University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Art: Photography

Still

David S. Shields — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The success of movies like The Artist and Hugo recreated the wonder and magic of silent film for modern audiences, many of whom might never have experienced a movie without sound. But while the American silent movie was one of the most significant popular art forms of the modern age, it is also one that is largely lost to us, as more than eighty percent of silent films have disappeared, the victims of age, disaster, and neglect. We now know about many of these cinematic masterpieces only from the collections of still portraits and production photographs that were originally created for publicity and reference. Capturing the beauty, horror, and moodiness of silent motion pictures, these images are remarkable pieces of art in their own right. In the first history of still camera work generated by the American silent motion picture industry, David S. Shields chronicles the evolution of silent film aesthetics, glamour, and publicity, and provides unparalleled insight into this influential body of popular imagery.

Exploring the work of over sixty camera artists, Still recovers the stories of the photographers who descended on early Hollywood and the stars and starlets who sat for them between 1908 and 1928. Focusing on the most culturally influential types of photographs—the performer portrait and the scene still—Shields follows photographers such as Albert Witzel and W. F. Seely as they devised the poses that newspapers and magazines would bring to Americans, who mimicked the sultry stares and dangerous glances of silent stars. He uncovers scene shots of unprecedented splendor—visions that would ignite the popular imagination. And he details how still photographs changed the film industry, whose growing preoccupation with artistry in imagery caused directors and stars to hire celebrated stage photographers and transformed cameramen into bankable names.

Reproducing over one hundred and fifty of these gorgeous black-and-white photographs, Still brings to life an entire long-lost visual culture that a century later still has the power to enchant.

Kennedy in Berlin

Hans-Michael Koetzle; Ulrich Mack — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

“Ich bin ein Berliner.” With these words, John F. Kennedy made history. Addressing a crowd of several hundred thousand in West Berlin, two years after the erection of the Berlin Wall, the young and charismatic president conveyed solidarity and support for West Germany on behalf of the United States, marking the height of good relations between the two countries and a decisive moment in Cold War history as well.

The local media were poised to record this momentous event. Among the photographers and reporters covering the Kennedy visit was twenty-eight-year-old Ulrich Mack, whose never-before-published photographs feature the president in a variety of settings: a triumphal ticker-tape procession down the main street of West Berlin with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, mayor of Berlin; a visit to the notorious Checkpoint Charlie where Kennedy stands atop the observation deck; a crowd of cheering West Berliners encircling the president following his impassioned speech. Mack’s photographs are technically superb but, more important, they are guided by an instinctive feel for capturing great moments—including those on the sidelines that, in their candor, often surpass the staged appearances. For the modern-day viewer, many of the photos are also remarkable for having been taken at very close range.

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of this historic occasion, Kennedy in Berlin reproduces more than one hundred of Mack’s photos taken throughout the state visit in June 1963—selected by the photographer himself and editor Hans-Michael Koetzle, offering a look at this important event.

Northern Exposures

Jonathan Waterman — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

North of the sixtieth parallel, the sun shines for less than six hours in the winter, and towering mountains are the only skyscrapers. Pristine waters serve caribou, moose, and bears in an unbroken landscape. At any given moment in this spectacular scenery, there’s a chance that Jonathan Waterman is present, trekking across the land. A masterful adventurer, Waterman has spent decades exploring the farthest reaches of our beautiful spaces. The essays and photographs collected in Northern Exposures are a product of this passion for exploration and offer an unparalleled view into adventuring in the north and beyond.

Picking up after In the Shadow of Denali, his first book of essays, Northern Exposures collects twenty-three stories from Waterman’s thirty-year career that show the evolution of the adventurer’s career and work, from ducking avalanches near the Gulf of Alaska, to searching for the most pristine tundra on the continent, and from writing haiku on Denali in the depth of winter to decrying oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Ninety-six spectacular photographs taken by Waterman during his expeditions lend a broader context and allow readers to fully understand his heartfelt argument for protecting these places. Whether active, aspiring, or just armchair adventurers, readers will be inspired by Waterman’s daring spirit.

Nuvuk, the Northernmost

Daniel James Inulak Lum — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

For years, tour guide Daniel Lum has brought visitors as well as his children out to the remote corners of Barrow, Alaska, one of the northernmost cities in the world, to witness polar bears and walrus on the dark, sandy beaches. Over time, snapping pictures for tourists and shooting photographs of his own, he has been a first-hand witness to the profound environmental changes taking place as his homeland shifts and disappears before his eyes.

