Monographs & Art Books / S

Nocturnes is an elegant art book that evokes the feeling of “moments of release” — like twilight, summer rain and the physical expression of love. Nine short poems are accompanied by a series of delicate images that bring these feelings to life.

The poems, unrhymed sonnets, are printed on translucent vellum — so that an image hovers behind the words until the page is turned.

The design of the book itself contributes to the mood of evanescence and refuge. Two artists responding to the night.

A catalogue of Josephine Sacabo's retrospective exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Hardbound in embossed linen with sixty-eight images, an introduction by John Stevenson, and notes on the portfolios by Josephine Sacabo. "...To be sure, each component does stand on its own; a distinct, titled, portfolio of images. Each was preceded by a year or more of silence: artist at work. Then, all of a piece, the body of work appears fully formed. There is one characteristic in common: each portfolio crystalizes around a particular poem, or just a wisp of a poem, that somehow became caught up in Sacabo's imagination. The epiphany of the exhibition, this collection of a life's work so far, is that these portfolios are not isolated islands. They are components - cantos - of a single extended work."

"This is the story of a woman who invents her freedom by creating an imaginary architecture made of light, scraps of memory, hopes, and dreams - a permeable architecture where nothing is confined. It is dedicated to Juana La Loca, the supposed 'mad' queen of Spain in the 16th century who for political motives was imprisoned for 46 years by her father, husband, and son in an architecture of darkness and stone." --Josephine Sacabo

Josephine Sacabo studied photography at Bard College in New York. Following the steps of Robert Frank, Joseph Koudelka and Henri Cartier-Bresson in England and France, she settled in New Orleans. This book shows her 1991 work influenced by the poetry of Rilke, Baudelaire, Garcia Lorca and Huidobro. Forty-Five black and white photographs 8.5" x 7.5" on Fine Art high grade paper. Two chapter headings in French. Published in France.

Dog Town is a street photography project about the dogs of Venice Beach, California. The book is named after »Dogtown«, an area of West Los Angeles that used to encompass the slums of Venice and Santa Monica’s Ocean Park, back in the 1960’s and 70’s. The surfers and skateboarders of Dogtown were known as aggressive, antisocial school dropouts from poor families. Today, actual dogs of all breeds and social status are taking over Venice Beach.

The canines photographed in this book often embrace Dogtown’s rich skateboarding culture. American photographer Dotan Saguy and his Leica camera delight us with many light- hearted, quirky, emotional moments captured with much love and compassion for both the dogs and their Dogtown surroundings. This book is a modern homage to Elliott Erwitt and a must-have for dog lovers.

Dotan Saguy met the Reis family, Mormons from Brazil, the day they arrived in Los Angeles in the yellow school bus they call home with their three children. They had come to the United States two years prior to chase the American Dream and decided to explore an alternative lifestyle that would allow them to spend more time as a family and discover the world together through travel.

This body of work documents their trials and tribulations over their ten-month stay in the City of Angels as they struggle as vehicle dwellers, improvised mechanics, unconventional parents, and experimental bread winners while seeking happiness as a family. Accompanying interviews with the family raise topics such as immigration, modern parenting, the housing crisis, and questioning one’s religious identity.

In capturing the revelations of Venice Beach, Dotan Saguy has created a body of work with unexpected, enthusiastic surprise. His fascination for the colorful, tattooed, costumed community is palpable. His compassionate photographs unabashedly praise the rarity of the unique originals who populate the sands of Venice. With an almost obsessive compulsion, Saguy strives to create perfection using separation and geometry resulting in harmonious scenes of rich detail. His use of layering allows us an insight into the chaos he organizes so beautifully within the confines of the frame.

Unfortunately, Venice Beach sits on the edge of a knife: gentrification and corporate greed threaten to squash the way of life that has defined Venice for decades. Saguy has documented what could be a lost society should the faces you see here be forced to acculturate. Allow yourself to be mesmerized – as Dotan Saguy has been – by this way of life, before it fades away.

Sebastião Salgado is one the most respected photojournalists working today, his reputation forged by decades of dedication and powerful black-and-white images of dispossessed and distressed people, taken in places where most wouldn't dare to go. Although he has photographed throughout South America and around the globe, his work most heavily concentrates on Africa, where he has shot more than 40 reportage works over a period of 30 years. From the Dinka tribes in Sudan and the Himba in Namibia to gorillas and volcanoes in the lakes region to displaced peoples throughout the continent, Salgado shows us all facets of African life today. Whether he's documenting refugees or vast landscapes, Salgado knows exactly how to grab the essence of a moment so that when one sees his images one is involuntarily drawn into them. His images artfully teach us the disastrous effects of war, poverty, disease, and hostile climatic conditions.

This book brings together Salgado's photos of Africa in three parts. The first concentrates on the southern part of the continent (Mozambique, Malawi, Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia), the second on the Great Lakes region (Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya), and the third on the Sub-Saharan region (Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Mauritania, Senegal, Ethiopia). Texts are provided by renowned Mozambique novelist Mia Couto, who describes how today's Africa reflects the effects of colonization as well as the consequences of economic, social, and environmental crises.This stunning book is not only a sweeping document of Africa but an homage to the continent's history, people, and natural phenomena.

Sebastião Salgado traveled the Brazilian Amazon and photographed the unparalleled beauty of this extraordinary region for six years: the forest, the rivers, the mountains, the people who live there - an irreplaceable treasure of humanity.

In the book's foreword Salgado writes: "For me, it is the last frontier, a mysterious universe of its own, where the immense power of nature can be felt as nowhere else on earth. Here is a forest stretching to infinity that contains one-tenth of all living plant and animal species, the world's largest single natural laboratory."

Salgado visited a dozen indigenous tribes that exist in small communities scattered across the largest tropical rainforest in the world. He documented the daily life of the Yanomami, the Asháninka, the Yawanawá, the Suruwahá, the Zo'é, the Kuikuro, the Waurá, the Kamayurá, the Korubo, the Marubo, the Awá, and the Macuxi - their warm family bonds, their hunting and fishing, the manner in which they prepare and share meals, their marvelous talent for painting their faces and bodies, the significance of their shamans, and their dances and rituals.

Sebastião Salgado has dedicated this book to the indigenous peoples of Brazil's Amazon region: "My wish, with all my heart, with all my energy, with all the passion I possess, is that in 50 years' time this book will not resemble a record of a lost world. Amazônia must live on." Soon available in a Collector's Edition including a bookstand designed by Renzo Piano and four Art Editions, each including the Renzo Piano bookstand and a signed print.

The first edition of Sebastião Salgado: Other Americas was published in 1985 by the French publisher Contrejour, and included photographs from Salgado's numerous trips through Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala and Mexico. The Brazil-born, Paris-based photographer traveled extensively in Latin America between 1977 and 1984 to document the shifting religious and political climate in the region, especially as reflected in Latin America's rural cultures and traditional lifestyles.

Other Americas, Salgado's first photobook, included portraits of farmers and indigenous people, landscapes and pictures of the region's spiritual traditions. An instant classic, the book received countless awards and prizes and has been called the visual equivalent to the magic of a Gabriel García Márquez tale. This new edition of Other Americas, an English-language reissue of the 1985 Contrejour edition, brings back into print one of the most powerful visions of life in Central and South America ever recorded.

In 1984 Sebastião Salgado began what would be a fifteen-month project of photographing the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa in the countries of Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and Sudan, where approximately one million people died from extreme malnutrition and related causes. Working with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, Salgado documented the enormous suffering and the great dignity of the refugees. This early work became a template for his future photographic projects about other afflicted people around the world.

Since then, Salgado has again and again sought to give visual voice to those millions of human beings who, because of military conflict, poverty, famine, overpopulation, pestilence, environmental degradation, and other forms of catastrophe, teeter on the edge of survival. Beautifully produced, with thoughtful supporting narratives by Orville Schell, Fred Ritchin, and Eduardo Galeano, this first U.S. edition brings some of Salgado's earliest and most important work to an American audience for the first time. Twenty years after the photographs were taken, Sahel: The End of the Road is still painfully relevant.

Having been raised on a rural farm in Brazil, far from civilization and without television, Salgado possessed a deep love and respect for nature; he was also particularly sensitive to the ways in which human beings are affected by their often devastating socio-economic conditions. Of the myriad works Salgado has produced in his esteemed career, three long-term projects stand out: Workers (1993), documenting the vanishing way of life of manual laborers across the world, Migrations (2000), a tribute to mass migration driven by hunger, natural disasters, environmental degradation and demographic pressure, and this new opus, Genesis, the result of an epic eight-year expedition to rediscover the mountains, deserts and oceans, the animals and peoples that have so far escaped the imprint of modern society—the land and life of a still-pristine planet. “Some 46% of the planet is still as it was in the time of genesis,” Salgado reminds us. “We must preserve what exists.” The Genesis project, along with Salgado’s Instituto Terra, are dedicated to showing the beauty of our planet, reversing the damage done to it, and preserving it for the future.

More than those of any other living photographer, Sebastião Salgado's images of the world's poor stand in tribute to the human condition. His transforming photographs bestow dignity on the most isolated and neglected, from famine-stricken refugees in the Sahel to the indigenous peoples of South America. Workers is a global epic that transcends mere imagery to become an affirmation of the enduring spirit of working women and men.

The book is an archaeological exploration of the activities that have defined labor from the Stone Age through the Industrial Age, to the present. Divided into six categories--"Agriculture," "Food," "Mining," "Industry," "Oil" and "Construction"--the book unearths layers of visual information to reveal the ceaseless human activity at the core of modern civilization.

Gathering a series of photographs taken by Txema Salvans (born 1971) over the course of six years, The Waiting Game documents the exercise of prostitution along the highways of Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Disguised as a surveyor, Salvans photographed prostitution with an emphasis on the decidedly unerotic quality of its actual environs: the intersections, roundabouts, dead-end streets and shoulders of the road.

The photographs in this book present the solitary figure of the waiting woman as a stereotypical image of objectified sexuality, in a landscape that is both striking and tragic. Exploring the varied and often surprising gamut of human longings and behaviors, Salvans achieves a balance of sociological dissection and naturalistic narration, and presents the image of the prostitute as an almost impersonal component of a larger mechanism.

In chaotically stunning portraits, HER captures the essence of the inner struggles of every woman. The stunning black-and-white images truly allow rage, encourage body acceptance, explore creativity, and essentially break the façade of female perfection and provide insights into the pressures that women face every day.

Many of the portraits are quite humorous, whimsical, and highlight the universal experience of being a woman.

Moises Saman, born in Lima, Peru, in 1974, was a Los Angeles college student when he traveled Chiapas to photograph the aftermath of the 1995 Zapatista uprising. After graduation, he traveled to Kosovo, and he's been working as a photojournalist ever since. Saman was one of only a few American photographers to remain in Baghdad during the 2003 Coalition bombing campaign when he was arrested and accused of espionage by the Iraqi secret police. He spent eight days in prison before being deported to Jordan, after which he returned to continue his coverage.

In this book, he returns to Afghanistan. The dramatic photographs collected in Afghanistan Broken Promises track five years of conflict in that country, and observe the apparent failure of the reconstruction effort: due to violence and government corruption, all of the large-scale reconstruction projects outside Kabul are at a standstill, while high-rise luxury hotels and late-model BMWs can be seen all over the capital. As before and during Taliban rule, warlords and militias control whole provinces without regard for human rights. And now the Taliban itself has been embarking on major offensives again. Broken Promise observes the lives of Afghan civilians beginning with the 2001 U.S. invasion and up through the resurgence of violence in 2006-07. Saman is a full-time photographer for Newsday.

The lens of Moises Saman, war press photographer for New York Newsday, shows war for what it truly is: pain, destruction, darkness. His pictures show a reality far removed from the mediated productions of television news, the terrifying reality of people living in conflict in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

For more than a decade, Victoria Sambunaris (born 1964) has crossed the United States with her five-by-seven wooden field camera and sheets of color negative film. Traveling seemingly every road nationwide, Sambunaris has described herself as having "an unrelenting curiosity to understand the American landscape and our place in it." This first monograph on Sambunaris' work consists of two handsome hardback volumes. The first includes a retrospective selection of her images from 2000 to 2013; the second documents the artist's collected professional ephemera as a photographer and researcher.

Included in this fascinating assortment of documents are images of books on geology and history, maps, artifacts such as mineral specimens, journals and road logs, as well as her small photographic sketches. An essay from MOCP Director Natasha Egan provides an insightful overview of this ardent chronicler of contemporary America.

This retrospective covers more than forty years of work and unfolds in almost as many countries. Pentti Sammallahti is a wanderer who makes subtle observations of the people and animals he encounters. He records the ordinary and in that ordinariness finds the “wondrous” and “beautiful.” Sammallahti is recognized as a master craftsman both in terms of the photographic print and also in mechanical printing methods—he has been a major influence on published photographic art. He has had an enormous influence on a generation of photographers in Scandinavia and, since 1979, has published thirteen books and portfolios and received innumerable awards.

With a rising number of women throughout the world picking up their cameras and capturing their surroundings, this book explores the work of 100 women and the experiences behind their greatest images.

Traditionally a male-dominated field, street photography is increasingly becoming the domain of women. This fantastic collection of images reflects that shift, showcasing 100 contemporary women street photographers working around the world today, accompanied by personal statements about their work. Variously joyful, unsettling and unexpected, the photographs capture a wide range of extraordinary moments. The volume is curated by Gulnara Samoilova, founder of the Women Street Photographers project: a website, social media platform and annual exhibition. Photographer Melissa Breyer's introductory essay explores how the genre has intersected with gender throughout history, looking at how cultural changes in gender roles have overlapped with technological developments in the camera to allow key historical figures to emerge. Her text is complemented by a foreword by renowned photojournalist Ami Vitale, whose career as a war photographer and, later, global travels with National Geographic have allowed a unique insight into the realities of working as a woman photographer in different countries. In turns intimate and candid, the photographs featured in this book offer a kaleidoscopic glimpse of what happens when women across the world are behind the camera.

A brilliant, perceptive visual study of the increasing integration of the photographic image and the built environment.

In the latest series from Anastasia Samoylova, the Russian-born, Miami-based photographer studies the proliferation of photographic images in urban environments across the world. Samoylova observes how, in our neoliberal era of networked economic markets and networked imagery, the global centers of internationalized money and culture are becoming increasingly aligned and similar: "all these cities are moving towards a generic urban landscape of anonymous steel and glass architecture in which homes, offices and storefronts all appear and feel the same. This is a new global order in which old ideas of nationality are at odds with the 21st-century notion of borderless economics and transnational culture. And yet, those older ideas are now deployed as attractive marketing devices, giving the illusion that these cities are somehow still appealing in their uniqueness rooted in the past." Samoylova’s work also points to the role photography plays in creating this ideological gap between branded urban identity and lived reality.

Anastasia Samoylova (born 1984) lives and works in Miami, Florida. Her photographs have been shown at museums in Europe and the US. She is the winner of numerous prizes, including the Fundación MAPFRE’s KBr Photo Award (2021).

In Jenny Sampson's follow-up monograph to Skaters (Daylight, 2017) featuring her acclaimed collection of tintype portraits of male and female skateboarders, the American photographer, who is based in Berkeley, California, chose to focus exclusively on female skateboarders. Although historically a male-dominated sport, there have always been girls in the skateboarding landscape.

By turning her lens on these fearless females in skate parks and at events all over California, Washington and Oregon, Sampson hopes Skater Girls (Daylight, September, 2020) will increase visibility and celebrate these girls and non-binary people, young and older, who have been breaking down this gender wall with their skater girl power.

The portraits in Skaters compel the subject, the photographer, and the viewer to slow down. These images, created with wet plate collodion, offer an honest glimpse into the skateboarders' core being: pensive, tough, playful, anxious, distracted, and innocent. Even the plates of seemingly empty skate parks are in fact teeming with immense energy and motion, yet the skaters are moving too quickly to be captured with long exposures.

Jenny Sampson earned a BA in Psychobiology at Pitzer College and has since dedicated her time to her photographic endeavors: wet plate collodion, traditional black and white photography, and commissioned portraits.

One of the legendary classics among German photography books, August Sander's Face of Our Time, is now available again. Compiled by August Sander himself, the book was first published in 1929, with a foreword by German writer Alfred Dublin. On its first publication, it was advertised as follows: "The sixty shots of twentieth-century Germans which the author includes in his Face of Our Time represent only a small selection drawn from August Sander's major work, which he began in 1910 and which he has spent twenty years producing and adding fresh nuances to.

The author has not approached this immense self-imposed task from an academic standpoint, nor with scientific aids, and has received advice neither from racial theorists nor from social researchers. He has approached his task as a photographer from his own immediate observations of human nature and human appearances, of the human environment, and with an infallible instinct for what is genuine and essential.

Featuring 60 subjects from August Sander's People of the 20th Century along with another 100 brilliant images from his large-scale project, this book presents a selection of the most stunning images from the photographer's monumental work.

