Why People Photograph by
A now classic text on the art, "Why People Photograph" gathers a selection of essays by the great master photographer Robert Adams, tackling such diverse subjects as collectors, humor, teaching, money and dogs. Adams also writes brilliantly on Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Laura Gilpin, Judith Joy Ross, Susan Meiselas, Michael Schmidt, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Eugene Atget. The book closes with two essays on "working conditions" in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West, and the essay "Two Landscapes." Adams writes: "At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are."
Camera lucida : reflections on photography by
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes's personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume--and the last book he published--finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on the subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.
Tom Hunter; Living in hell by 
Portrait in Photography by
The photographic portrait is discussed in a wide context, from general subjects such as the family photograph album and American portrait photography to the work of individual artists like Sander and Stieglitz.
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 10 by 
Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective by
This volume is the first comprehensive monograph on Rineke Dijkstra to be published in the United States, accompanying the first U.S. mid-career survey of this important Dutch artists work in photography and video. The catalogue features the Beach Portraits and other early works such as the photographs of new mothers and bullfighters, together with selections from Dijkstras later work, including her most recent video installations. Also featured are series that the artist has been working on continuously for years, such as Almerisa (1994), which documents a young immigrant girl as she grows up and adapts to her new environment. Exhibition curators Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Sandra S. Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, contribute essays accompanied by an interview with the artist by Jan van Adrichem, selected interviews with several of the artists subjects, and entries on the artists series by Chelsea Spengemann, as well as the most comprehensive exhibition history and bibliography to date.
Doug Dubois: All the Days and Nights by 
Richard Avedon portraits by 
Tom Hunter by
In 1998, the London-based artist Tom Hunter was awarded the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Prize for "Woman Reading a Possession Order, an image of a young woman standing at a window reading an eviction notice with a baby at her side. This work, part of his "Persons Unknown series, directly references Vermeer's "A Girl Reading at the Open Window, using both its composition, color and play of light to produce an image that, as with Vermeer's representations of the Dutch working class, ennobles his subjects. Hunter's concern with the political issues surrounding the right of "squatters," "travellers" and all those viewed as "outsiders" is reflected in his choice and treatment of his subjects. In 1998 while traveling himself around Europe, Hunter began a new series of portraits entitled "Travellers, which focused on the domestic environment of this nomadic group. In his most recent body of work begun in 1999, collectively entitled "Life and Death in Hackney Hunter focused on a community living in and around the Hackney area of London. Many of the photographs in this series are based on Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and in so doing Hunter overlays art historical references with stories from the everyday lives of those around him. This publication brings together these three bodies of work.
Girl on Girl by
A new generation of female artists is emerging who have grown up in a culture saturated with social media and selfies. This book looks at how young women are using photography and the internet to explore issues of self-image and female identity, and the impact this is having on contemporary art. Forty artists are featured, all of whose principal subject matter is either themselves or other women. Each is accompanied by a short profile based on personal interviews with the author, giving a fascinating insight into this exciting shift in female creativity.
Gerhard Richter 48 portraits: exhibition : Midland group Nottingham 1978. by 
I know how furiously your heart is beating by 
New Topographics by
This book is dedicated to the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, held in 1975 at the International Museum of Photography, and demonstrates both the historical significance of the show and its continued relevance in today's culture. The show brought together Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel (Jr.). Signaling the emergence of a new approach to landscape, the exhibition effectively gave a name to a movement. Even today, the catchphrase New Topographics is used to characterize the work of artists not yet born when the exhibition was held. New Topographics has since come to be understood as marking a paradigm shift. The show occurred just as photography took its place within the contemporary art world. Arguably the last traditionally photographic style, New Topographics was also the first photo-conceptual style. Illustrated with selected works from the 1975 exhibition, installation views, and contextual comparisons, the book also includes an illustrated checklist of the show and an extensive bibliography.
On Photography by
Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay "A Short History of Photography" is a landmark in the understanding and criticism of the medium, offering surprising new takes on such photographic pioneers as David Octavius Hill and Nicéphore Niépce and their aesthetic and technical achievements. On Photography presents a new translation of that essay along with a number of other writings by Benjamin, some of them presented in English for the first time. Translator and editor Esther Leslie sets Benjamin's work in context with prefaces to each piece and contributes a substantial introduction that considers Benjamin's engagement with photography in all its forms, including early commercial studio photography, the uses of photography in science, and much more.
Maidan : portraits from the Black Square by 
Lament by
Lament is a beautiful, original and affecting work of art in book form that takes as its subject the themes of light and dark, love and loss, life and death. This extraordinary volume is the result of a creative collaboration between artist photographer Bettina von Zwehl, known for her explorations of the photographic portrait, and psychoanalyst and academic Josh Cohen, author of award-winning books on psychoanalysis, privacy and the nature of the self. Two series of images by von Zwehl - fifteen black-and-white silhouette portraits of women in near darkness, and fifty fragments of a single repeated photo of a young girl - appear alongside and within two parallel texts by Cohen - one a critical reflection on light and shadow, the other a fictional tale inspired by the torn photographs - to create a unique hybrid work. The silhouettes, produced during von Zwehl's residency at London's Freud Museum and inspired by child psychoanalyst Anna Freud's letters with women friends, are a reflection of the female bonds in the artist's own life following the death of a close friend; while the name she gives to the fragments - The Sessions - refers to her fifty-minute sessions in psychoanalysis, her portrait sessions with the child, and her many sessions in the darkroom as she sought the essence of both image and subject. Each of these series of photographs and texts can be read separately, but it is through the careful combination and imaginative interplay of word and image that a new narrative emerges and an additional layer of meaning appears in the gaps and folds between the two. The result is a powerful and moving meditation on separation and childhood memory, the hidden mind and the lasting effects of psychoanalysis, and the nature of art and truth.
Bettina Von Zwehl by
Bettina von Zwehl's portraits in series impose exacting conditions on her subjects. She photographs them as they wake from deep sleep, as they hold their breath, as they recover from physical exertion, drenched in rain or listening intently to music in a darkened room. She orchestrates a climate in which they must relinquish control of the way they are represented. The resulting portraits reveal not the conscious projection of an identity but a space between the subject's private and thoughtful world and his or her public appearance. With their pared-down backgrounds and balanced compositions, von Zwehl's portraits have the texture and poise of Renaissance paintings. Their stillness arrests the viewer and demands the kind of absorption they depict. The eye is directed to the slightest details: blemishes, wrinkles, stray hairs, raised color in the cheeks, a striking variety of profiles. Surveyed in this comprehensive monograph, Bettina von Zwehl's work forms a delicate and exquisitely detailed catalogue of human physiognomy.
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