As arguments over climate change rage in more temperate locales, Nuvuk, the Northernmost is a poignant snapshot of life in a town where these changes are impossible to overlook. Lum’s vivid photographs of wildlife, such as whales, polar bears, and birds, offer rare close-ups of animals few ever see. In addition, Lum provides vivid descriptions and pictures of daily life in and around Barrow, offering a compelling insider’s introduction to living on the tip of the world. With Lum as a capable guide, Nuvuk, the Northernmost is a chance to see a rare world before it changes forever.

International Garden Photographer of the Year

Philip Smith — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The International Garden Photographer of the Year competition has blossomed into one of the premiere showcases for nature and landscape photography, receiving thousands of entries from both professional and amateur participants. The competition encourages photos that take fresh approaches to their subjects, pushing the boundaries of garden photography. New categories this year are Wildflower Landscapes and Wildlife in the Garden, joining others such as Beautiful Gardens, Greening the City, and a special Young Garden Photographer of the Year.

This eagerly anticipated sixth collection of finalists brings together an exceptional group of photos, ranging from a split-second shot of hummingbird wings to eerily beautiful x-rays of flowers. Photos spill across the pages, allowing readers to pore over every detail. And though the beauty of the images can speak for itself, each photo comes with descriptions that tell how the photographer caught each moment and what camera and settings were used. The collection reminds us that despite advances in technology, the people behind the cameras are still the true talent.

This year’s best photos will be shown in exhibitions across the world, with shows in New York City, London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Nuremburg, Lisbon, and more. With a winning combination of beautiful images and insight into the photographer’s process, this collection will be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of any gardener, nature lover, or photography enthusiast.

Local Portraiture

Carmen Pérez González — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This thoughtfully and meticulously researched book explores the work of indigenous Iranian photographers and the way in which their photographs reflect their society and surroundings. In order to highlight how photography reflects local culture, Carmen Pérez González, a photographer herself, offers a comparative visual analysis of nineteenth-century Iranian photographs and paintings created during the same time period and in the same place in order to show that aesthetic preferences are rooted in the socio-cultural habits of artists. This lushly illustrated book is a testimony to the unique power and historical value of photographic portraits and their enduring power to capture local realities.

Cairo to Constantinople

Sophie Gordon — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the spring of 1862, Queen Victoria commissioned the leading British photographer Francis Bedford to accompany her son and heir, the future King Edward VII, on an ambitious journey across the Middle East. This beautifully illustrated book traces their tour throughout Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and Greece alongside excerpts from Prince Edward’s diary and other newly discovered archival material, published here for the first time.

Over the course of several months, Bedford produced more than two hundred negatives, including images of architecture and stunning landscapes, from a breathtaking view of the Garden of Gethsemane to shots of the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. He was the first Christian granted permission to photograph sacred sites in Jerusalem. Bedford also captured many photographs of the people he encountered on the tour, both locals and members of the royal party.

Cairo to Constantinople is the first book to focus on the photographs taken during Prince Edward’s travels in the Middle East. Taken during a time of great change in the area, these extraordinary photographs will fascinate anyone with an interest in the history of the Middle East or in photography’s role in documenting civilization.

Alberto Giacometti

Ernst Scheidegger — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess, Alberto Giacometti:Traces of a Friendshipis being published in a revised and expanded edition, which includes over forty previously unpublished photographs, an intimate new chapter, and amended captions.

Alberto Giacometti (1901–66) is inarguably one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century. Immensely gifted and prolific, Giacometti gave physical expression to his twin obsessions of the human form and the alienation of modern life. Because of his canonical position in the history of art and the reams of scholarship produced about him, Giacometti remains to many the elusive master artist, distant and remote on the Olympus of creative endeavor.

Ernst Scheidegger, a friend of the sculptor, knew a very different Giacometti. Scheidegger accompanied him to his studio, ate and drank with him, and relaxed with him in his family home. Alberto Giacometti: Traces of a Friendship is a document of this intimate life of Giacometti, consisting of photographs that Scheidegger made over the course of two decades. Scheidegger welcomes readers into Giacometti’s studio and house in Maloja, Switzerland, allowing them rare access to the most closely held aspects of the artist’s life. Sketching in his studio, having a cup of coffee, his works in progress, his art in installation views, even his sleeping cats—Scheidegger captures the essence of the artist's working life in images that are artful in their own right.