August Sander is one of the greatest photographers in international photographic history. With his seminal book People of the 20th Century, he set new standards in portrait photography. Sander's aspiration was to create a typological "composite image" of his time. The ambitious project began in the 1910s and was to occupy him through the 1950s. A novel feature of this book is that all the reproductions are based on vintage prints produced and authorized by August Sander himself. The croppings and the desired tonal values are authentically rendered here for the first time in the long publication history of Sander's brilliant portrait work. The originals are from the rich holdings of the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne and from additional major collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.

With People of the 20th Century, August Sander created a monumental work that is unique in the history of photography and a classic of photographic literature. Sander conceived this large-scale project, which he ultimately never completed, in the 1920s. He was to spend the rest of his life working on it, his objective nothing less than a complete typological portrait of contemporary society.

Hundreds of portraits classified according to professional, social or family criteria were to provide a representative picture of the various social groups. He envisaged seven groups labeled: "The Farmer", "The Skilled Tradesman", "The Woman", "Classes and Professions", "The Artists", "The City" and--on the theme of age, illness and death--"The Last People". We have now condensed out 2002 seven-volume edition of the artist's complete oeuvre into one large volume presenting "the essential" People of the 20th Century.

Timing, skill, and talent all play an important role in creating a great photograph, but the most primary element, the photographer’s eye, is perhaps the most crucial. In The Eyes of the City, Richard Sandler showcases decades’ worth of work, proving his eye for street life rivals any of his generation.

From 1977 to just weeks before September 11, 2001, Richard regularly walked through the streets of Boston and New York, making incisive and humorous pictures that read the pulse of that time. After serendipitously being gifted a Leica camera in 1977, Sandler shot in Boston for three productive years and then moved back home to photograph in an edgy, dangerous, colicky New York City.

In this album, the compelling photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti explores her vision of France, in which old traditions persist even while they fray and shift in relation to contemporary stresses, including multiculturalism. The work presents an intuitive, often lyrical journey that is undercut with a sense of tension about what it means to be French―and to photograph the French―today.

Le Gendarme Sur La Colline is the result of a major new commission by Fondation de l’entreprise Hermès and Aperture Foundation, working in alliance. Called “Immersion, a French American Photography Commission,” the program seeks to expand artistic dialogue between France and the US, while investing in creativity, and providing a platform for an important emerging artist to create a major new body of work. (Copublished by Aperture and Fondation de l’entreprise Hermès)

"Since 2014, Alessandra Sanguinetti has been returning to the small town of Black River Falls in Wisconsin, creating the photographs that would come to form the stark and elliptical series Some Say Ice. The same town is the subject of Wisconsin Death Trip, a book of photographs taken by Charles Van Schaick in the late 1800s documenting the bleak hardships of the lives and deaths of its inhabitants. Sanguinetti first came across this book as a child, and the experience is engraved into her memory as her first reckoning with mortality. This encounter eventually led her to explore the strange relationship of photography and death, and ultimately to make her own visits to Black River Falls. The austere, sculptural scenes and ambiguous, uneasy portraits that make up Some Say Ice depict a place almost outside of time. Presented unadorned by text or explication, the photographs are touched with the spirit of the gothic as well as the unmistakable tenderness familiar from Sanguinetti’s series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda. By bringing undercurrents of doubt and darkness to the surface of her images, Sanguinetti alludes to things absent or invisible, playing on atmospheres both real and imagined, as well as the ghostly possibility of undoing death through the act of photography. With its title inspired by Robert Frost’s famous poem equivocating on how best one’s inevitable death might be met, Some Say Ice is a humane look at the melancholic realities underpinning our lives, seen with glacial clarity by one of the world’s foremost photographers."

For more than two decades, Alessandra Sanguinetti has been photographing the lives of Guillermina and Belinda, two cousins living in rural Argentina, as they move through childhood and youth toward womanhood. This volume, originally published in 2010 and reissued now as the first installment of a trilogy, chronicles the first five years of their collaboration.

Sanguinetti’s images portray a childhood that is both familiar and exceptional. The farmlands of western Buenos Aires province are a particular mix of the modern and traditional, where life is lived in consonance with animals and rugged landscapes. Against this backdrop, Guille and Belinda go through the childhood rites of dressing up and make believe, exploring and appropriating the world around them as they go.

This book presents Alessandra Sanguinetti’s return to rural Argentina to continue her intimate collaboration with Belinda and Guillermina, two cousins who, as girls, were the subjects of the first book in her ongoing series, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams.  In this second volume, The Illusion of An Everlasting Summer, we follow Guillermina and Belinda from ages 14 to 24 as they negotiate the fluid territory between adolescence and young adulthood. Still surrounded by the animals and rural settings of their childhood, Everlasting Summer depicts the two cousins’ everyday lives as they experience young love, pregnancy, and motherhood - all of which, perhaps inevitably, results in an ever-increasing independence from their families and each other.

Similarly, we can sense a shift in Sanguinetti's relationship to the cousins and the work they make: from insular childhood collaborators to three women with lives branching in different directions. Though the passage of time is one of the most palpable tensions at work in these photographs, An Everlasting Summer deepens Sanguinetti's exploration of the timeless, universal language of female intimacy and friendship.

The Burnthouse Lane estate was first dreamt up by Exeter Council in the idealistic 1920s to rehouse impoverished people from the West Quarter slum. Designed along Garden City lines and purposely self-contained it was a place for working-class families to live. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme meant that some of the properties became privately owned, but Burnt House Lane is still referred to as a council estate. The deprivation it was supposed to overcome has continued to haunt it, but the isolated nature of the estate and its intricate labyrinth of lanes, have also made for positives, such as a close-knit community and a sense of solidarity among the residents.

Michelle Sank has developed an international reputation for her powerful environmental portraits and landscapes. She has published four previous books and has exhibited widely across the world. Her work is in many private collections. Born in South Africa, Michelle Sank settled in the UK in 1987. She grew up during Apartheid and is the daughter of Latvian immigrants. She cites this background as informing her interest in sub-cultures and the exploration of contemporary social issues and challenges. Her crafted portraits and landscapes meld place and person creating sociological, visual and psychological narratives.

The world-renowned photographer David Goldblatt wrote about her portraiture that there is “an unstrained yet visually sophisiticated synthesis of subject and context… people are not typecast or stereotyped; they are just ‘ordinary’. They seem completely themselves, Sank has allowed each of them simply to be … something has been evoked that seems to come from deep within… it is the unique spirit of the other person”.

Burkina Faso photographer Sory Sanlé (born 1943) started his career in 1960, the year his country (then named République de Haute-Volta) gained independence from France.

Sanlé opened his Volta Photo portrait studio in 1965 and, working with his Rolleiflex twin-lens, medium-format camera, Volta Photo was soon recognized as the finest studio in the city. Voltaic photography’s unsung golden age is fully embodied by Sory Sanlé: his black-and-white images magnify this era and display a unique cultural energy and social impact.

This is the first monograph on Sanlé’s work, which examines the natural fusion between tradition and modernity. Sanlé documented the fast evolution of Bobo-Dioulasso, then Burkina Faso’s cultural and economic capital, portraying the city’s inhabitants with wit, energy and passion. His work conveys a youthful exuberance in the wake of the first decades of African independence. In many ways, Sanlé’s subjects also illustrate the remoteness and melancholy of African cities landlocked deep in the heart of the continent.

A thick layer of fine dust covers everything in this apocalyptic landscape. The ground is burning, and a vast area is oozing with toxic gases, fire, and smoke. Amongst all of this, there are people digging in the soil with their bare hands. In Jharkhand, India, coal is mined everywhere. The locals call it 'Black Diamond'. There is a fragile balance between nature and mankind. The human inability to break patterns is painstakingly visible in these photographs, as we knowingly keep on extracting the ground beneath our own feet. Sebastian Sardi began his work on photographing mines in 2008. Black Diamond is a close portrait of the people who extract coal, as well as an exploration of our dualistic human nature.

This is the first book by French photographer-artist Lise Sarfati, composed of images made during extended visits to Russia during the 1990s. The book is neither travelogue nor photojournalistic essay. Rather, Sarfati uses descriptions of the details of the Russian environments which fascinate her to create a visual drama - a personal theatre of dysfunction and deterioration, of change and beauty. The title - literally "it (feminine) is over" from the Latin phrase "Acta Est Fabula" meaning "the play is over" - signals her insistence that the work not be read as journalism but as a work of theatrical imagination.

This edition of Fashion Magazine is devoted solely to the work of French photographer Lise Sarfati. In her portraiture, Sarfati dramatizes the intensities of fashionably clad adolescence in the insolently sensual creatures she encounters on the roads of America.

Couching their lightly worn street elegance in moody sobriety, Sarfati presses pause on the activities in which her subjects are engaged and extracts their quintessential sensuality, to produce a type of photography that partakes of both fashion and portraiture idioms without quite belonging to either. Redolent in this respect of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, in which the camera deliberately and continually "overgrooms" the emotional drama, Sarfati's work is likewise utterly seductive and compelling.

Oh Man is a series of seventeen large-format photographs, fifteen in color and two in black and white, created in Los Angeles from 2012 to 2013. Like Lise Sarfati’s previous series The New Life (2003), She (2009), and On Hollywood (2010), Oh Man is also set in the urban landscape. In this new work, Sarfati rejects the romantic picturesque. She continues to pursue a body of work which possesses a certain interior complexity and can neither be narrowed down to a singular or global perspective nor be perceived as an object.

Sarfati quotes Baudelaire regarding the series: “in certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its Symbol.” She invests the city in a personal and metaphoric way. She rethinks what already exists. A primal vitality, visceral, unrestrainable, arising from rootlessness―men walking and the radical indifference of their bodies―occupies the empty heart of Los Angeles. She creates an image that is always engaged in a discourse with the viewer, an image in which we can project ourselves yet also feel free. The whole series is bathed in a solar light. This luminous point of view acts as an illumination on the image as if to light our vision. Sarfati worked very precisely on the choice of this intense solar light: “I worked on the distance to create an ambiguous link in the relationship between the man and the landscape. My images are large format but through their equilibrium allow the viewer total freedom to engage with the landscape or the human figure.”

The figures in the photographs, characters like those she defined in her series The New Life, She and On Hollywood, are ghostly here. Oh Man creates an uncanny feeling: the men are both anonymous and somehow familiar. They are filmed by surveillance cameras and become a detail of the virtual landscape. What J.G. Ballard, one of Lise Sarfati's references, concerning computerized surveillance systems calls: "an Orwellian nightmare come true, but disguised as a public service."

Oh Man gives us the feeling that we could be downtown in any US megalopolis. The American urban landscape in Sarfati's photographs scrolls along, the warehouses like a long list of signs without affect: United States Post Office, NAB Sound, Toys, Clothing, Handbag, Cosmetics.

Throughout her different series, Sarfati never ceases to interrogate herself on the void and the relationship between the man and the outside world. InOh Man we are swayed by the ambiguous sensation of the landscape, between the attraction to the void and the enjoyment of the space crossed by the walking man.

A series of 50 photographs by French photographer Lise Sarfati. The photographs were taken in cities like Austin, Asheville, Portland, Berkeley, Oakland,Los Angeles, New Orleans and some small towns in Georgia. In each of these portraits, Lise Sarfati dramatizes the complexity of adolescent identity; within unfamiliar territory - both emotionally and physically - where the simplest of feelings become exalted and everything is lived with an intensity that adults will never again be able to feel.

A family album preserves only carefully selected photographs. Out of an entire life, it stores only handpicked moments, privileging special occasions, happy ones usually, and consigning the rest to oblivion: happy faces, relaxed moments, places of leisure rather than work. It tends to underline a group’s social links and affective relations, to highlight an identity, a communal spirit, a shared life and destiny. The portrait of the couple or group, with all its attendant conventions, is one of its inescapable figures.

The family album tries to register the evolution of a particular human community, to write its story and scan the passage of time with each succeeding page. None of this figures in She: instead of a chronology, time is stopped, it appears to stammer and bite its own tail. There is no group photo or desire to stage a collective destiny, but only isolated models and individuals who do not seem to communicate amongst themselves, or only barely; no happy moments or picturesque places, only indifferent moments in ordinary places; no strong gesture, none of the conventional poses, and no complicity with the photographer.

The models pose, but reservedly, more often than not without looking into the camera. And even when we do see their faces, we don’t really seem to see them. They are here, but they are always also there, elsewhere. When we close the book and think a bit about it, we cannot but see She as the anti-family album par excellence.

"In this book, the first in a three-part series, you’ll find images that I’ve taken and processed exclusively with the iPhone. I’ve utilized apps such as TrueHDR, VSCOcam, Snapseed, Noiseware, Retouch, Perspective, and many others. I invite you to check out some of my other photography and written work on Instagram @j_sarinana. I hope you enjoy it." -- Joshua Sariñana

In a nondescript concrete building on a busy street in the old city of Kabul, young men file into a dark, smoke-filled theater and take their seats. Soon the projector roars to life, and the audience begins to laugh, whistle and even dance as the latest Pakistani cinematic drama illuminates the big screen before them.

In his new book, Forbidden Reel, American-born, Sweden-based photographer Jonathan Saruk documents the cinemas of Kabul--entertainment venues that had been banned under the Taliban but which have sputtered back to life since the US invasion 12 years ago. Forbidden Reel provides an alternative narrative to life in this violence-plagued city where going to the movies, for many, is an escape from the harsh reality that lies outside the secure confines of the theater.

This mid-career retrospective volume focuses on Viviane Sassen's fine art photography, revealing a surrealist undercurrent in her work. Sassen recognizes Surrealism as one of her earliest artistic influences, seen in the uncanny shadows, fragmented bodies, and otherworldly landscapes she captures in her work. In addition to images from the acclaimed series "Umbra," this volume draws from the series "Flamboya," in which she returned to Kenya, "Parasomnia," a dreamlike exploration of sleep, the "Roxane" series, a mutual portrait created with her muse, Roxane Danset, "Of Lotus and Mud," a study of procreation and fecundity, and "Pikin Slee," a journey to a remote village in Suriname.

This book features a contextualizing essay and an insightful interview with the artist. Throughout, Sassen emerges as a poetic photographer obsessed with light and shadow and a brilliant technician, who is a master of both vibrant color and muted hues. Selected by Sassen herself from across the last ten years, the images draw on the surrealist strategies of collage and unexpected juxtapositions to give a survey of her practice.

Following the success of Parasomnia, this major new book focuses on the fashion photography of Viviane Sassen. Bringing together 17 years of work in the fashion world, this eye-catching volume features selections from Sassen's award-winning series and campaigns for Stella McCartney, Adidas, Carven, Bergdorf Goodman, MiuMiu, and M Missoni, along with editorials for magazines such as the New York Times Magazine, i-D, Numéro, Purple, AnOther Magazine, Dazed &Confused, Fantastic Man, and POP.

Sassen's intuitive and imaginative style can be flamboyant, contemplative, erotic, and surreal, often simultaneously. This volume includes essays that offer a context for Sassen's work in the history of fashion photography as well as a bibliography of nearly all of her fashion series. The book will be a delight for Sassen's many fans and those eager for inspiration or beautiful escape.

Renowned photographic artist Viviane Sassen's latest body of work was realized in a remote village on the Upper Suriname River. Known for her imaginative approach to fashion photography, Sassen's lens here captures mundane objects, making them appear extraordinary against the background of nature's overwhelming presence. Largely shot in black and white, the informal photos also capture a sense of Sassen's personal connection to the village, which is inhabited by the ancestors of former slaves who escaped Dutch rule.

In Roxane II, Viviane Sassen and her muse Roxane continue writing their shared visual journal. The dynamic gallery of poses and moods touches notes at times sensual, at times tender. Images are equally about the performances in front of and behind the camera: Sassen’s presence is perceived through her shadow and made tangible by scraps of paper that bear the imprint of her breasts.

This is a mutual portrait, an exchange in which the artist’s and model’s individualities blur, leaving traces on each other. As Maria Barnas writes in the poem introducing the images: “When I take a glance at our selves I hold my breath and see us expand in colours and clouds bursting from a mouth. Are they yours or mine?”

This latest book by Viviane Sassen, one of the world’s most acclaimed photographers, explores the concept of shadow in a series of stunning images. Based on an award-winning exhibition, Viviane Sassen’s new book focuses on a common theme in her photographs: shadow. In this book she leads us through a series of thought-provoking takes on the concept―shadow as metaphor for anxiety and desire; as a symbol of both memory and hope for the future; and as an evocation of imagination and illusion.

Sassen’s work is renowned for its deft interplay between realism and abstraction. Here that characteristic emerges in the dramatic use of light, shadow and color, as well as the adroit cropping of images and interventions on the prints. This lovely book brilliantly accentuates Sassen’s contrasting color schemes to reinforce the idea of shadow creating an enthralling tactile and visual experience.

Tracing a career of more than thirty years, this celebration of the prodigiously talented Dutch photographer includes vibrantly colored portraiture, landscapes, still lifes, abstract compositions, and fashion editorials.

