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One of Chicago's great cultural achievements, the Institute of Design was among the most important schools of photography in twentieth-century America. It began as an outpost of experimental Bauhaus education and was home to an astonishing group of influential teachers and students, including Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind. To date, however, the ID's enormous contributions to the art and practice of photography have gone largely unexplored. Taken by Design is the first publication to examine thoroughly this remarkable institution and its lasting impact.

With nearly 300 illustrations, including many never-before published photographs, Taken by Design examines the changing nature of photography over this critical period in America's midcentury. It starts by documenting the experimental nature of Moholy's Bauhaus approach and photography's new and enhanced role in training the "complete designer." Next it traces the formal and abstract camera experiments under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, which aimed at achieving a new kind of photographic subjectivity. Finally, it highlights the ID's focus on conscious references to the processes of the photographic medium itself. In addition to photographs by Moholy, Callahan, and Siskind, the book showcases works by Barbara Crane, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Joseph Jachna, Kenneth Josephson, Gyorgy Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Ray K. Metzker, Richard Nickel, Arthur Siegel, Art Sinsabaugh, and many others. Major essays from experts in the field, biographies, a chronology, and reprints of critical essays are also included, making Taken by Design an essential work for anyone interested in the history of American photography.


Contributors include:
Keith Davis, Lloyd Engelbrecht, John Grimes, Nathan Lyons, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Elizabeth Siegel, David Travis, Larry Viskochil, James N. Wood

Since its founding in 1921, the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) at the University of London has seen students and teachers come together, socially and intellectually, to engage in lively academic seminars. But for what purpose and with what value?

Talking History provides a defence of the seminar as a central element in historians' teaching, research and sense of community. Covering a range of the IHR’s long-running seminar series, which are differentiated by historical period, region and/or theme, the book presents the seminars as a local, national and international hub for scholarship that emerges from and is sustained by the ongoing learning practices of historians as scholars and people. Talking History bears witness to a seminar culture of evolving, multifarious synergies between teaching, researching and learning, historiography and participation — intertextual, interpersonal, intergenerational and intercultural. Viewed as such, the seminars constitute a living tradition, stimulating and incorporating dynamic change over time to contribute not just to the development of historiography but intellectual life more generally, often in conversation with major political events and cultural phenomena.

This original and significant book therefore reflects upon, and gives further expression to, the ongoing evolution of historical research and its role in wider society today.