Photocinema

Neil Campbell; Alfredo Cramerotti — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Taking as its starting point the notion of photocinema—or the interplay of the still and moving image—the photographs, interviews, and critical essays in this volume explore the ways in which the two media converge and diverge, expanding the boundaries of each in interesting and unexpected ways. The book’s innovative approach to film and photography produces what might be termed a hybrid “third space,” where the whole becomes much more than the sum of its individual parts, encouraging viewers to expand their perceptions to begin to understand the bigger picture.

The latest edition in Intellect’s Critical Photography series, Photocinema represents a nuanced theoretical and practical exploration of the experimental cinematic techniques exemplified by artists like Wim Wenders and Hollis Frampton. In addition to new critical essays by Victor Burgin and David Campany, the book includes interviews with Martin Parr, Hannah Starkey, and Aaron Schumann, and a portfolio of photographs from various new and established artists.

Women Changing India

Urvashi Butalia; Anita Roy — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

India is changing. And at the heart of this change are its women. The change is widespread and varied, individual and collective, reflecting the full spectrum of women’s lives, whether in politics or in economics, in business, or within their daily domestic work. This book maps—in words and in one hundred and fifty marvelous color photographs—some of the changes that are both visible and invisible in India today.

In Women Changing India, six writers flesh out the stories captured by photographers Raghu Rai, Martine Franck, Olivia Arthur, Alex Webb, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Patrick Zachmann from the world-renowned Magnum Photos. These beautiful and evocative photographs focus on the world of women working with the help of microloans, participating in grassroots governance, working behind the scenes in the Mumbai film industry, and moving into new jobs, often in male-dominated fields. Together, they are making contributions in varied fields and imagining a new future for themselves and other women. Featuring contributions from leading writers, Women Changing India offers a window into the lives of women living in South Asia today, bringing to public attention their complex realities and their aspirations for a better world.

Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine

Philippe D. Mather — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

From 1945 to 1950, during the formative years of his career, Stanley Kubrick worked as a photojournalist for Look magazine. Offering a comprehensive examination of the work he produced during this period—before going on to become one of America’s most celebrated filmmakers—Stanley Kubrick at "Look" Magazine sheds new light on the aesthetic and ideological factors that shaped his artistic voice.

Tracing the links between his photojournalism and films, Philippe Mather shows how working at Look fostered Kubrick’s emerging genius for combining images and words to tell a story. Mather then demonstrates how exploring these links enhances our understanding of Kubrick’s approach to narrative structure—as well as his distinctive combinations of such genres as fiction and documentary, and fantasy and realism.

Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, Stanley Kubrick at "Look" Magazine features never-before-published photographs from the Look archives and complete scans of Kubrick’s photo essays from hard-to-obtain back issues of the magazine. It will be an indispensable addition to the libraries of Kubrick scholars and fans.

Portraits from the Park

Thomas W. Harney — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Chicago’s old Comiskey Park, home to the White Sox until 1990, is as essential to the city’s cultural history as it is to baseball’s. From the first day that Thomas W. Harney set out to photograph fans in the ballpark, he felt at home there, owing to memories of games with his father and grandfather. It became his ongoing subject, as well as a setting that would inspire his growing reputation as a street photographer.

The sequence of portraits Harney took of White Sox fans between 1973 and the last game played at the park—September 30, 1990—captures the essence of baseball fandom: pregame excitement, exploration of the ballpark, the quiet moments in between plays, the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat. Most importantly, these portraits capture the aura of “Old Comiskey,” a ballpark that looms large in the memories of Chicagoans and baseball fans alike.

Box of Photographs

Roger Grenier; Alice Kaplan — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Most attempts to generalize about photography as a medium run up against our experience of the photographs themselves. We live with photos and cameras every day, and philosophies of the photographic image do little to shake our intimate sense of how we produce photographs and what they mean to us. In this book that is equal parts memoir and intellectual and cultural history, French writer Roger Grenier contemplates the ways that photography can change the course of a life, reflecting along the way on the history of photography and its practitioners.

Unfolding in brief, charming vignettes, A Box of Photographs evokes Grenier’s childhood in Pau, his war years, and his working life at the Gallimard publishing house in Paris. Throughout these personal stories, Grenier subtly weaves the story of a lifetime of practicing and thinking about photography and its heroes—Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Alfred Eisenstaedt, George Brassaï, Inge Morath, and others. Adding their own insights about photography to the narrative are a striking range of writers, thinkers, and artists, from Lewis Carroll, Albert Camus, and Arthur Schopenhauer to Susan Sontag, Edgar Degas, and Eugène Delacroix. Even cameras themselves come to life and take on personalities: an Agfa accompanies Grenier on grueling military duty in Algeria, a Voigtlander almost gets him killed by German soldiers during the liberation of Paris, and an ill-fated Olympus drowns in a boating accident. Throughout, Grenier draws us into the private life of photographs, seeking the secrets they hold for him and for us.