From her early African-inspired work to her more recent experiments in interventionist techniques, Viviane Sassen has gained international acclaim for her striking, dynamic images that explore a range of themes and subjects—from identity, gender, and the body, to race, fashion, and the environment.

This retrospective book brings together both well- and lesser- known works and includes pieces from her recent series, Paint Studies, in which early photographs are reimagined with ink and painterly marks, and Venus and Mercury, a collection of exquisite photomontages based on the history of the Palace of Versailles.

An introductory essay and interview with the artist combine with additional illuminating texts to make this the definitive overview of an important and ever-evolving photographer.

A gorgeously printed philosophical photobook that reenchants the natural world.

This project is the result of a unique fusion between photographer Viviane Sassen and philosopher Emanuele Coccia, two key figures in their respective fields. Sassen contributes 80 new photographs that celebrate the natural world, and Coccia supplies an ambitious essay that reassesses the unity of all sentient life. Neither an illustration of text nor a commentary on a series of images, Modern Alchemy situates their two streams of creativity in a dialogue, forging a reverent meditation on art and nature. Gorgeously bound in printed cloth, this meditative photobook invites readers to reenvision the earth’s ever-present beauty.

The theater of sensual dreams The Czech Republic has long been a land of mystery and magic, home to alchemists, artists, and the original bohemians, all of them weavers of spells, creators of fantastic worlds of the imagination. Internationally famous Czech photographer Jan Saudek is no exception, and equally as uncompromising in pursuit of his own unique vision. For over four decades Saudek has created a parallel photographic universe, a two-dimensional home full of longing, peopled with the most extraordinary characters and colored by desire.

Saudek's book is a gorgeous continuation of the handcolored work seen in Life, Love, Death & Other Such Trifles. Using dark, crepuscular rooms as sets for models whose bodies defy conventional ideals, these images are dreamlike parlour photographs which reveal the inner workings of Saudek's mind. Saudek's vision is one of the strongest emerging from the newly liberated Czech Republic--he has elevated erotica to a level of fine art without losing any of its primacy. An exciting addition to this contemporary artist's distinctive work.

Jan Saudek is the most famous living Czech photographer, and simultaneously the most provocative. For over four decades Saudek has created a parallel photographic universe, a two-dimensional home full of longing, peopled with the most extraordinary characters and colored by desire. The timeless strength of his hand-tinted photographs lies in their poetic compositions and their forceful pictorial language, with its overtones of medieval genre pictures and Baroque mythology.

Photo-collages made from iconic Hollywood film stills.

German photographer Martina Sauter (born 1974) combines original photographs with film stills and newspaper images to create visual spaces with unfamiliar perspectives within which fragmented figures or text appear. This volume features a selection of her works from 2008 to 2022.

During apartheid, Jurgen Schadeberg worked for the leading “black” publications of the time. This way he had access to the likes of a young activists, like the lawyer, named Nelson Mandela. Iconic pictures of many future South African leaders followed.

Judge Albie Sachs, an ANC operative who lost an arm in an attack by the security police, says of this collection: “Jurgen Schadeberg wrenches moments and people right out of time, place and mood, so that we can engage with them here and now, as we are, at the instant of looking. We gasp and feel a frisson of delight at each picture. Was it really like that? Look at the faces as they were then, the hairstyles, the clothes people wore, the way they looked at each other. What is still the same, what has changed? There is the honesty of values, the dignified and respectful treatment of the subject matter and especially the people who might be involved. In this respect Jurgen’s photographs are extraordinarily sensitive.”

In his coffee table book Metropolis, Alan Schaller presents city life in his own individual way, setting standards in modern street photography. For all lovers of spectacular black-and-white photography, the coffee table book Metropolis is a must-have, because there is hardly anything comparable on the market. In a unique way, Alan Schaller depicts urban contrasts that big cities like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo or Istanbul hold in store in their architecture and everyday life. In the photo book Metropolis, Alan Schaller elevates city views to an art form, playing with light and perspective and creates a world in black and white that captivates the viewer. This is what fans of Schaller love about his work. The photo artist manages to capture moments for eternity. Accompany Alan Schaller in his coffee table book Metropolis on 240 pages through the most famous metropolises on earth. Look forward to impressive black-and-white photographs, with extraordinary city views in which people and architecture merge in an intimate moment.

Father and son collaborate on a photographic panorama of humanity Famed photojournalist Steve Schapiro (1934–2022) and his son Theophilus Donoghue (born 1982) have collaborated on a photo project that is 70% Schapiro, 30% Donoghue. Seventy Thirty depicts the various faces and expressions of humanity, from metropolitans to migrants, homeless people to conspicuous celebrities such as Alec Guinness, Allen Ginsberg, Muhammad Ali, Robert De Niro, René Magritte, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol. Schapiro photographs early New York skateboarders while Donoghue documents current Colombian breakdancers. Schapiro includes his classic photograph Man on Iceberg, which was the opening spread of a Life story on existentialism. Similarly, Donoghue contributes his contemplative photograph Hindsight Intersection, recently featured in ARTSY’s 20 21 Artists in Support of Human Rights Watch benefit auction. Shooting in monochrome with an occasional dash of color, Schapiro and Donoghue portray the proud and lofty as well as the humble and humorous.

Steve Schapiro traveled throughout America photographing and recording people and issues during the turbulent decade of the 1960s. For the very first time, American Edge brings together ninety of Schapiro's searing images-images fit to stand aside classics of documentary photography like Walker Evans's American Photographs (1938), Robert Frank's The Americans (1959), and Diane Arbus's posthumous MoMA retrospective (1972). American Edge offers a singular vision of the fractured fabric of contemporary American life. The photographer traveled with Bobby Kennedy during his presidential campaign, and with writer James Baldwin through the American South. Schapiro also covered the New York art scene-documenting Andy Warhol's Factory-as well as the hippie and protest movements sweeping the universities, which culminated in the riots of 1968. American Edge reveals the increasing disparity between the rich and poor, racial and class conflict, and the burgeoning American middle class and its materialist desires. Among the countless women and men portrayed are Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ike and Tina Turner, Simon and Garfunkel, Robert Rauschenberg, Janis Joplin, and Andy Warhol. American Edge represents a major rediscovery of one of the most talented documentary photographers of the late twentieth century.

In June, 1963, on assignment from Sports Illustrated, peerless portrait photographer Steve Schapiro traveled to Louisville, Kentucky to spend some time with the young Olympic champion boxer Cassius Clay, and accompany him on a road trip to New York City. At 21, Clay was yet to adopt the mantel of Muhammad Ali, but his boastful persona, intelligence, black pride, and sharp tongue were already fully formed.

Over the course of their five days together, Schapiro - a master at developing trust and capturing unguarded intimacy on film - revealed both sides of the young Ali: the one side posing and preening for the camera, ever conscious of his image; the other, unguarded and unselfconscious, in candid images of the young fighter at home with his family and immersed in his community and neighborhood.

Ali collects the best of Schapiro's images of the late fighter; many in print for the first time ever. They offer a glimpse of a star on the rise. It is an indelible portrait of the early life of one of the most talented, graceful, controversial, athletic, and influential American figures of the 20th century.

In 1970 Barbra Streisand published a story in Life magazine titled “Who Am I Anyway?” It was the very question two leading photojournalists of the day—Steve Schapiro and Lawrence Schiller—were also asking as they photographed her during her first five years in Hollywood, working to get beneath the veneer and capture “the real Barbra.”

Brimming with photographs, stories, and behind-the-scenes shots from Schapiro and Schiller, and previously available as a limited edition, this is a must-have collection for any Streisand fan. All the best movies of Streisand’s first Hollywood decade are here: Funny Girl, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, The Way We Were, The Owl and the Pussycat, Up the Sandbox, Funny Lady, and A Star Is Born. So too are her loves, directors, confidants, and costars: Elliott Gould, William Wyler, Sydney Pollack, Vincente Minnelli, Cis Corman, Omar Sharif, Kris Kristofferson, and, of course, Robert Redford.

Through it all a picture emerges not of a singer who could act, but of an actress who could sing, write, direct, dance, and do just about anything she put her mind to.

A private photo session from 1974 with the iconic performer featuring many images seen here for the first time.

David Bowie's unexpected death has invited intense scrutiny over the rich and complex imagery and signifiers in the videos released for Blackstar, his last, enigmatic album. At press time for this book, a Bowie superfan alerted us to the remarkable similarities between these videos, particularly "Lazarus," and the photo shoot that comprises the bulk of this book.

Schapiro's Heroes brings together an extraordinary collection of stories in the photo-journalistic tradition of people who have shaped our lives, our politics, and our tastes by the celebrated documentarian Steve Schapiro. In behind-the-scenes photographs, we visit the young Muhammad Ali and his Monopoly set, followed everywhere by the neighborhood kids; glimpse the warm family life and campaign of Robert Kennedy, who was so suddenly struck down; see Andy Warhol in photographs never before published; watch Ray Charles perform; visit the set with Samuel Beckett; and march alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the most respected American documentary photographers, Steve Schapiro has a knack for being in the right place at the right time. His heroes are the iconic men and women who have influenced the political and cultural climate of our times. Schapiro's Heroes is a rare and intimate glimpse of a major period of American history, photographed during the golden age of photojournalism by one of the major talents of the late twentieth century.

Taxi Driver has long been regarded as a cinematic milestone, and Robert DeNiro's portrait of a trigger-happy psychopath with a mohawk is widely believed to be one of the greatest performances ever filmed. Time magazine includes the film in its list of 100 Greatest Movies, saying: "The power of Scorsese's filmmaking grows ever more punishing with the passage of time."

Steve Schapiro - whose photographs were featured in TASCHEN's Godfather Family Album - was the special photographer on the set of Taxi Driver, capturing the film's most intense and violent moments from behind the scenes. This book - more than a film-still book, rather a pure photo book in its own right - features hundreds of unseen images selected from Schapiro's archives, painting a chilling portrait of a deranged gunman in the angry climate of the post-Vietnam era.

"Schapiro and Baldwin showed the possibility of what strong writing and photography could achieve in their time. In ours, we'd do well to look to them." - The Guardian, London

First published in 1963, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time stabbed at the heart of America's so-called "Negro problem." As remarkable for its masterful prose as for its frank and personal account of the black experience in the United States, it is considered one of the most passionate and influential explorations of 1960s race relations, weaving thematic threads of love, faith, and family into a candid assault on the hypocrisy of the "land of the free."

Now, James Baldwin's rich, raw, and ever relevant prose is reprinted with more than 100 photographs from Steve Schapiro, who traveled the American South with Baldwin for Life magazine. The encounter thrust Schapiro into the thick of the movement, allowing for vital, often iconic, images both of civil rights leaders-including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Jerome Smith-and such landmark events as the March on Washington and the Selma March.

Rounding out the edition are Schapiro's stories from the field, an original introduction by civil rights legend and U.S. Congressman John Lewis, captions by Marcia Davis of The Washington Post, and an essay by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, who was with her brother James in Sierra Leone when he started to work on the story. The result is a remarkable visual and textual record of one of the most important and enduring struggles of the American experience.

As special photographer on the sets and locations of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy, Steve Schapiro had the remarkable experience of witnessing legendary actors giving some of their most memorable performances. Schapiro immortalized Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Diane Keaton in photos that have since become iconic images, instantly recognizable and endlessly imitated.

Gathered together in this book are Schapiro’s finest photographs from all three Godfather films, lovingly reproduced from the original negatives. With contextual essays and interviews covering the trilogy in its entirety, this book contains over 300 color and black-and-white images. Schapiro’s images take us behind the scenes of this epic and inimitable cinematic saga, revealing the director’s working process, capturing the moods and personalities involved, and providing insight into the making of movie history.

Double-exposed nude photography from a master of self-portraiture.

The work of Swedish photographer Lina Scheynius (born 1981) captures quiet moments of intimacy and hidden beauty, as if ripped from the pages of her diary. Raw sexuality and naked bodies populate her photographs, which often feature her close friends and lovers, and herself, as models. In this latest project, Scheynius works with analog photography, double-exposing the film―first with images of centuries-old statues, then with her own nude body―using self-portraiture as a bridge across millennia. Both subtle and raw, Scheynius offers here a groundbreaking photobook for the 21st century.

For a decade, Ken Schles watched the passing of time from his Lower East Side neighborhood. His camera fixed the instances of his observations, and these moments became the foundation of his "invisible city." Friends and architecture come under the scrutiny of his lens and, when sorted and viewed in the pages of this book, a remarkable achievement of personal vision emerges. Twenty-five years later, Invisible City still has the ability to transfix the viewer. A penetrating and intimate portrayal of a world few had entrance to--or means of egress from--Invisible City stands alongside Brassai's Paris de Nuit and van der Elsken's Love On The Left Bank as one of the twentieth century's great depictions of nocturnal bohemian experience. Documenting his life in New York City's East Village during its heyday in the tumultuous 1980s, Schles captured its look and attitude in delirious and dark honesty. Long out of print, this "missing link" in the history of the photographic book is now once again made available. Using scans from the original negatives and Steidl's five-plate technique to bring out nuance and detail never seen before, this new edition transcends the original of this underground cult classic.

Close presents 120 portraits of the world's most famous and influential people across the arts and entertainment industries, politics, business and sport-from Julia Roberts and Adele, to Frank Gehry and Marina Abramovic, Barack Obama, Julian Assange and Roger Federer.

Between 2005 and 2018 Martin Schoeller (born 1968) photographed his subjects, in his words "to create a level platform, where a viewer's existing notions of celebrity, values and honesty are challenged." Schoeller realized this goal by subjecting his sitters to equal technical treatment: each portrait is a close-up of a face with the same camera angle and lighting.

The expressions are consistently neutral, serious yet relaxed, in an attempt to tease out his subjects' differences and capture moments "that felt intimate, unposed." Schoeller's inspiration for Close was the water-tower series of Bernd and Hilla Becher, his ambition to adapt their systematic approach to portraiture. Amid Schoeller's famous subjects are also some unknown and unfamiliar ones, a means to comprehensively make his project an "informal anthropological study of the faces of our time."

Almost each week, Martin Schoeller is called upon by The New Yorker magazine to capture portraits of the most recognized personalities of our time (President Bill Clinton, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Norman Mailer, Jack Nicholson and many others).

Over 100 of these stunning headshot portraits are collected here in a monograph that tracks the evolution of his style and showcases the body of his work. His photographs strip away all extras, leaving only the form and light. Martin Schoeller is a rare photographer who is advancing a new style and vision in the world of portrait photography.

Female Bodybuilders is the second monograph by contemporary artist and photographer Martin Schoeller. Schoeller is considered a contemporary master of portrait photography. Since 1999, Martin Schoeller has been contracted by The New Yorker to capture portraits of the most recognized personalities of our time. Through this and other magazines, he has photographed President Bill Clinton, Barak Obama, Tom Wolfe, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and many others.

Long a source of fascination, twins have often been a theme of myth and legend. The founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus is one of the many instances that spring to mind. Even when separated at birth, twins usually have uncannily similar tastes, habits and life experiences.

In this landmark photographic study, Martin Schoeller uses his distinctive close-up portrait style to examine 40 sets of identical twins, capturing every subtle aspect of their facial structure and expressions. We notice the myriad similarities and the seemingly miniscule--yet significant--differences. Browsing this remarkable collection, you'll find yourself pondering how appearance and identity define our sense of our selves.

Martin Schoeller is a master in both staged photographs as well as raw portraits establishing a new paradigm in photography. As typified in the best-selling Close Up (ISBN 978-3-8327-9045-5), Schoeller captures well-known personalities stripped of artifice and PR spin. The resultant headshots are pure and resonant. Yet, this photographic artist is also a master storyteller who juggles elements of fairytales and blockbuster movies. His action-packed vignettes are worlds unto themselves…dark little universes where anything can—and does—happen.

A broad appraisal of the multifaceted work of famous portraitist Martin Schoeller.

The portraiture of Martin Schoeller (born 1968) is renowned for its indelible ultra-closeups, with a tone, mood and compositional consistency that have energized the pages of many of America's and Europe's most respected publications over the last 20 years.

But these revelatory photographs are just the most recognizable slice of his astonishingly searching, restless oeuvre. Schoeller has now amassed a body of work that defies classification, as he has ventured into all but invisible subcultures, the most current events, breakdowns in social justice, celebrity and several other subcategories of public interest.

As seen collectively in Martin Schoeller: 1995-2019, these images comprise a veritable museum of recent history-a varied, imaginative, buoyant, disciplined and conscientious project that is the work of an inexhaustibly humane outlook.

Building on the success of his previous titles, Close Up and Identical, Martin Schoeller's momentous Portraits is cause for celebration. The illustrious photographer's full range of expression is on display in this unprecedented gathering of editorial images. With an impressive amount of variety and scale, Schoeller shares his signature compositional imagination alongside the wry wit that animates his work. Whether portraits of political leaders, Hollywood stars, business entrepreneurs, or contemporary music royalty, these images are as daring as they are exacting, playful and precise.

