History Books / C

The culture of the British academic elite receives a clinical examination in Cambridge Balls, the latest volume from society photographer Dafydd Jones. Since 1981, Jones has utilized his unique access to document the May Balls, a series of traditional, all-night celebrations marking the conclusion of the academic year at the University of Cambridge. Known for a style that balances technical precision with a sharp, observational wit, Jones records the rituals of a demographic often shielded from the public eye. The resulting collection spans over four decades, offering an unfiltered look at the intersection of wealth, youth, and institutional tradition within the secluded courtyards of the university’s historic colleges.

The imagery functions as a sociological record of the British upper class and its evolution over forty years. Notable inclusions feature figures such as former Prime Minister David Cameron, captured in the distinctive regalia of the Bullingdon Club, alongside rowing teams and international student cohorts. Jones tracks the shifting aesthetics of these events, from the formal rigidity of the early eighties to the more globalized and diverse face of the modern student body. Despite these changes, the core elements of the May Ball remain constant: the excessive consumption, the elaborate formal dress, and the physical exhaustion that sets in as dawn breaks over the River Cam. His lens captures both the choreographed public image and the unscripted moments of rowdiness that occur when the gates are closed.

Critics often describe Jones’s work as a study in the deflation of status, where his "wicked eye" identifies the precise moment when composure dissolves into revelry. By documenting gate-crashers punting across the water and the debris of expensive celebrations, the book avoids nostalgia in favor of a more detached, ironic perspective. Like his previous surveys of Hollywood and New York high society, Cambridge Balls archives a specific tier of social hierarchy that is simultaneously influential and insular. The work stands as a definitive historical document, preserving the antics and visual language of a society that continues to exert significant cultural and political power across the globe.

The Colors of Photography aims to provide a deeper understanding of what color is in the field of photography. Until today, color photography has marked the "here and now," while black and white photographs have been linked to our image of history and have formed our collective memory. However, such general dichotomies start to crumble when considering the aesthetic, cultural, and political complexity of color in photography.

With essays by Charlotte Cotton, Bettina Gockel, Tanya Sheehan, Blake Stimson, Kim Timby, Kelley Wilder, Deborah Willis. Photographic contributions by Hans Danuser and Raymond Meier.

This gorgeous cornerstone volume celebrating the camera and the art of the photograph, created in collaboration with the George Eastman House, spans almost 200 years, from the first faint image ever caught to today's state-of-the-art digital equipment. The informative narrative by Todd Gustavson--including insightful essays by Steve Sasson (inventor of the digital camera) and Alexis Gerard (visionary founder of Future Image Inc.)--traces the camera's development, the lives of its inventors, and the artists behind the lens. Images of more than 350 cameras from the George Eastman House Collection, plus historic photos, ads, and drawings, complement the text.

Today color photography is so ubiquitous that it's hard to believe there was a time when this was not the case. Color Rush explores the developments that led us to this point, looking at the way color photographs circulated and appeared at the time of their making. From magazine pages to gallery walls, from advertisements to photojournalism, Color Rush charts the history of color photography in the United States from the moment it became available as a mass medium to the moment when it no longer seemed an unusual choice for artists. The book begins with the 1907 unveiling of autochrome, the first commercially available color process, and continues up through the 1981 landmark survey show and book, The New Color Photography, which hailed the widespread acceptance of color photography in contemporary art. In the intervening years, color photography captured the popular imagination through its visibility in magazines like Life and Vogue, as well as through its accessibility in the marketplace thanks to companies like Kodak. Often in photo histories, color is presented as having arrived fully formed in the 1970s; this book reveals a deeper story and uncovers connections in both artistic and commercial practices. A comprehensive chronology and examples of significant moments and movements mark the increasing visibility of color photography. Color Rush brings together photographers and artists such as Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, László Moholy-Nagy, Irving Penn, Eliot Porter, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Laurie Simmons, Edward Steichen, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston and many others, and examines them in a fresh context paying particular attention to color photography's translation onto the printed page. In doing so, it traces a new history that more fully accounts for color's pervasive presence today.

"Read this book if you want to understand me."--Pablo Picasso

Conversations with Picasso offers a remarkable vision of both Picasso and the entire artistic and intellectual milieu of wartime Paris, a vision provided by the gifted photographer and prolific author who spent the early portion of the 1940s photographing Picasso's work. Brassaï carefully and affectionately records each of his meetings and appointments with the great artist, building along the way a work of remarkable depth, intimate perspective, and great importance to anyone who truly wishes to understand Picasso and his world.

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, hundreds of amateur photographers took part in the photographic survey movement in England. They sought to record the material remains of the English past so that it might be preserved for future generations. In The Camera as Historian, the groundbreaking historical and visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards works with an archive of nearly 55,000 photographs taken by 1,000 photographers, mostly unknown until now. She approaches the survey movement and its social and material practices ethnographically. Considering how the amateur photographers understood the value of their project, Edwards links the surveys to concepts of leisure, understandings of the local and the national, and the rise of popular photography. Her examination of how the photographers negotiated between scientific objectivity and aesthetic responses to the past leads her to argue that the survey movement was as concerned with the conditions of its own modernity and the creation of an archive for an anticipated future as it was nostalgic about the imagined past. Including more than 120 vibrant images, The Camera as Historian offers new perspectives on the forces that shaped Victorian and Edwardian Britain, as well as on contemporary debates about cultural identity, nationality, empire, material practices, and art.