early 2008, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that an estimated 4.4 million Iraqis had been displaced from their homes as a result of the war. While nearly half were uprooted internally, the remaining citizens escaped to neighboring countries. The New York Times called the escalating crisis, "the largest exodus since the mass migrations associated with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948." Today, the situation of most refugees remains dire; months and years into forced flight, many are running out of money, food and the good will of their hosts. In Silent Exodus, Kabul-born, Switzerland-based photographer Zalmai chronicles the plight of Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon; over the course of several trips in 2007, he interviewed them, collected their individual stories and photographed them in their homes, where many remain in uncertainty. Although frequently harassed by neighbors, they are still afraid to return to Iraq, given the instability and violence that lingers there. Rarely told and under-reported, this is a human story which deserves a wider audience. Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns contributes an introduction to the work.
Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004
from Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art
In August of 2007, Denmark's renowned Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presented Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004, the first major retrospective devoted to Avedon's work since his death in 2004. (With stops in Milan, Paris, Berlin and, Amsterdam, the highly-anticipated exhibition concludes in at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art in October of 2009.) This beautifully produced catalogue, designed by the renowned Danish graphic designer Michael Jensen, features deluxe tritone printing and varnish on premium paper, and includes 125 reproductions of Avedon's greatest work from across the entire range of his oeuvre--including fashion photographs, reportage and portraits, and spanning from his early Italian subjects of the 1940s to his 2004 portrait of the Icelandic pop star, Bjork. It also contains a small number of color images--including one of the most famous photographic portraits of the twentieth century, "Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent" (1981). Texts by Jeffrey Fraenkel, Judith Thurman, Geoff Dyer, Christoph Ribbat, Rune Gade and curator Helle Crenzien offer the most sophisticated and thorough composite view of Avedon's work to date. All color separations byRobert Hennessey.
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