Regardless of the subject and setting, Schoeller's photographs seemingly come to life. While Portraits will surely thrill devoted fans, it will also attract new admirers with images they've noted in top magazines. Every frame in this expansive volume is touched with Schoeller's distinctive flare for creative meticulously realized worlds--and confirm that he's a talent that consistently resets the limits of photographic portraiture.

Haunting images of 75 Israeli Holocaust survivors by renowned portrait photographer Martin Schoeller.

Marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, these portraits by New York–based photographer Martin Schoeller (born 1968) were photographed in cooperation with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

Schoeller's compelling images capture the weathered faces of Jewish men and women who lived through and witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust, and allow viewers to look into their eyes for traces of the experiences they endured and to be inspired by their resilience and remarkable strength of spirit. Targets of baseless anguish and suffering simply because they were Jewish, their lives were forever altered during the dark years of the Holocaust.

Each photograph offers a portal to the vast legacy of the victims and the survivors.

He Had a Dream is a visual record of King's life and work by the only man King trusted and to whom he gave such complete access. Schulke's images, combined with his commentary on both the moment and its place in the context of the civil rights movement, create a more immediate and revealing portrait of King than we have had before.

As a young photojournalist just out of college in the early fifties, Flip Schulke moved to Miami and began covering social issues. In 1958, while working as a freelancer for Jet and Ebony, he was assigned to photograph Martin Luther King. Afterwards, the two men talked late into the night about King's philosophy. Schulke became convinced that King's plans would change the face of the country. At King's invitation, he began photographing behind the scenes at Southern Christian Leadership Conference meetings and eventually became committed to covering King and the growing civil rights movement. For a decade before King's death, Schulke was as close to him and his inner circle as a photographer could be. He was privy to momentous events public and private, and always he was photographing. This book is the result.

In September 1960, Cassius Clay, a young boxer from Louisville, Kentucky, won a gold medal at the Olympic Games in Rome. Barely three months out of high school, Clay had embarked on a career that would lead him to the pinnacle of athletics as a boxer and a social icon. Within four years he would defeat Sonny Liston and thus become the world heavyweight champion, at which point he converted to Islam and took the name Muhammad Ali. By this time, he was already a legend, with a reputation for a strong sense of humor and a penchant for outlandish acts of self-promotion, which earned him the enmity of a few, but the love of most of the world.

Although Ali was certainly famous by the time of his bout with Liston, and his legend grew even more afterward, not much is known about his early years. After the Olympics, Ali moved to Miami in December 1960 to train with the celebrated Angelo Dundee. It was there that he honed his boxing as well as his self-promotional skills and grew into the boxer who would be able to take down the feared Liston.

In three extended sessions in the early 1960s, before he became known to the world as Muhammad Ali, the young Cassius Clay was captured by the cameras of Flip Schulke, himself a young man trying to make his name in the world. Photographing for Life and Sports Illustrated magazines, Schulke presented the young Clay in tender, almost intimate settings that would never be duplicated once the spotlights focused on the young boxer. It was a perfect match of camera and subject; Clay's warm, boyish exuberance beams directly through the lens to reveal a personality of extraordinary confidence and charisma. He would become one of the most widely photographed personages in the world, and these remarkable photographs show him at the very beginning of his journey.

Since that time, Ali's fame has only grown, to the point where he is generally considered the greatest athlete of the century, as well as a role model for young and old fans alike. These remarkable photographs show him at the beginning of his journey. Muhammad Ali: the Birth of a Legend, Miami, 1961-1964 will be a necessary book for anyone interested in Ali's legend.

'Good Goddamn' is a short photobook about a man from rural Texas and his last few days of freedom before going to prison.

Grays the Mountain Sends. Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat. Silas Finch, 2013. 102 pp., 42 color illustrations, 11½x13½". Publisher's Description Equipped with a large format view camera, and inspired by the poetry of Richard Hugo, Bryan Schutmaat combines portraits, landscapes, and still lifes in a series of photos that explores the lives of working people residing in small mountain towns and mining communities in the American West. First edition. Includes 42 full color plates printed with UV inks on Mohawk Superfine uncoated paper. Flexible offset-printed cover with steel spine.

Amelia is 14 years old. In many ways, she is your average American teenager: since she was three years old, she has been her mother's muse, and the subject of her photographs. However, not every mom is a world-class photographer with a predilection for photographing animals. And it's not every teenager who has portraits of herself with elephants, llamas, ponies, tigers, kangaroos, chimpanzees and endless dogs, cats, and other animals--portraits that hang in the collections of major art museums around the world.

Amelia and the Animals is Robin Schwartz's second monograph featuring this collaborative series dedicated to documenting her and Amelia's adventures among the animals. As Schwartz puts it, "Photography is a means for Amelia to meet animals. Until recently, she took these opportunities for granted. She didn't realize how unusual her encounters were until everyone started to tell her how lucky she was to meet so many animals." Nonetheless, these images are more than documents of Amelia and her rapport with animals; they offer a meditation on the nature of interspecies communication and serve as evidence of a shared mother-daughter journey into invented worlds.

The ghetto today: a story told in pictures, a history in the making. The forty-four black-and-white photographs presented here have been selected from the many pictures taken by Ferdinando Scianna on a succession of visits made to Venice between May and June in 2016: they take the form of notes, a series of precise annotations on the course of daily life in a neighborhood of the city.

The result of his work is a lucid and vivid photographic reportage on the Venice ghetto in the late spring of last year filled with initiatives organized to mark the 500th anniversary of the setting up of the first enclave for the segregation of Jews in the world, the one in Venice. On March 29, 1516, the Senate of the Venetian Republic had in fact decided that all the Jews present in the city should be sent to live "together" in "a courtyard of houses" at Cannaregio.

Ferdinando Scianna has always been fascinated by the sight of figures wrapped in sleep. In over 30 years of photography he has captured countless images of people and animals sleeping in the most diverse places on earth: in the countryside, in cities, deserts, corners of towns, streets, moving trains, in their own homes.

With this astounding collection of photographs - interspersed with evocative quotations about sleep and dreaming - Scianna takes us on his fascinating journey into a dimension of life that is at once natural and mysterious, necessary and disturbing, everyday and universal.

Usually the camera freezes movement, isolating a single moment in the endless flux of reality. Here, on the contrary, the stillness of the image is of its essence. Through the mystery of sleep, life itself - like the photographic image - is seen as static, as if in suspense.

These 250 photographs capture Sicilian Ferdinando Scianna's (born 1943) work for young Dolce & Gabbana; portraits of luminaries such as Roland Barthes, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabelle Huppert, Milan Kundera and John Lennon; plus his anecdotes of photographing them and other career highlights.

Joni: The Joni Mitchell Sessions is the ultimate celebration of a visionary musician and the artist who captured her spirit on film. An extraordinary collection of photographs of the legendary Joni Mitchell, captured by celebrated rock-and-roll photographer Norman Seeff.

It is a creative partnership that has lasted for over 40 years. Joni Mitchell, the artist behind celebrated hits “Help Me” and “Big Yellow Taxi,” and Norman Seeff, a rock-and-roll photographer with a host of legendary subjects in his portfolio, did some of their best work together. Joni was a truly authentic subject, able to surrender herself to the art and express herself freely within his lens. Through over a dozen sessions across more than a decade together, the photographer captured the many facets of her personality in some of her most famous images.

Joni: The Joni Mitchell Sessions is the culmination of their partnership. Timed to release on Joni’s 75th birthday, this collection of familiar and rare imagery tracks the pair’s history together through these exclusive moments captured on film. A combination of album artwork and candid shots reveals Joni’s personality in ways few have managed to capture before or since. Featuring commentary from Seeff on the enlightenment into his art that he gained from their sessions, this compilation is a true reflection on mutual creativity between artist and muse.

More than 500 dramatic photographs of celebrities--including Jodie Foster, Jane Fonda, The Judds, Al Jarreau, and Ray Charles--fill this larger-than-life treasury of vivid portraits that surprise the viewer with their powerful emotional impact.

Across four decades, photographer Norman Seeff has created some of the most iconic portraits of the biggest names in music, art, and showbiz: Patti Smith, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones, Steve Jobs, Marc Bolan, Frank Zappa, and many more. Rock 'n' roll, blues, jazz, or new wave: his pictures burst with spontaneous vitality and give us deep insights into the culture of photography and music in the 1960s to the 1980s.

In this first major monograph, we witness how Seeff captured artists on film, in their private surroundings, or at the studio.

During reconstruction of the Italian economy following World War II, the newly established Italian republic and its American allies implemented a program of land reform, the Riforma Fondiaria, which ran from 1950 to 1972. With funding from the Marshall Plan, the Italian state attempted to inhibit the popularity of the communist party and other left wing movements by appropriating some of their policies. Two extensive re- form laws initiated a redistribution of land that had profound e ects across Italy, albeit predominantly in the south. Nearly 50 years later, what became a spectacular disaster for the people and a bonanza for the state has left its physical evidence scattered across the countryside. In 2017, Steven Seidenberg and Carolyn White began an interdisciplinary project to document the contemporary remains of the Riforma. Seidenberg’s richly detailed photographs capture the houses, the outbuildings, the interiors, and the exteriors in a hauntingly beautiful manner, drawing attention to the lives that were strung along through the reform process. Some of the photographs depict the houses themselves, documenting the cast concrete structures posed on the landscape. As Seidenberg turns his lens toward this rural landscape, he captures the tensions between permanence and temporary, between oc-cupied and abandoned, and where the edge of tolerability exists―places where people moved to live better and where the place was so intolerable that it had to be abandoned again.

Peter Sekaer (1901-50) emerged as an artist in the company of Ben Shahn, Berenice Abbott, and Walker Evans. This book intends to show how he stepped from their benign shadows to build his own distinctive style. It is the first monograph to show the full range of his accomplishments. Sekaer's early work combines dispassionate images with others that show his concern and intuitive grasp of the human condition. Many of his most memorable photographs were made while fulfilling mundane assignments for various government agencies. Sekaer had none of the reformer's passion found in the works of Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine. His stance was more that of the artist/anthropologist, who delighted in recording the artifacts and gestures that defined American society in the 1930s.

The highly acclaimed contemporary photographer presents his private and evocative nudes, landscapes, and close-up still lifes. Listen is in a sense a memento mori, which follows in the tradition of many photographers (Weston, Stieglitz) and artists (Cézanne) who, at a certain age, focus on the nude, landscapes, and still lifes. It highlights Mark Seliger’s personal reflections on seeing and on the passage of time.

Best known for his portraits of celebrities and musicians, Listen is a compilation of works from Seliger’s private collection that captures the essence of light and shadow, and whose photographs speak to us metaphorically. The book includes more than ninety tritones, each printed with a turn-of-the-century platinum palladium photographic process, a process that results in a highly detailed, rich texture. Many of the photographs were made especially for this book and will be published for the first time. In 2009, Seliger was the recipient of the Lucie Award for outstanding achievement in portraiture.

Mark Seliger Photographs showcases his best-known portraiture, as well as never before seen outtakes and select standouts from his landscape and personal work including portraits of Holocaust survivors and transgender men and women on Christopher Street, and documentary photography of Cuba. Accompanying the photographs is an interview between Mark Seliger and Judd Apatow, in which Seliger shares stories behind some of his most iconic work: Kurt Cobain showing up for a Rolling Stone shoot in a “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” T-shirt; taking a road trip with Brad Pitt; and navigating a room full of Tibetan monks while shooting His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In addition, the book also features an essay by Lyle Lovett. Mark Seliger Photographs is the ultimate celebration of one of the most in-demand portrait photographers.

A wild ride through the famous faces of our decade--from a frisky Drew Barrymore to a world-weary Mick Jagger--portraits that run the gamut from sexy to humorous, poignant to compelling. 104 color and 84 duotone photos.

In Dark Room A–Z, photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya offers a comprehensive reflection on the methodologies and artistic strategies that have shaped his work over the past two decades. This pivotal volume unpacks his Dark Room series (2016–21), diving deep into the layered network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that Sepuya has woven throughout his images. Grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to studio practice and portraiture, Sepuya’s work is explored here with thoughtful precision.

The book presents a multifaceted study of Sepuya’s creative process, using three distinct “voices” to explore and cross-reference the conceptual categories that define his art. Through this structure, the book reveals the intellectual and artistic data points that Sepuya draws from, offering a dynamic dialogue between the artist’s own writings, new texts by curator and scholar Gökcan Demirkazik, and selections from previously published critiques by colleagues, friends, and critics. The volume also incorporates quotations from writers and thinkers who inspire Sepuya, shedding light on the thematic preoccupations that consistently surface in his work.

Dark Room A–Z serves as both an exhaustive manual and an iterative return to the generative methods behind Sepuya’s image-making, making it an essential guide to understanding his evolving practice. By cataloging the conceptual underpinnings of his work, the book illuminates Sepuya’s exploration of portraiture, collaboration, and the photographic process itself, offering an intimate look into one of today’s most innovative artists.

Three years of conflict at the threshold of Europe and Russia.

Magnum photographer Jérôme Sessini (born 1968) documents the chaos and banality of life in wartime Ukraine between 2014 and 2017, in photographs and text.

In 2008 the photographer Jérôme Sessini started the Mexican project: a dive into the drug cartel war in Mexico. This compelling reportage, lasting two years, is a valuable document about the most dangerous cities in the country: Culiacán, Tijuana, and especially, Ciudad, Juárez.

In 2010 this work was awarded with the F Award for Concerned Photography, "Jérôme Sessini's ongoing exploration of drug-related violence in Mexico at the US border is remarkable for its sustained engagement with an increasingly alarming and dangerous reality, for its attention to concrete particulars, and for its ambition to convey the scope and complexity of the conflict."

Sydney-based Jon Setter (b. 1989, Detroit) makes photographs that attempt to reveal the unseen aspects of urban spaces and architecture. Often working with subjects discovered by chance on unprescribed walks, he documents cities from peculiar viewpoints. Colours, patterns, materials and textures of the urban vernacular are methodically developed into an abstracted expression of space to expand our reading of the cityscape.

Taking French sociologist Michel de Certeau’s notion of the urban text as a starting point, Jon Setter uses his photography to reveal the often overlooked aspects of urban spaces; ambiguous fragments hidden in plain sight among the dense narratives of the built environment. Acting as a modern day flâneur he seeks out what we take for granted, uncovering hidden truths and detailing the unexplored. Preferring formal concerns over identity politics, he examines a space’s essential grammar through its colours, patterns, textures and materials; elements which form the basis of any city’s character and speak to the uniqueness of its culture and history. Through precise and methodical composing, these aspects are reduced to almost unrecognisable detail. Thus, defamiliarising the everydayness of urban architecture and offering us a closer reading of the micro-level intimacy of the street beyond the artificial busyness of urban life.

By abstracting the urban text, Setter attempts to create a kind of universality of vision, a simplified network of ‘writings’ that encourage us to slow down and start observing the uniqueness of everything in the urban landscape. So, no matter where we are in the world, we can all begin to observe and experience the spaces in which we live more completely.

Inspired in part by Daido Moriyama's grim 1971 photograph “Stray Dog”, Yusuf Sevincli’s high contrast black-and-white photographs explore his neighborhood in Istanbul.

The images, abused with scratches and stains, suggest a thriving human element despite the area’s harsh conditions. Good Dog is brutally poetic, a reminder that “what was felt is what was lived”, its melancholic images resonating on both a visual and emotional level.

Each year, the Marseille (s) collection offers carte blanche to a Mediterranean photographer who delivers his vision of the city. Over the years, the diversity of photographic writings has drawn the portrait of a multicultural city, which appears in a new light.

The first title of the collection presents the work of Yusuf Sevinçli. In a highly contrasting black and white, thick grain and often scratched surface, his almost compulsive shots of everyday life, made of wandering and instability, offer a subjective and felt vision of the world. The photographs are accompanied by a text by writer Christian Garcin.

"Chim picked up his camera the way a doctor takes his stethoscope out of his bag, applying his diagnosis to the condition of the heart. His own was vulnerable." -- Henri Cartier-Bresson

Among the great masters of European photography, Chim endures as a legend. Along with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and George Rodger, he co-founded photojournalism's famous cooperative, Magnum Photos, and occupies a special place in the canon.

This retrospective monograph gathers hundreds of rolls of film Chim shot shortly after World War II for UNICEF. One of Chim's best-known projects, this series was printed by Life in 1948 and by UNICEF is 1949. However, myriad images were left unpublished, hidden from the public audience. Chim: Children of War, created in close collaboration with Chim's estate, unveils many of these never-before-seen photographs, further cementing Chim as one of the most influential photographers of our time, an image-maker whose emotional empathy remains unmatched.

The first comprehensive retrospective of Chim’s work includes many never before published images. He chronicled many of the turbulent events of the twentieth century, from France’s Front Populaire and the Spanish civil war to the devastating aftermath of World War II and the birth of Israel. One of the founders of Magnum, he was killed in the Suez war. Edited by Catherine Chermayeff, Kathy McCarver Mnuchin and Nan Richardson. Includes a biographical chronology and a bibliography.