A valedictory salute to a lost world of darkrooms, proofs, and the gummed paper corners of old photo albums, A Box of Photographs is a warm look at the most honest of life’s mirrors.

About Face

Sage Sohier — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Through the influences of vanity, aging, and insecurities, many find fault with their own faces and few achieve their own notions of perfection. Yet, in the course of such self-criticism, most people take for granted their own ability to explore and employ the full range of facial expressions and the range of emotions those expressions convey.

In About Face Sage Sohier’s photographs portray people who have varying degrees of facial paralysis, a condition that usually occurs on just one side of the face and can result from a multitude of causes, including Bell’s palsy, tumors, strokes, accidents, and congenital nerve damage. Working in a clinic in Boston that provides physical therapy, Botox treatments, and sometimes surgery, Sohier documents patients before treatment, and in some cases captures their progress over time, witnessing hope and excitement as they regain the ability to smile, speak, and eat.

Modernism London Style

Christoph Rauhut; Niels Lehmann — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the 1920s, London was a city on the cusp of change. Just as dance halls and jazz-age decadence displaced wartime austerity, a new generation of artists and designers sought to enliven the city’s architecture, erecting dazzling buildings in the emerging art deco style. In contrast with the aging Victorian structures that dotted the city, these bright and colorful buildings—from the Hoover factory to the Ideal House by Raymond Hood, who later designed New York’s Rockefeller Center—communicated the city’s aspirations as a thriving, modern metropolis.

In the decades since, London’s art deco buildings have lost none of their appeal. Millions of visitors gaze up at the headquarters of the Daily Telegraph and the nearby Daily Express, take in the elegance of Eltham Palace, or sip a martini at the Savoy. The city’s most popular art deco attraction, however, is the London Underground, which boasts a series of art deco and modernist stations, designed throughout the 1920s and ’30s by noted architect Charles Holden. In Modernism London Style, architectural historian Christoph Rauhut, with the help of three hundred photographs by Niels Lehmann, captures the architectural art deco heritage of London in a thrilling photographic tour. A portrait of the city during the interwar years, it chronicles the creativity of the artists and designers of the period—and the currents in the city’s culture that helped shape their work.

Insightful essays and an introduction by architecture scholar Adam Caruso shed light on some of the key features that characterize art deco, from floral and animal motifs to Egyptian themes. For readers planning a trip to London and hoping to place these striking buildings, the book also includes a detailed register and maps.

Reframing the New Topographics

Greg Foster-Rice; John Rohrbach — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In 1975 the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape crystallized a new view of the American West: the sublime “American” vistas of Ansel Adams were replaced and subverted by images of a landscape inundated with banal symbols of humanity. Organized by William Jenkins for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, New Topographics showcased such photographers as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke. Their pictures, illustrating the vernacular, human-made world of contemporary America, punctured the myth of the pristine, wild American landscape—and definitively changed the course of landscape photography.

Reframing the New Topographics offers the first substantive analysis of this shift and the continuing influence of an exhibition that not only reshaped the look and subject matter of landscape photography, but also foreshadowed environmentalism’s expansion beyond the mere preservation of wilderness. The essays in this anthology will add an important new dimension to the studies of art history and visual culture.

Whistling Dixie

Anderson Scott — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

At hundreds of events held year-round across the southern United States, thousands of individuals spend their time, energy, and money recreating the battles of the Civil War. The number of participants involved ranges from tens to tens of thousands; those among them span the spectrum from casual spectators to amateur historians who seek to immerse themselves in the experience of living and fighting in the 1860s—from the cuisine to the very stitches in their uniforms.

With Whistling Dixie, photographer Anderson Scott captures these latter-day Confederates at a series of reenactments in the years leading up to the 2011 sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Always maintaining the perspective of a keen and sometimes ambivalent observer, Scott’s photographs convey the earnestness and enthusiasm of this subculture while exposing its idiosyncrasies and contradictions.

Scott’s photographs span the southern countryside, documenting reenactments in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, and the Carolinas as well as living histories and Confederate Memorial Days. An essay by Scott, describing his experience at a reenactment of the Battle of Selma, and a cultural essay by Chip Benson, of Yale University, provide context for the photographs and the subculture of their subjects.