An accessible monograph on the work of David Seymour (1911–56), the Polish-born American photojournalist, who used his camera to record the political upheavals and social change of the 1930s.

Known by his pseudonym, Chim, Seymour was a practitioner of concerned photography and his images provide an eloquent testimony to the strength and vulnerability of humankind. He became known for his sensitive documentation of war and its devastating effects on its victims, especially children, and his documentation of the Spanish Civil War established him as one of history’s finest photojournalists.

This book traces the career of Chim, famed photojournalist and cofounder of Magnum Photos, who dedicated much of his life to documenting war and its aftermath. Born Dawid Szymin in Warsaw, Chim began his career in the early 1930s photographing for leftist magazines in Paris.

In 1936, one of these magazines, Regards, sent him to the front lines of the civil war in Spain, along with comrades Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. Although war formed the backdrop of much of his reportage, Chim was an astute observer of 20th-century European politics, social life, and culture, from the beginnings of the antifascist struggle to the rebuilding of countries ravaged by World War II. Like millions of other Europeans, Chim had suffered the pain of dislocation and the loss of family in a concentration camp.

His profound empathy for his subjects is evident in his postwar work on child refugees. In this volume, Chim emerges as both a talented reporter and a creator of elegant compositions of startling grace and beauty. The book places Chim's work within the broader context of 1930s-1950s photography and European politics.

Photo albums from the archives of the iconic chronicler of New York's 1980s rap, hip-hop and Black culture.

The influential Brooklyn-based photographer Jamel Shabazz has been making portraits of New Yorkers for more than 40 years, creating an archive of cultural shifts and struggles across the city. His portraits of different communities underscore the street as a space for self-presentation, whether through fashion or pose. In every instance Shabazz aims, in his words, to represent individuals and communities with “honor and dignity.” This book―awarded the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize―presents, for the first time, Shabazz’s work from the 1970s to ’90s as it exists in his archive: small prints thematically grouped and sequenced in traditional family photo albums that function as portable portfolios.

Shabazz began making portraits in the mid-1970s in Brooklyn, Queens, the West Village and Harlem. His camera was also at his side while working as an officer at Rikers Island in the 1980s, where he took portraits of inmates. This book features selections from over a dozen albums, many previously unseen, and includes his earliest photographs as well as images taken inside Rikers Island, all accompanied by essays that situate Shabazz’s work within the broader history of photography.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Jamel Shabazz (born 1960) picked up his first camera at the age of 15 and began documenting his communities, inspired by photographers such as Leonard Freed, James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including those at the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Shabazz is the author of Back in the Days (2001) and Sights in the City (2017).

Inspiration is not a far-flung concept, out of reach to all but a few great artists. It's not random luck either, hitting people like lottery winners. As a photographer its possible to train your mind to see the possibilities in any situation, and Inspiration in Photography will show you how.

Shaden’s book offers a plethora of gorgeous imagery as well as case studies of other photographers showcasing a variety of styles. This book appeals to Adobe Photoshop pros as well as amateur photographers looking to diversify their portfolio.

“Of all the amazing things that photography can do, it all means nothing without inspiration,” she said. “I believe that everyone can find inspiration if they open themselves up to it. And I believe in the power of imagination and in using that imagination to create works of art.”

Shadenblogs regularly, hosts photography workshops across the country, and offers inspirational and instructional videos on her You Tube channel. Her work was recently chosen by Ron Howard as inspiration for a short film in Canon’s Imagin8tion competition.

Fine art photographer Brooke Shaden channels the light and darkness inherent in humanity through her self-portraits. Embodying both rapture and horror, Shaden blurs the line between fantasy and reality, tapping into the universality of our primal fears and dreams. From death and rebirth to beauty and decay, Shaden’s debut art catalogue, Reflection, takes readers beyond the realm of belief to the outer limits of imagination.

Bronx Boys presents an extended photo essay that chronicles the lives of these kids growing up in the Bronx. Shames captures the brutality of the times—the fights, shootings, arrests, and drug deals—that eventually left many of the young men he photographed dead or in jail. But he also records the joy and humanity of the Bronx boys, who mature, fall in love, and have children of their own.

One young man Shames mentored, Martin Dones, provides riveting details of living in the Bronx and getting caught up in violence and drugs before caring adults helped him turn his life around. Challenging our perceptions of a neighborhood that is too easily dismissed as irredeemable, Bronx Boys shows us that hope can survive on even the meanest streets.

Photographer Richard Sharum travelled across Cuba to document the lives of isolated farmers, or ‘Campesinos,’ and their wider communities at a time of national transition.

The histories of these communities have formed the backbone of Cuba, and yet they are rarely depicted in photographic representations of the country. Sharum began researching Campesino communities in late 2015 and his resulting black and white photographs depict the intertwined relationship of people and the land they depend on.

In Spina America, photographer Richard Sharum embarks on a deeply introspective journey through the central "spine" of the United States, seeking to explore the elements that unify the nation’s identity amidst its current divisions. Motivated by personal and national anxiety over America’s fractured state, Sharum set out to discover what remains of the collective hope for unity. His journey takes him through a 100-mile-wide corridor along the geographic center of the U.S., covering parts of the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas—areas often dismissed as "flyover" country.

Over the course of his project, Sharum spoke to more than 4,000 individuals and captured over 14,000 photographs, documenting the lives of a diverse array of people who call this region home. His subjects range from Mennonites, Lutherans, and Indigenous Americans to Mexican-Americans and farmers of German, Scandinavian, and Ukrainian descent. Sharum's lens also focuses on the daily lives of mechanics, surgeons, police officers, prisoners, exotic dancers, politicians, and migrant laborers, all set against the vast and varied backdrop of America's heartland.

Spina America is divided into chapters that highlight different aspects of life in the central U.S., giving each individual featured equal status and space within the narrative. Sharum’s portraits are a tribute to the diversity and resilience of the people living in this often-overlooked region. Through chance encounters and intimate moments, Sharum paints a vivid picture of contemporary American life, challenging preconceived notions of what constitutes the country’s "national character."

The final chapter, Peril and Promise, powerfully contrasts images of decay, hate, and danger with those of duty, community, and hope. This juxtaposition serves as both a stark warning and a heartfelt plea for unity, emphasizing the precarious state of America’s future while also holding onto the belief in the power of togetherness. Sharum’s work in *Spina America* is a poignant reflection on the state of the nation, offering both a critique and a reminder of what still holds America together.

A comprehensive survey of master railroad photographer Jim Shaughnessy's images of the railroad in North America in the transitional era from steam locomotives to diesel- powered engines.

Jim Shaughnessy is an essential witness to six decades of change in North American railroading, from the late 1940s into the twenty-first century. His photographic achievement is one of the pinnacles of railroad photography as a genre, which he, along with others of his generation, raised to the level of art, worthy of consideration beyond the world of trains and the interest of rail fans.

The early years of his career coincided with the dramatic shift in the railroad industry from the steam locomotive to the diesel engine. During those transition years of the 1940s and 1950s, Shaughnessy was there to record every nuance and every detail with uncommon insight and unrelenting dedication. Shaughnessy loved steam, but he also embraced diesel. It was a period of transition, and it would only happen once, and he made the most of it, for he understood that he was a witness to history.

Born and raised in Troy, New York, a city with a deep industrial heritage rooted in iron and steel, Shaughnessy began by documenting the railroad scene in the Northeastern United States. His interests and travels also took him to other areas of the country to document the Rio Grande narrow gauge in Colorado and the Union Pacific Big Boys in Wyoming, and into Canada and Mexico as well.

Shaughnessy distinguished himself from the previous generation of railroad photographers by thinking more photographically and exploring the creative potential of the medium, challenging the conservative vision that had dominated railroad photography through to mid-century. This led him to see beyond the trains themselves to visually interpret the industrial and cultural landscape through which they moved. And so he documented the railroad environment, set within village, town, and city as well as rural and wilderness landscapes. He not only photographed the trains and locomotives, but contextualized the railroad by depicting the personnel, the infrastructure, and architecture, documenting for posterity the workers behind the machines that operated in the depots, roundhouses, and back shops. He captured a sense of place and time in astutely observed moments during both day and night in all seasons. Particularly striking are his images of trains at night-as author and historian Lucius Beebe once described Shaughnessy's work, "He was master in the massive effects of black and white."
Drawn from a lifetime's work and an archive of some 60,000 images, the principal focus of this revealing new book is on the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps the most dynamic era of North American railroading.

The pictures in Ether, Fazal Sheikh's first book in color, were made as a way to honor the experience of death and to try to comprehend its significance. Benares (Varanasi) is one of India's sacred cities, where many Hindus come to die in the belief that they will find salvation. As he walked its streets by night, Sheikh observed sleeping figures, shrouded in blankets, lost to an oblivion that seemed, in that holy city, to offer a simulacrum of death.

In watching these ambiguous figures, which hover in the imagination between a dream state, sleep, and death, Sheikh recalled his own experience with his dying father and their passage together through his father's final days. He remembered it as an invaluable period of emotional connection with the body and soul of the person he knew and loved, a connection that reached back to his paternal ancestors, who had traveled south from northern India a century before. To lose oneself in sleep is to abandon the senses and leave the way open to a dream state in which mind and body separate.

A tender, joyous portrait of the thriving lesbian subculture in ’90s San Francisco.

In the 1990s, queer youth, outcasts and artists flocked to San Francisco to experiment with art, self-expression, style and gender and to find community. Rent was affordable, paving the way for queer bars, clubs, tattoo shops, galleries, cafés, bookstores and women-owned businesses to emerge. A new wave of feminism embraced gender fluidity, and butch/femme culture flourished. The Mission district was the center of this queer cultural renaissance, and the feeling of community there was palpable.

Chloe Sherman was both a member of this community and an ardent visual chronicler. Her documentary photographic work on 35mm film stems from a commitment to capturing the vibrancy, tenderness, individuality, resilience and joy within this subculture that was derided by mainstream society. Distilling the spirit of the time, her debut monograph is a candid portrait of a vibrant era that connects current and future generations to the pulse of San Francisco at a pivotal chapter in queer history.

Chloe Sherman (born 1969) arrived in San Francisco in 1991 and earned her BFA in Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured in magazines such as Rolling Stone and Interview.

Featuring 230 key works from Cindy Sherman's most celebrated photo series--including Untitled Film Stills, Centerfolds, Cover Girls, Fashion, and Society Portraits--this is the first book to address her work through the lens of portraiture and style in the era of social media and selfies.

Cindy Sherman is among the most influential artists of her generation. Using herself as a model in a range of costumes in invented situations, she plays with images created and popularized by mass media, popular culture, and fine art. Television, advertising, magazines, fashion, and Old Master paintings--they are all fair game.

Whether using makeup, costumes, props, or prosthetics to manipulate her own appearance, or devising elaborate narrative tableaux, the entire body of forty years' work constitutes a distinctive response to contemporary culture.

Published to accompany the first major survey of Cindy Sherman's work in the United States in nearly 15 years, this publication presents a stunning range of work from the groundbreaking artist's 35-year career. Showcasing approximately 180 photographs from the mid-1970s to the present, including new works made for the exhibition and never before published, the volume is a vivid exploration of Sherman's sustained investigation into the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation.

The book highlights major bodies of work including her seminal Untitled Film Stills (1977-80); centerfolds (1981); history portraits (1989-90); head shots (2000-2002); and two recent series on the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status. An essay by curator Eva Respini provides an overview of Sherman's career, weaving together art historical analysis and discussions of the artist's working methods, and a contribution by art historian Johanna Burton offers a critical re-examination of Sherman's work in light of her recent series. A conversation between Cindy Sherman and filmmaker John Waters provides an enlightening view into the creative process.

The Phaidon Focus series presents engaging, up–to–date introductions to art’s modern masters. Compact, affordable, and beautifully produced, the books in this growing series are written by top experts in their field. Each features a complete chronological survey of an artist’s life and career, interspersed throughout with one–page "Focus" essays examining specific bodies of work.

This magnificent book encompasses the full scope of Cindy Sherman’s career, with a special focus on the cinematic quality of her oeuvre. Known for slipping seamlessly behind the rotating masks of fairy tale characters, centerfold models, historical figures, and clowns, Cindy Sherman tackles popular tropes in her photographs and brilliantly dismantles the stereotypes surrounding the roles she embodies.

Featuring illustrations that draw from the Broad collection, the world’s largest collection of Sherman’s photography, as well as other sources, this book traces Sherman’s most important works from 1977 to the present. Curator Philipp Kaiser, taking his cue from Sherman’s choice to title the book and exhibition after Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film Imitation of Life, analyzes Sherman’s work from the standpoint of cinema and traces how such a reading can impact the critical discourse around her photographs.

The book also features a fascinating conversation between director Sofia Coppola and Cindy Sherman, which centers on Sherman’s use of filmic techniques to examine women’s roles and identities across a wide array of popular representations. This generously illustrated volume offers readers an intriguing new perspective from which to understand one of today’s most important photographers.

American artist Cindy Sherman creates staged and manipulated photographs that draw on popular culture and art history to explore female identity. Her art embodies two developments in the art world: the impact of postmodern theory on art practice; and the rise of photography and mass-media techniques as modes of artistic expression.

This volume, published on the occasion of an international touring exhibition, presents over 200 images from the breadth of Sherman's work, from the "Untitled Film Stills" of the 1970s to series such as "Centerfolds", "Fashion", "Disasters", "Fairy Tales" and "History Portraits". Essayists Cruz, Jones and Smith offer insights into Sherman's art from several vantage points, positioning it within the trajectory of feminist art history and revealing her influence since the 1970s.

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives.

Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom.

Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichas.

For more than 30 years now, Cindy Sherman has been enacting a gamut of female roles and identities. Contrary to popular belief, the famous Untitled Film Stills (1978-80) are not Sherman's earliest works, but rather those photographs she took as a student at State University College at Buffalo, between 1975 and 1977.

During those years, Sherman cast aside the career in painting she had initially imagined for herself and began to study photography: "I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead," she later recalled. Cindy Sherman: The Early Works, 1975-1977 gathers all of the artist's work from this decisive phase, in which Sherman was formulating her conceptions of gender and identity construction, gathering her toolkit of props (wigs, makeup, costumes) and becoming friends with artists such as Robert Longo (with whom she would establish the Hallwalls gallery in New York).

With nearly 300 plates, including numerous previously unknown photographs, plus scholarly research by editor Gabriele Schor, this substantial volume adds a wealth of new information to our understanding of Sherman's oeuvre.

Throughout her career, Cindy Sherman (born 1954) has been interested in exposing the darker sides of human nature, noticeable both in her selection of subject matter (fairytales, disasters, sex, horror, surrealism) and in her disquieting interpretations of well-established photographic genres, such as film stills, fashion photography and society portraiture.

Delving relentlessly into the more grotesque extremes of delusion, vanity and self-image, Sherman probes deeply into the masks and distractions we all employ to set apart our public and our private personae, and challenges us to consider how bizarre and unconvincing our attempts at projecting a semblance of normality can be. Attracting a certain degree of notoriety, intense and ongoing public interest as well as extensive critical acclaim, Sherman's works continue to challenge and intrigue in equal measure.

This richly illustrated publication deploys a selection of works from across her career to highlight and acknowledge these particular aspects of her art. These images are accompanied by more recent work, as well as essays from well-known authors, filmmakers and artists who likewise deal with the grotesque, the uncanny and the extraordinary in their practice.

In Vanishing Points, Michael Sherwin locates and photographs significant sites of indigenous American presence, including sacred landforms, earthworks, documented archaeological sites and contested battlegrounds. The sites he chooses to visit are literal and metaphorical vanishing points. They are places in the landscape where two lines, or cultures, converge. They are also actual archaeological sites where the sparse evidence of a culture's once vibrant existence has all but disappeared. While visiting these sites, Sherwin reflects on the monuments modern culture will leave behind and what the archaeological evidence of our civilization will reveal about our time on Earth.

The Passion of Trees is a collection of photographs taken in Iran and Azerbaijan's stunning nature. However, this is a collection of nature photographs with a difference. Over the years, Ali has witnessed the beauty of the forests that he has loved since his childhood severely decline. As the number of roads and dams have increased, and more and more of the forests have been destroyed, the situation has become increasingly desperate.

The Passion of Trees is Ali's stark reminder that the natural world deserves our care. Through his photography, Ali encourages viewers to consider the world around them and to look upon nature with a different perspective, to consider the very real possibility that without swift action, the devastating effects of climate change and the decline of countless animals and plants.

Stephen Shore's images from his travels across America in 1972-73 are considered the benchmark for documenting the extraordinary in the ordinary and continue to influence photographers today.

The original edition of American Surfaces, published by Phaidon in 2005, brought together 320 photographs sequenced in the order in which they were originally documented. Now, in the age of Instagram and nearly 50 years after Shore embarked on his cross-country journey, this revised and expanded edition will bring this seminal work back into focus.

An updated edition of Shore's groundbreaking book, now with previously unpublished photographs and a new introduction.

Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is indisputably a canonic body of work - a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, despite having been the focus of numerous shows and books, including the eponymous 1982 Aperture classic (expanded and reissued several times), this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety.

Over the past five years, Shore has scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture has invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images. Each portfolio offers an idiosyncratic and revealing commentary on why this body of work continues to astound; how it has impacted the work of new generations of photography and the medium at large; and proposes new insight on Shore’s unique vision of America as transmuted in this totemic series.

Texts and image selections by Wes Anderson, Quentin Bajac, David Campany, Paul Graham, Guido Guidi, Takashi Homma, An-My Leê, Michael Lesy, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Francine Prose, Ed Ruscha, Britt Salvesen, Taryn Simon, Thomas Struth, and Lynne Tillman

In 1977, Stephen Shore travelled across New York state, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio – an area in the midst of industrial decline that would eventually be known as the Rust Belt. Shore met steelworkers who had been thrown out of work by plant closures and photographed their suddenly fragile world: deserted factories, lonely bars, dwindling high streets, and lovingly decorated homes.

Across these images, a prosperous middle America is seen teetering on the precipice of disastrous decline. Hope and despair alike lurk restlessly behind the surfaces of shop fronts, domestic interiors, and the fraught expressions of those who confront Shore’s 4x5” view camera. Originally commissioned as an extended photographic report for Fortune Magazine in the vein of Walker Evans, Shore’s multifaceted investigation has only gained political salience in the intervening years.

Shore’s subjects – including workers, union leaders, and family members – had voted for Jimmy Carter the year preceding his visit; now he found them disillusioned with the new president, fated to leave behind the Democratic party and become the ‘Reagan Democrats’. Through unfailingly engrossing images by one of the world’s acknowledged masters, Steel Town provides an immersive portrait of a time and place whose significance to our own is ever more urgent. With a text by Helen C. Epstein, author, translator and professor of human rights and public health.

Organized into 60 thematic sections, this magisterial volume provides a complete overview of Shore's career―from the early portraits of Warhol's Factory to his latest Instagram images.

One of the most influential photographers of our time, Stephen Shore has often been categorized as one of a group of artists of the 1970s who captured American popular culture in straightforward, unglamorous color images. While this is true, it is only part of the story: Shore has worked with many forms of photography, switching from cheap automatic cameras to large format in the 1970s, pioneering the use of color film before returning to black and white in the 1990s, and, in the 2000s, taking up the opportunities offered by digital photography, digital printing and social media.

Published to accompany the first comprehensive survey of Stephen Shore’s work in the US, this catalog reflects the full range of his contribution, including the gelatin silver prints he made as a teenager (and sold to The Museum of Modern Art); his photographs of the scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory, in New York; the color images he made during cross-country road trips in the 1970s; his recent explorations of Israel, the West Bank and Ukraine; and his current work on digital platforms, including Instagram.

This book offers a fresh, kaleidoscopic vision of the artist’s extensive career, presenting more than 400 reproductions arranged in a thematic framework, each grouping accompanied by a short but wide-ranging essay. This unique encyclopedia-style format makes visible the artist’s versatility of technique and the diversity of his output, reflecting his singular vision and uncompromising pursuit of photography’s possibilities.

Shore’s life and career have been deep, varied and rich, and Survey reflects it all, with panoramas of New York alongside landscapes of the Arizona desert, Walker Evans-inspired portraits of humble country folk, archeological photos, and tableaux of our own Hudson Valley, to name but a few subjects. (Shore, who has directed Bard’s photography program since 1982, lives in Tivoli.)

Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore's legendary Uncommon Places has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape inaugurated a vital photographic tradition.

Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, published by Aperture in 2005, presented a definitive collection of the landmark series, and in the span of a decade has become a contemporary classic. Now, for this lushly produced reissue, the artist has added nearly 20 rediscovered images and a statement explaining what it means to expand a classic series. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore retains precise systems of gestures in composition and light through which a hotel bedroom or a building on a side street assumes both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance.

An essay by critic and curator Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and a conversation with Shore by writer Lynne Tillman examine his methodology and elucidate his roots in Pop and Conceptual art. The texts are illustrated with reproductions from Shore's earlier series American Surfaces and Amarillo: Tall in Texas.

The Case Study House program (1945–1966) was an exceptional, innovative event in the history of American architecture and remains to this day unique. The program, which concentrated on the Los Angeles area and oversaw the design of 36 prototype homes, sought to make available plans for modern residences that could be easily and cheaply constructed during the postwar building boom.

The program’s chief motivating force was Arts & Architecture editor John Entenza, a champion of modernism who had all the right connections to attract some of architecture’s greatest talents, such as Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eero Saarinen. Highly experimental, the program generated houses that were designed to redefine the modern home, and had a pronounced influence on architecture―American and international―both during the program’s existence and even to this day.

TASCHEN brings you a retrospective of the entire program with comprehensive documentation, brilliant photographs from the period and, for the houses still in existence, contemporary photos, as well as extensive floor plans and sketches.

With a life and career spanning nearly a century, Julius Shulman is credited with furthering the Mid-Century Modern movement through his flawless photographs of the pioneering architecture of Richard Neutra and Charles Eames, among others. While Shulman's pictures comprise the most recognizable images of Southern California Modernism, this monograph presents many never before seen views of Los Angeles and it's environs, from a rural Canoga Park to new Palm Springs.

This book documents the rise of Wilshire Boulevard and the emerging Century City, as well as landmarks, from Sid Grauman's Chinese Theatre to The Watts Towers. Many of these Los Angeles buildings and neighborhoods have since been overhauled, torn down, or otherwise altered beyond recognition, making these images lasting testaments to their existence. Selected from his personal collection as well as his official archives, the photographs represent not only lesser-known and never-before-seen material, but also some of Shulman's own personal favorites.

Through Julius Shulman’s lens, the architecture of Southern California became iconic images of modernism. His photographs heralded the glamor and casual elegance of a lifestyle and architecture that has become revered worldwide. Focusing on the desert paradise of Palm Springs, which was his seminal crucible, this book presents his masterpieces. Images range from Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House and Albert Frey’s Raymond Loewy House, to Paul R. Williams’ house for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Frank Sinatra’s house, John Lautner’s house for Bob Hope, as well as other famous landmarks.

The book features more than sixty buildings by fifteen of the most notable mid-twentieth-century architects. With new photography and images culled from his personal collection as well as the Getty Center, this book includes many images never before seen.

Mali Twist offers an essential and immersive survey of the beloved African photographer Malick Sidibé - nicknamed “the eye of Bamako” - who chronicled the exuberant youth culture of his native Bamako, Mali, in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

The book is structured around his famous series: studio portraits in which young people pose alone or in groups, sometimes accompanied by quirky accessories; photographs of parties that radiate spontaneity and joy; and the comparatively lesser-known outdoor photography, depicting scenes at (for example) the edge of the Niger River, or at local swimming pools and villages. In addition to these iconic series, many previously unpublished photographs are gathered here, as well as archival documents.

The series are punctuated by the authors’ texts, including testimony from friends of the photographer. With elegant paper changes and fabulous printing, this volume is a celebration of the postwar African vernacular.

Following the success of "Les Françaises," Sonia Sieff ventures into new territory with her unparalleled exploration of the male form in her latest book.

In her previous work, Sieff offered a feminist perspective on the female nude, earning acclaim for her unique approach. Now, she turns her attention to men from diverse backgrounds, capturing them in various settings across France, Europe, and even Africa. In this second volume of nude portraiture, Sieff celebrates body diversity and positivity, presenting fifty men whose stories are as captivating as they are sensual.

With an expert eye for composition, Sieff skillfully stages over 100 photographs that offer glimpses into the inner lives of men in moments of repose and activity. Each image captures the individuality of its subject while also reflecting the distinctive atmosphere of its location. From the vibrant landscapes of the Mediterranean to the intimate settings of Parisian bedrooms, Sieff's work offers a fresh and compelling perspective on the male nude.

In this ambitious work, Hans Silvester turns his photographic eye toward ancient Africa, the birthplace of humanity. Silvester was essentially adopted by his subjects during his travels, and his stunning color photographs present a rare, intimate view of their world. The first volume of this deluxe two-volume set presents the everyday lives of the Omo people, their rituals, parades, children’s games, and even their battles.

In the second volume, each photograph becomes a masterpiece of abstract art, revealing close-ups of the tribes’ traditional body paintings. Silvester’s accompanying text traces his journey to the Horn of Africa, revealing the fascinating beauty of a world now in danger of extinction.

In the Omo Valley, the cradle of humanity, in southwest Ethiopia, the Suri people adorn their naked bodies almost daily with the finest materials that nature has to offer: necklaces made of branches and bark, crowns of flowers, fruits or seeds, plant-based paints... Serving as both a playground and an experimental ground, women and men themselves become unique artistic creations, in harmony with their land.

Hans Silvester invites us to discover, page by page, this tradition that imbues the environment with such a powerful sacred character. The aesthetic ingenuity of the Suri, enhancing their skin and appearances, provides a vibrant testimony of their culture, in the face of climate change threatening their lost paradise.

Hans Silvester's talent, accompanied by the words of Éric Fottorino, reveals the beauty of these magnified bodies and the intensity of the ancestral bond with nature, like a declaration to a world doomed to disappear.

The scene of tribal conflicts and guerrilla incursions, Ethiopia’s Omo Valley is also home to fascinating rites and traditions that have survived for thousands of years.

The nomadic people who inhabit the valley share a gift for body painting and elaborate adornments borrowed from nature, and Hans Silvester has captured the results in a series of photographs made over the course of numerous trips. 160 color photographs

Originally trained as a photojournalist and bookmaker, Dayanita Singh (born 1961) has exhibited widely both in India and abroad. Her work often takes a curious view of the everyday, and is characterized by an unsparing view of her subject matter. Best known for her portraits of India’s urban middle and upper classes, her images of people working, celebrating or resting depict everyday life without embellishment, capturing insights that often challenge exotic stereotypes in the West. Published alongside an exhibition at Hayward Gallery, Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer<\!s>marks a turning point in the career of this artist. For the first time in print, this publication presents a detailed overview of Singh’s Museums--wooden structures that introduce a radical new way of experiencing Singh’s work and photography in general. The book includes images from throughout Singh’s career, a new essay from Geoff Dyer and an in-depth interview with Singh by Hayward Chief Curator, Stephanie Rosenthal.

Dayanita Singh's Museum of Chance is a book about how life unfolds, and asks to be recorded and edited, along and off the axis of time. The inscrutably woven photographic sequence of Singh's Go Away Closer has now grown into a labyrinth of connections and correspondences. The thread through this novel-like web of happenings is that elusive entity called Chance. It is Chance that seems to disperse as well as gather fragments or clusters of experience, creating a form of simultaneity that is realized in the idea and matter of the book, with its interlaced or parallel timelines and patterns of recurrence and return. The 88 quadratone images in the book will also appear on the front and back covers in random pairs, transforming each copy of the book into a distinct piece of work by the author.

On Singh’s inventive explorations of archives―with an essay by Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk.

This book celebrates Dayanita Singh (born 1961) as the 2022 winner of the Hasselblad Award, considered the most prestigious international photography prize. Sea of Files highlights Singh’s consistent and unique engagement with the archive, both literally and metaphorically. The book includes Singh’s associative visual essay Sea of Files in its entirety, as well as―for the first time in a publication―Museum of Innocence (The Madras Chapter) and other series engaging with the meanings and materiality of archives. A personal essay by Orhan Pamuk explores Singh’s photographs of state archives, for him images of aura and melancholy that evoke the “texture of memory,” “an idea of poetic decrepitude and a sense of profundity.” The book furthermore shows how Singh has paved new ways for engaging with photography, be it through humanist portraiture or her innovative display structures and book objects that recast conventions of the museum and publishing.

The book is well known as Dayanita Singh’s (born 1961) primary medium, one she explores to create new relationships between photography, publishing, the exhibition and the museum. But where did her passion for the book as the ideal vessel for her photos, for the stories she tells, begin? The answer lies in Zakir Hussain, a handmade maquette Singh crafted in 1986 as her first project as a graphic design student. The protagonist of Singh’s photo essay is the Indian classical tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, whom she captured on the stage and at home with his family. Surrounding the photos are handwritten texts gleaned from interviews Singh made with her sitters, including insights from Hussain himself. This Steidl facsimile edition is scanned from Singh’s original maquette and reproduces all its “imperfections” and idiosyncrasies, including her pencilled notes about the book’s construction―indications of the influential book-maker to come. Shanay Jhaveri’s accompanying essay discusses how Singh intuitively assembled the book.

Siskind’s style of gesture and nuance, a new form of visual calligraphy, dominated his work for the next forty years, and ran parallel to the developments of his colleagues, the abstract expressionists.

Siskind was not only a critical figure in modern photography, but he also influenced the work of painters of that period, including Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Rauschenberg. Aaron Siskind 100, the book and exhibition, honors the legacy of this legendary artist through six decades of an incredible photographic journey.

Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) was a major figure in the history of American photography. A leading documentary photographer who was active in the New York Photo League in the 1930s, Siskind moved beyond the social realism of his early work as he increasingly came to view photography as a visual language of signs, metaphors, and symbols—the equivalent of poetry and music.

Through the forties and fifties, he developed new techniques to photograph details and fragments of ordinary, commonplace materials. This radical new work transformed Siskind's image-making from straight photography to abstraction, from documentation to expressive art. His concern with shape, line, gesture, and the picture plane prompted immediate comparison with abstract expressionist painting, particularly with the art of Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. It took some years for Siskind's unprecedented photography to gain full acceptance, but, by the 1970s, he was an acknowledged master, publishing and exhibiting widely.

Siskind was also one of the founding donors who established the archive at the Center for Creative Photography.

An excellent survey of Siskind's work; produced in conjunction with an exhibit at the MoMA, Oxford, England. Photographs by Aaron Siskind; introduction by Peter Turner. 64 pages; 52 full-page b&w plates; 9.5 x 8.25 inches. Chronology, bibliography.

A portrait of Black urban America and the people, culture, and lifestyles of Harlem during the 1930s.

The evocative photos of Harlem through the lens of Aaron Siskind's camera, accompanied by text from the Federal Writers Project, collected and edited by Ann Banks. Foreword by Gordon Parks; Introduction by Ann Banks. Included are interviews with Harlem residents, performers, shopkeepers, etc.; children's street rhymes, rent parties, prostitutes, Ralph Ellison, Father Divine, the Apollo Theatre, and much more. A real bit of history of Harlem.

Presents a selection of the photographer's most recent work and includes photographs of abstract images taken in locations around the world.

From ballroom dancers to bodybuilders, Neal Slavin’s photographic exploration of ’70s America captures both intricate group dynamics and broader societal values. In the 1970s, Slavin traveled across the United States, photographing a wide variety of groups—from bingo players and Star Trek convention attendees to religious congregations and bodybuilding competitions. Although his portraits are posed, Slavin encouraged his subjects to arrange themselves, allowing natural hierarchies and social cues to surface.

Describing his approach, Slavin notes: “I walk a delicate line between providing general direction and letting the group express itself freely. I watch as individuals jockey for position, some stepping forward with the biggest smiles, while others fade into the background, content to be part of something larger—the group. My role is to capture a complete image, embracing the quirks of human behavior that arise naturally.” He adds, “I want my work to affirm our sense of identity within our public persona, and to celebrate the joy of being together rather than apart. Through my lens, I aim to offer a glimpse of that collective human spirit.”

Originally published in 1976, *When Two or More Are Gathered Together* offers a distinct portrait of America, highlighting its ideals of individuality and freedom, frozen in the nostalgia of the ’70s—a time distant from both today’s realities and mental landscape. This new expanded edition, edited with contributions by Kevin Moore, includes group portraits spanning 50 years.

Neal Slavin (b. 1941) graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture. He has published three photobooks: Portugal (1971), When Two or More Are Gathered Together (1976), and Britons (1986). Slavin also directed and produced the 2001 film Focus, adapted from Arthur Miller’s novel.

East to East describes a journey from Eastern Europe to China, bringing together work made over an extended period of time. Klavdij Sluban's use of deep blacks and backlit silhouettes imbues his work with a highly individual photographic style. These powerful images are remarkably moody and atmospheric. Published simultaneously in six countries in six languages.

Klavdij Sluban is an established photographer of Slovenian origin based in Paris. He is included in the Photo Poche series of books, which feature the world's leading photographers. He has been awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence and the Prix Niépce.

One of the greatest artist-photographers working today, Smith moved to New York in the 1970s and began to make images charged with startling beauty and spiritual energy. This long-awaited monograph brings together four decades of Smith’s work, celebrating her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, dynamic street scenes, and deep devotion to theater, music, poetry, and dance―from the “Pittsburgh Cycle” plays of August Wilson to the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra.

With never-before-seen images, and a range of illuminating essays and interviews, this tribute to Smith’s singular vision promises to be an enduring contribution to the history of American photography.

Rodney Smith's first book is a compilation of images taken in and around Jerusalem. In some we see views of the resonant landscapes of the Holy Land. But Smith's primary concern is the human element in the landscape. In his portraits, which suggest the immense ethnic range of the inhabitants of Israel, he seeks to express one central quality of the human spirit: the indomitable will to persevere and prevail.

In the tradition of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, Rodney Smith has a signature, timeless style. This dazzling collection, now in paperback and with a framable print, celebrates 50 years of Smith’s photography.

Rodney Smith bridges the gap between commercial photography and art, between the real world we live in and the artist’s world of the imagination. His images—silhouettes and skylines, a man in a hat, elegant women in lush gardens—are by now familiar to us. Rodney Smith Photographs presents the man behind the photographs. A selection of pictures spanning four decades, organized thematically, stand alongside personal reflections drawn from Smith’s popular blog. It reveals that the photographer’s signature style is the product of his unusual background, his unique perspective, and his many years of self-analysis: in short, Smith’s photographs are also pictures of their creator.

Mystery and manners, romance and fun—the sophisticated compositions and stylish characters in the extraordinary pictures of fashion photographer Rodney Smith (1947–2016) exist in a timeless world of his imagination. Born in New York City, Smith started out as a photo-essayist, turned to portrait photography, and found his niche, and greatest success, in fashion photography. Inspired by W. Eugene Smith, taught by Walker Evans, and devoted to the techniques of Ansel Adams, Smith was driven by the dual ideals of technical mastery and pure beauty. This lavish volume features nearly two hundred reproductions of Smith’s images—many that have never before been published—and weaves together a biocritical essay by Getty Museum curator Paul Martineau and a technical assessment of Smith’s production by the Center for Creative Photography’s chief curator, Rebecca A. Senf. It maps Smith’s creative trajectory—including his introduction to photography, early personal projects, teaching, commissioned pieces, and career in fashion—and provides insight into his personal life and character, contextualizing his work and creative tendencies within his privileged but lonely upbringing and complex emotional and psychological makeup. Rodney Smith is the definitive record of the life’s work and worldview of a truly original artist.

Let Truth Be The Prejudice documents the life and work of W. Eugene Smith, a man whose work expanded the range and depth of photography, bringing new aesthetic and moral power to the photo essay. Smith was born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, and raised according to traditional American values, believing in the nobility of America and the injustice of war. He began taking pictures with his mother's camera while still a boy and continued this practice throughout his schooling. In 1937 his burning ambition took him to New York City, where his rise as a professional photographer was meteoric.

Before he was twenty-one, Smith had placed hundreds of photographs in the major picture magazines of the time. Dramatic composition, a hard-edged brilliance, and a mastery of lighting were evident even in this early work. But the moment of true ground-breaking would occur during World War II. It was when Smith went ashore with the Marines at Saipan, Guam, and Iwo Jima that his work and his sense of moral responsibility came together. He wrote: "Each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future-- causing them caution and remembrance and realization." Breaking from the concerns of the mass media, his personal priorities were born. Smith's war photographs earned him repeated and justified comparisons to Mathew Brady. His coverage of American prisoner-of-war camps helped convince the Japanese that their fears were exaggerated, and stopped the suicide of thousands of terrified citizens upon the advance of American troops. This would not be the last time that Smith's work would change as well as document history.

Minamata is a fishing and farming town on the Japanese island of Kyushu. As many as 10,000 of the residents fell ill due to methyl mercury poison from contaminated fish. W. Eugene Smith the renowned photojournalist created with Aileen Smith this enduring document that speaks of the pollution and ruined bodies struggling against the power of a great industrial state.

W. Eugene Smith, an icon in the field of twentieth-century photography, is best known as the master of the humanistic photographic essay. Smith’s most expressive and frequently reproduced images - World War II combat, the country doctor and nurse-midwife, Pittsburgh, Albert Schweitzer in Africa, rural Spanish villagers, and the mentally ill in Haiti—have altered our perception and understanding of the world.

The American photojournalist W. Eugene Smith revolutionized the photo-essay form with the works he published in Life magazine between 1948 and 1956. This monograph reproduces images from six classic sequences of this era: Country Doctor (1948), which portrays the selfless and sometimes frustrating work of a doctor in rural America; Spanish Village (1950), perhaps the most powerful photographic study of 1950s Spain; Nurse Midwife (1951), which examines the life of a black woman in the American south; A Man of Mercy (1954), which documents Dr. Albert Schweitzer's humanitarian work in Africa; Pittsburgh (1955), Smith's first freelance assignment, previously unpublished; and Minamata 91971-1973), a photo-essay recording the effects caused by a mercury spill in a region inhabited by Japanese fishermen.

Together, these six classic documents of twentieth-century photography affirm Smith as an impassioned conscience, with practical ends in mind for his work: "I put such passion and energy into my photographic work that, more than their being just for art's sake, I prefer to think that my photographs push someone to action, to do something, to solve something," he one wrote. This volume includes previously unpublished writings by Smith that elucidate his field techniques and guiding principles, as well as the memoir "A Walk to a Paradise Garden," which tells the tale of his most acclaimed photograph.

This Peanut Portfolio Book includes one signed and numbered original photograph and one signed and numbered hardcover book, 40 pages, 18 color plates.

Aline Smithson's award-winning portraiture has been shown in numerous exhibitions and publications internationally and is held in many public and private collections. Smithson has also exhibited her portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London and was commissioned to create a series of portraits for the Smithsonian Art and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Fugue State asks us to think about the permanence of photographs. Both digital and analog images can be destroyed by time, and here, Smithson hastens the process herself. When has destruction been so beautiful?

Created over an almost 20-year span and drawing from 18 bodies of work, this is the first published monograph of Aline Smithson’s work and features her defining series Arrangement in Green and Black: Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother. From black-and-white to hand-painted photographs, this collection of portraits combines humor and family to create a universal expression of motherhood, to capture the essence of childhood, and to examine created realities, the poignancy of childhood, and the pathos of aging and relationships. She brings a background in painting and fashion to her images, but at the heart of her work is her ability to recognize the inner self of her subjects. The photographer considers all her portraits as a reflection of herself and the stories she wants to tell and in this way she has created a visual language that is her own unique autobiography.

South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa (born 1995) began this project after finding a family portrait with his sister Ziyanda’s face cut out. He describes her as a secretive, rebellious and rough presence and recalls the dark day when she chased him and he was hit by a car: she disappeared hours later and returned only a decade later, ill. By this time, Sobekwa had become a photographer and realized the family had no picture of her. However, Ziyanda died before he could photograph her.

Employing a scrapbook aesthetic with handwritten notes, I Carry Her Photo with Me is a means for Sobekwa to engage both with the memory of his sister and the wider implications of such disappearances―a troubling part of South Africa’s history. The book complements his wider work on fragmentation, poverty and the long-reaching ramifications of apartheid and colonialism across all levels of South African society.

This volume is the definitive collection for all 74 of Sokolsky’s printed images from the Bubble and Fly series, including more than a dozen previously unreleased and alternate visions of his iconic series, behind the scenes documentary photos, and outtakes, and an intimate intisght into Sokolsky’s process and inspiration as he developed his incomparable Fly series. Each copy is signed and numbered by the artist and is delivered with an etched Lucite slipcase designed by Sokolsky himself.

At the age of twenty-one, photographer Melvin Sokolsky joined the prestigious staff of Harper's Bazaar, whose art department was then led by legendary art director Henry Wolf. Sokolsky's unique take on fashion was quite different from fellow photographers like Hiro, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon. His work took the mundane and transformed it into the marvelous, in a style that today seems ethereal and otherworldly.

Women in bubbles floating across the Seine or flying uncontrollably through the air, rooms constructed as to appear upside down, household objects magnified to colossal proportions-these are all elements of the bizarre universe of Sokolsky's memorable fashion photographs. Covering the years 1959-1971, these images have a distinctly 60's "look," but they also point to the work of current photography stars like David LaChapelle and Bruce Weber. Among the fashion and screen personalities included are Mia Farrow, Ali McGraw, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Dustin Hoffman, Chet Baker, Lena Horne, Natalie Wood, Shere Hite, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Suzie Parker, Julie Christie, Lee Remick, and numerous others.

This book, bound in simulated pink fine grain leather, is the first retrospective of Sokolsky's fashion photography, and represents another major rediscovery of one of America's finest image-makers.

This stunning book—published in the artist’s centenary—chronicles the extraordinary life and work of Frederick Sommer (1905–1999). One of the great masters and key innovators in the history of art photography, Sommer was a complex and highly creative individual. His work in photography is unconventional and fascinating for its wide range of methodologies and techniques. He also explored making images with other media, creating masterful drawings, collages, and musical scores.

Arriving in Arizona in 1931, Sommer abandoned his original profession, landscape architecture, and began painting and drawing. After meeting Alfred Stieglitz in 1935 and Edward Weston in 1936, Sommer embraced and quickly mastered photography. Other artists who later proved inspirational to Sommer included Precisionist painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, Surrealist artist Max Ernst, and photographer Aaron Siskind.

With an essay by photo historian Keith F. Davis, exquisite reproductions of Sommer’s diverse works, and a detailed chronology of his life by April Watson, The Art of Frederick Sommer describesand documents the full extent of the artist’s achievement as a twentieth-century visionary. The book is a revelation for scholars, artists, students, and everyone who admires and appreciates creative genius.

Photographs by Frederick Sommer; edited by John Weiss; essay by Jonathan Williams and one by Roberta Helena and Marvin Hoshino. 69 pages; 28 b&w plates printed by Meriden Gravure. Includes a chronology and bibliography. From an edition limited to 3500 copies. A beautiful production. With: EXHIBITION CHECKLIST: A Supplement to Venus, Jupiter & Mars. 16 pages; 102 b&w photos. Saddle-stitched stiff wraps; near fine except for a mild bump to foot of spine.

Danish photographer Trine Søndergaard (born 1972) creates stunning individual portraits in single bold monochromes, using the constraint of color to achieve more tangible emotional effects. By capturing her anonymous subjects in profile or from behind, Søndergaard produces highly introspective images that reveal mental or emotional states rather than specific identities.

Layered with quiet emotion, the photographs of Danish artist Trine Søndergaard (born 1972) are celebrated for their intensification of our perception of reality. Søndergaard's new volume brings together three recent series exploring stillness and introspection, in which different historical time periods and materials meet.

A journey without scenery. A journey in black and white into a land of emotions. Everything flows, everything blurs, like an ongoing quest for that intense, magical moment of joy or sadness. An offbeat vision of the world and the people she meets. Contrasting black-and-white photos with 5 or 6 in color. Fifteen years of life lived intensely.

This book highlights the relationships that exist between several generations of photographers whose practice is as intuitive as it is abrupt or transgressive. Emerging after World War II with pioneers such as Robert Frank, William Klein, and the founders of the legendary Japanese magazine Provoke, this singular approach to photography remains particularly productive in contemporary creation.

Gathering this family of photographers, whose work together spans more than 60 years, this book allows the reader to visualize the links between past and present, rediscover classics, find new talents, and understand the various influences of this photographic heritage up until today.

Made up of black and white silver photographs, NADA is a mental stroll, a journey through a world that is both anchored and dreamlike. Between street-photography and interiority, the landscape that emerges between its pages is above all an exploration of the human race; from the United States to Cambodia, NADA is crossed by recurring characters and yet encountered at random, all of whom have in common that they never manage to meet, to look at each other. They all seem to be looking for their way through urban settings that are then more and more natural, as if they were pursuing a form of redemption.

After completing the work for his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, in 2002, Alec Soth traveled with his wife to Bogotá, Colombia, to adopt a baby girl. The baby's birth mother had given the new parents a book filled with letters, pictures and poems for their daughter. "I hope that the hardness of the world will not hurt your sensitivity," she wrote. "When I think about you I hope that your life is full of beautiful things." While the courts processed the adoption paperwork, and with these words as a mission statement, Soth set about making his own book for his daughter.

Soth writes, "In photographing the city of her birth, I hope I've described some of the beauty in this hard place." This beauty makes itself apparent through ramshackle architecture, the companionship of animals and the perseverance of the human spirit. But Soth's photographs also transcend the simple description of beauty, roaming through a cast of strays, tough souls and small hints of hope.

By way of follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut monograph Sleeping by the Mississippi, Alec Soth turns his eye to another iconic body of water, Niagara Falls. And as with his photographs of the Mississippi, these images are less about natural wonder than human desire. "I went to Niagara for the same reason as the honeymooners and suicide jumpers," says Soth, "the relentless thunder of the Falls just calls for big passion."

The subject may be hot, but the pictures are quiet, the rigorously composed and richly detailed products of a large-format 8x10 camera. Working over the course of two years on both the American and Canadian sides of the Falls, Soth edited the results of his labors down to a tight and surprising album. He depicts newlyweds and naked lovers, motel parking lots, pawnshop wedding rings and love letters from the subjects he photographed. We read about teenage crushes, workplace affairs, heartbreak and suicide. Oscar Wilde wrote, "The sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life." Niagara brings viewers both the passion and the disappointment--a remarkable portrayal of modern love and its aftermath.

Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America's iconic yet oft-neglected "third coast." Soth's richly descriptive, large-format color photographs present an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors.

Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, Sleeping by the Mississippi elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing, and reverie. "In the book's 46 ruthlessly edited pictures," writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, "Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex." Like Robert Frank's classic The Americans, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with a poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust.

Known for his haunting portraits of solitary Americans in Sleeping by the Mississippi and Broken Manual, Alec Soth has recently turned his lens toward community life in the country. To aid in his search, Soth assumed the increasingly obsolescent role of community newspaper reporter. From 2012-2014, Soth traveled state by state while working on his self-published newspaper, The LBM Dispatch, as well as on assignment for the New York Times and others.

From upstate New York to Silicon Valley, Soth attended hundreds of meetings, dances, festivals and communal gatherings in search of human interaction in an era of virtual social networks. With Songbook, Soth has stripped these pictures of their news context in order to highlight the longing for connection at their root. Fragmentary, funny and sad, Songbook is a lyrical depiction of the tension between American individualism and the desire to be united. Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

His photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and Sao Paulo Biennials. In 2008, a survey exhibition of Soth's work was exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2010, the Walker Art Center produced a traveling survey exhibition of Soth's work entitled From Here To There. Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2008, Soth founded his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, and is a member of Magnum Photos.

Drawing out the serenity and graceful simplicity of the architecture, land, and people of rural America, Spaid has created a document of beauty and comfort. His travels across America have taken him through Ohio and Colorado, as well as the Southwest. He currently teaches photography at Kenyon College.

"There is something plain about America that can be experienced most clearly in rural places. It can be heard in unpretentious speech, seen in unadorned buildings and felt in wide-open spaces. I have tried to photograph this humble quality in various places throughout the United States, but most often on the high plains of Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, and in Knox County, Ohio, where I live." -- Gregory Spaid

A visual homage to Nantucket, photos blk / white.Square format. 1st printing, limited edition to 1000 copies, stated.

"When I look about Nantucket I see everywhere photographs already half made. It is the nature of this island to be kind to photographers, especially those making black and white photographs like the ones in this book that I have made over almost a quarter century. Returning whalers called Nantucket “The Little Grey Lady of the Sea,” no doubt because of the combination of frequent fog and the ubiquitous grey cedar shingles. Often she appears to the eye with little or no color, like a monochromatic photograph waiting to happen.

In making the photographs in this book I have been inspired by the unique architectural tradition of Nantucket. Although I have not documented each style of architecture represented on the island, I have use elements of those styles as the building blocks for these photographs. Taken as a whole, the architecture of Nantucket is simple and geometric. Even the more flamboyant styles of the past, like the Victorian vernacular and Second Empire, take on a reserved quality on Nantucket. This may be the ongoing influence on the island of one hundred years of Quaker severity and emphasis on simple utility. The spareness -- even austerity -- in some of these photographs is my attempt to evoke that tradition and use it expressively. Today the traditional spareness of Nantucket architecture is being “dressed up.” There are more trees, more gardens, more sculpted privet hedges than ever before. Houses are being lovingly and lavishly restored and maintained. Sometimes this “dressing up” goes too far, becoming sentimental or ostentatious. Yet the spare geometry of Nantucket architecture endures, in part, because of an enlightened building code that is preserving much of the authenticity of the island, and because of a general awareness that Nantucket is a place like no other and therefore one well worth protecting." -- Gregory Spaid

Bordello is pure seduction. The images presented by internationally renowned photographer Vee Speers are inspired by the 1920s - an era of extravagant life style and sexual decadence. Shot in French bordellos, perfectly orchestrated and artistically adapted, the photographs take the viewer into the world of temptation - erotic, lascivious, and nostalgically arranged. Music CDs: French chansons, by Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet, Yves Montand, Lucienne Boyer, Damia, and Frehel musically emphasize this electrifying world of images. She shows beauty where beauty can be terribly absent. Karl Lagerfeld.

In her portraits of adolescents, Vee Speers eternalizes a moment of fragile beauty. She photographs the time before first loss, the time of childhood. She captures this in the bodies and faces. And she creates a world layered upon a world, of characters upon children who are no longer children.

She dresses, styles, costumes, and sometimes masks them. And the big girls and proud boys who pass through her hands are projected elsewhere. Into their battles, their modesty, their trouble. Each and every one has a frightening power. Each and every one, in their manner and in their costume, is invincible.

For the past fifteen years, Vee Speers has been based in Paris, working in fashion, photojournalism, and fine art photography. Widely exhibited throughout Europe, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and Australia, her work has also been seen in publications including The Sunday Times, Harpers+Queen, GQ, Arena, and Esquire Susan Bright is an independent curator and writer on photography.

Author of the highly successful book 'Art Photography Now' (Thames & Hudson, 2006), she has worked with the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain. Recent curatorial projects include Face of Fashion for the National Portrait Gallery, London, and 'How We Are: Photographing Britain' (co-curated with Val Williams) for Tate Britain, London.

An up-close portrayal of late-’90s London’s many music scenes, from the pages of Sleazenation and beyond.

In the late 1990s, as a graduate from art school, the British photographer Ewen Spencer began making pictures for Sleazenation, in particular for the infamous listing pages at the rear of the magazine that were called "Savoir Vivre." The images were made in both black and white and color, and were immensely candid and full of characters that seemed to be everywhere at that time.

London was at the epicenter of a cultural boom in this period. Small clubs, parties and discos were plentiful in venues from North to South, and Spencer was in a minicab and night bus taking in all the scenes―from Northern Soul, Acid House, Jungle and Garage to Nu Metal, South London blackout clubs and more. Spencer captures an era filled with love, lust and messy authenticity.
Ewen Spencer (born 1971) graduated from the University of Brighton in 1997 and began shooting for style magazines such as Sleazenation and The Face, with an emphasis on youth culture. In 2004 his series Teenagers was shortlisted for the Project Assistance award at Rencontres D’Arles, curated that year by Martin Parr, who tipped Spencer as “one to watch.” In 2013 he began self-publishing a biannual photo-zine, Guapamente focusing on global youth subcultures. Spencer has also made documentaries on Britain’s Garage and Grime scenes. His monograph Young Love was published by Stanley Barker in 2017.

To the Ends of the Earth by Jeanette Spicer is a compelling photographic exploration that spans over twelve years, delving into the nuanced and often overlooked dynamics within a family affected by a lesbian identity. What began in 2012 as Spicer’s thesis project, examining the boundaries and rules governing interactions between children and their parents, evolved into a profound personal and artistic journey.

Initially, Spicer’s work focused on staging intimate, sometimes disquieting, and occasionally humorous scenes with her mother, reflecting a Western perspective on familial boundaries. However, as Spicer’s self-awareness as a lesbian deepened, the project took on new significance. Realizing that visual representations of lesbian experiences with straight parents were scarce, Spicer shifted her focus to illuminate this unique relational dynamic.

In To the Ends of the Earth, Spicer integrates her partner into the narrative, enriching the portrayal of her identity. The photographs capture the trio—Spicer, her mother, and her partner—in tender and everyday activities such as bathing, assembling puzzles, painting toenails, and braiding hair. Through strategic use of cropping, fragmentation, shadow, and light, Spicer creates a visual ambiguity that often leaves viewers questioning the nature of the relationships depicted.

The series is sometimes interpreted through a heteronormative lens, which can obscure the authentic representation of the lesbian experience. Spicer’s work challenges these conventional readings by presenting a multifaceted view of her life, underscoring the tension, lust, and evolving boundaries within her familial relationships. The photographs stand as a testament to the continuous negotiation of identity and intimacy, offering a poignant and layered perspective on love, family, and self-discovery.

A visually stunning, intimate photographic tour of Pompeii’s spaces, including many that have never been seen by the public.

Pompeii, one of the most astonishing and well-preserved sites of classical antiquity, is also one of the world’s most visited architectural locations. Produced in partnership with the Archeological Park of Pompeii, this lavish volume takes readers on a tour of Pompeii through an array of visually compelling and original photographs by Italian artist Luigi Spina.

Pompeii’s architecture is a central feature of Spina's pictures, which were shot at all times of day, in all seasons, and in natural light. Lacy peristyles and rows of ruined columns give way to intimate, atmospheric interior spaces. Mosaic floors and beautiful wall paintings are reproduced with stunning fidelity and sensitivity. The volume also includes an essay by Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archeological Park of Pompeii, and several meditations on the history, architecture, and natural beauty of the city.

Inside Pompeii provides the wondrous experience of wandering through this remarkable site without ever leaving home.

The acronym "PIGS" is a media-coined term referring to the European Union's economically weakest countries--Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. Carlos Spottorno's The Pigs is a tragicomic vision of these countries' stereotypes, utilizing the format of the influential magazine The Economist.

Brandon Stanton created Humans of New York in 2010. What began as a photographic census of life in New York City, soon evolved into a storytelling phenomenon. A global audience of millions began following HONY daily. Over the next several years, Stanton broadened his lens to include people from across the world.

Traveling to more than forty countries, he conducted interviews across continents, borders, and language barriers. Humans is the definitive catalogue of these travels. The faces and locations will vary from page to page, but the stories will feel deeply familiar. Told with candor and intimacy, Humans will resonate with readers across the globe―providing a portrait of our shared experience.

Based on the blog with more than four million loyal fans, a beautiful, heartfelt, funny, and inspiring collection of photographs and stories capturing the spirit of a city.

Now an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, Humans of New York began in the summer of 2010, when photographer Brandon Stanton set out to create a photographic census of New York City. Armed with his camera, he began crisscrossing the city, covering thousands of miles on foot, all in an attempt to capture New Yorkers and their stories. The result of these efforts was a vibrant blog he called "Humans of New York," in which his photos were featured alongside quotes and anecdotes.

Throughout a year, Chris Steele-Perkins photographed at Holkham Hall, a 23,000 acre estate set on the Norfolk coast with a history stretching back to the 1700s. He photographed not only the various activities there, from hunting and shooting through to concerts and weddings, but also groups of workers that form the backbone of day to day life on the Estate.

"Afghanistan" is introduced by the French essayist and traveller André Velter and includes essays and verses by the Afghani poet Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, who was assassinated in Pakistan in 1988. 76 duotone photographs.

The echo has a nostalgie de la boue that history cannot convey; Proust was a master of the reverberating sounds of the past, ill-defined and resonant. Chris Steele-Perkins has selected here, from the fragments of a working photographer's life and the archive of a single year - 2001, and the new millennium - images that unashamedly evoke his memories of that year, sentimental, odd, striking, and intensely personal.

Photographers create in an instant an image that is indelible - until the print fades. Memory, wilful and indiscriminate, cannot compete. But in Echoes Chris Steele-Perkins has somehow combined the two by selecting images he created throughout a single year that recall his misting glimpses of 2001. They are not his normal milieu, the stunning images of Africa and further abroad for which he is renowned. They are something new.

Here are the Surrey hills, New York, Japan, family, Africa, home, solipsistic aide-memoires he has arranged in a chronology that combine to make, for him, a Pandora's box of his recollections of that year. No matter that they are at once intimate and unengaged. After all, photographers are human beings with the flickering sight of a raptor's eye, scanning the horizon and the nest.

Chris Steele-Perkins, internationally acclaimed and award-winning Magnum photographer, has collected over 40 years of images which encapsulate what it means to be English. These natural and authentic photographs are a personal selection of the best and most important of Chris's images that he has taken over 40 years of photographing in England.

Fuji as seen by Chris Steele-Perkins emerges as a meditation about modern Japan and Japanese life. The exquisite images offer a fresh and surprising view of Japan’s iconic mountain and an understanding of Japanese worldview as seen by an outsider who has penetrated its diversity with astounding clarity, metaphysical insight, and profound complicity.

'The New Londoners' is a powerful celebration of London's unique cultural richness, and of the diversity that is the hallmark of this great city. Chris Steele-Perkins has photographed 165 families from almost 200 different countries, all of whom have made their homes in London. These are beautiful and powerful portraits with each family photographed in their homes. Accompanied by insightful interviews we learn of the varied experiences of these families from across the globe.

'The New Londoners' is a plea for tolerance and for openness of heart. At a time when social and political divisions seem to be opening up across the UK, it is a timely reminder both of the important role that immigration has played in our country as well as the rich and valued diversity that is the hallmark of our capital city and which makes London such a special place.

The Teddy Boys were a flashily dressed, rebellious and sometimes violent youth movement that originated in Britain in the '50s. The three-quarter-length Edwardian jacket with velvet collar, drainpipe trousers and quiff became a focus of male fashion which still holds cult status today. The Teds combines image and text to tell their story - a fascinating tale spanning three decades.

Chris Steele-Perkins is a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos. He has published eight books and exhibited worldwide. His reportages have received high public acclaim and won several awards, including the Tom Hopkinson Prize for British Photojournalism, the Oscar Barnack Prize, the Robert Cappa Gold Medal and a World Press Award.

One of Britain's greatest photographers is exhibiting for the first time his vision of Tokyo, a seemingly incomprehensible city that has nevertheless become like a second home for him. The book equivalent of Sofia Coppola's film, Lost in Translation.

Freedom, adventure, romance; a spellbound audience, bright-eyed children, rolling drums, a brass band playing lively music; intrepid acrobats in colorful costumes and garishly made-up clowns. The same old stereotypes about the world of the circus are trotted out on many occasions. Over a period spanning more than 15 years, the photographer Oliver Stegmann visited different circuses to take photos of what happens behind the curtains.

His muted images attempt to break the usual stereotypes. Again and again, the photographer captured protagonists in moments of unawareness, showing scenes that the audience would normally never get to see from the edge of the ring. Above all, Stegmann is interested in the atmosphere of tense expectation and utmost concentration when the artists are about to perform their hair-raising acts. Using neither color nor flash, he creates an enigmatic atmosphere reminiscent of expressionist films.

For his circus series, Stegmann develops a kind of imagery that has rarely been applied to the small world of the circus as consistently and confidently as in this case. In terms of subject-matter, design, and production, Circus Noir takes a different approach to this genre by adding an entirely unromantic perspective that focuses on the true essence of what it means to work in a circus. Text in English and German.

Photographs and text by Edward Steichen. Includes a biographical outline. Designed by Kathleen Haven. A time travel through history through the lens of his life/photos. Almost Forrest Gump-like as Steichen found himself involved with so many other famous people through history and 2 world wars.

Photographically illustrated matt laminated wrappers with French folds, with title stamped in silver on cover and spine. Photographs and paintings by Edward Steichen. Text by Barbara Haskell. Includes a chronology (compiled by Anne Lampe), a list of exhibitions Steichen curated at the Museum of Modern Art, a selected bibliography and a list of works in the exhibition. Designed by Makiko Ushiba. 128 pp., with 22 color plates and numerous additional reference illustrations finely printed in Rhode Island by Meridian Printing Company. 11 x 9 inches. Published on the occasion of the 2000-2001 exhibition Edward Steichen at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Edward Steichen was already a famous painter and photographer in America and abroad when, in early 1923, he was offered the most prestigious position in photography's commercial domain: that of chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair.Over the next fifteen years, Steichen would produce a body of work of unequaled brilliance, dramatizing and glamorizing contemporary culture and its achievers in politics, literature, film, sport, dance, theater, opera, and the world of high fashion.

Here are iconic images of Gloria Swanson, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, and Charlie Chaplin as well as numerous other celebrities drawn from an archive of more than two thousand original prints. Until now, no more than a handful have been exhibited or published in book form. The photographs of the 1920s and 1930s represent the high point in Steichen's career and are among the most striking creations of twentieth-century photography.

Edward Steichen (1879-1973) is unquestionably one of the most prolific, influential, and indeed controversial names in the history of photography. He was admired by many for his achievements as a fine-art photographer, while impressing countless others with the force of his commercial accomplishments. The influence of his legendary exhibition, The Family of Man, is still felt.

This volume traces Steichen’s career trajectory from his Pictoralist beginnings to his time with Condé Nast through his directorship of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Hundreds of his photographs are reproduced in stunning four-color to reveal the complexities and nuances of these black-and-white images. Essays from a range of scholars explore his most important subjects and weigh his legacy. Contributors include A. D. Coleman, Joanna T. Steichen, and Ronald Gedrim. With a full bibliography and chronology, this is the most complete and wide-ranging volume on Steichen ever published.

One of the most influential figures in the history of photography, Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was also one of the most precocious. Born in Luxembourg, raised in Wisconsin, and trained as a lithographer's apprentice, Steichen took up photography in his teens and by age twenty-three had created brooding tonalist landscapes and brilliant psychological studies that won the praise of Alfred Stieglitz in New York and Auguste Rodin in Paris, among others. Over the next decade, this young man--the preferred portraitist of the elite of two continents--was repeatedly acclaimed as the peerless master of the painterly photograph. This volume, covering the period from the late 1890s to World War I, highlights masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses the finest collection of Steichen's early work in the world, and reproduces them in near-facsimile through four-color digital offset lithography.

Steichen worked with a designer's inventive eye, a Symbolist's poetic sensibility, an entrepreneur's charisma, and--above all--the originality and finesse of a creative and painstaking printer to establish ambitious new standards in artistic photography. Overlaying the subtle tone-poetry of his platinum prints with repeated washes of harmonious color, he created unforgettable images. In his three famous twilight views of New York's Flatiron Building, one of the landmarks of turn-of-the-century architecture, Steichen crafted a powerful symbol of a new age. His stunning sequence of Rodin's Balzac figure in the moonlight is presented here as are his nudes, with their frankly erotic sense of flesh and weight. And the intense energy of a decade comes to life in his portraits of a diverse cast ranging from Richard Strauss to J. P. Morgan, Maurice Maeterlinck to George Bernard Shaw--and Steichen himself, the founding auteur of a century of celebrity. In the accompanying text, Joel Smith explores Steichen's maturing artistry in the light of contemporary developments in photography, graphic design, and the decorative arts.

This is a stunning visual record of the emergence of Steichen as a great artist and is one of the most important books to be published on his life and work in recent years.

A career-spanning survey of the influential modernist photographer.

In 1985, the National Museum of Luxembourg unexpectedly received a generous bequest from the estate of the world-renowned Luxembourg-born American photographer Edward Steichen (1879–1973). The bequest comprised a total of 178 prints, 175 of which were by Steichen himself. These prints cover all aspects of his photographic oeuvre―from the pictorialist images of his early years to the portraiture, fashion, advertising, landscapes and family photographs of his late career.

Edward Steichen: The Luxembourg Bequest presents this extraordinary collection in a comprehensive and scholarly treatment for the first time. Replete with full-page illustrations of all 178 photographs, the publication includes six new essays by five authors that examine the provenance and historical significance of the Luxembourg donation, as well as Steichen’s special role as a transmitter of modernism from Europe to America.

A magnificent book--315 photographs by Edward Steichen, the man Auguste Rodin called "the greatest photographer of his time."

This is the first gathering in thirty years of Steichen's photographs, spanning seven decades: the landscapes, the haunting studies of flowers, the portraits of friends and family, the still lifes and cityscapes. Here are fashion photographs taken during the fifteen years Steichen worked for Vogue. And here too are the breathtaking portraits he made for Vanity Fair: Colette, Noel Coward, Greta Garbo, Willa Cather, Isadora Duncan . . . William Butler Yeats, Henri Matisse, Thomas Mann . . . George Gershwin, Amelia Earhart, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (taken when he was governor of New York--a standard pose, the decisive leader in his chair--but later, when FDR was president, cropped by Steichen to show the sad, serious face of a visionary acquainted with suffering).

In a personal and illuminating text, Joanna Steichen writes about her husband's passionate views on photography; about how he moved away from painting (his understanding and support of modernism helped bring the movement to this country); about his experiments with abstraction; about the repercussions of commercial success in his life as an artist; about how he and Joanna first met (through the mischievous intervention of Steichen's brother-in-law, Carl Sandburg) and how their relationship changed as they became lovers, man and wife and, finally, artist and assistant.

Joanna Steichen writes about Steichen's days as a colonel in World War I, in charge of aerial photography for the Air Force in France, and then as a captain in the Navy--past the age of retirement--in World War II, in charge of combat photography in the Pacific. She writes about his years as the European art scout for his friend Alfred Stieglitz, and of how Steichen later designed the gallery for the Photo-Secession's 291 and arranged exhibitions of the work of Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso and Brancusi, long before these names were known in America. And she writes about the couple's farm in Connecticut, which Steichen landscaped out of woods and rocks and hollows and photographed over the years, as well as the new hybrid of delphinium Steichen produced and the sunflowers he raised and studied through his lens.

Carl Sandburg said: "A scientist and a speculative philosopher stands back of Steichen's best pictures. They will not yield their meaning and essence on the first look nor the thousandth--which is the test of masterpieces."