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115 books match the query 'Portraits' and 7 start with b

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Baltimore Portraits

Amos Badertscher

Duke University Press, 1999

Baltimore Portraits is a unique presentation of photographs by Amos Badertscher. These portraits—many accompanied by poignantly revealing, hand-written narratives about their subjects—represent a sector of Baltimore that has gone largely unnoticed and rarely has been documented. In this volume, the assemblage of images of bar and street people—transvestites, strippers, drug addicts, drag queens, and hustlers—spans a twenty-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Badertscher’s arresting and melancholy photographs document a culture that has virtually disappeared due to substance abuse, AIDS, and, often, societal or family neglect.

The photographer’s focus on content rather than on elaborate technique reveals the intensely personal—and, indeed, autobiographical—nature of his portraits. Their simplicity along with the text’s intimacy affects the viewer in ways not easily forgotten. An introduction by Tyler Curtain contextualizes the photographs both within the history of Baltimore and its queer subculture and in relationship to contemporaneous work by photographers Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Duane Michaels, and others. Curtain also positions the underlying concerns of Bardertscher’s art in relation to gay and lesbian cultural politics.

This striking collection of portraits, along with the photographer’s moving text, will impact not only a general audience of photographers and enthusiasts of the art but also those engaged with gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, and cultural studies in general. It is published in association with the Duke University Museum of Art.

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Behind the Angel of History

The "Angelus Novus" and Its Interleaf

Annie Bourneuf

University of Chicago Press, 2022

The story of artist R. H. Quaytman’s discovery of an engraving hidden behind a famous artwork by Paul Klee.

This book begins with artist R. H. Quaytman uncovering something startling about a picture by Paul Klee. Pasted beneath Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus—famous for its role in the writings of its first owner, Walter Benjamin—Quaytman found that Klee had interleaved a nineteenth-century engraving of Martin Luther, leaving just enough visible to provoke questions.

Behind the Angel of History reveals why this hidden face matters, delving into the intertwined artistic, political, and theological issues consuming Germany in the wake of the Great War. With the Angelus Novus, Klee responded to a growing call for a new religious art. For Benjamin, Klee’s Angelus became bound up with the prospect of meaningful dialogue among religions in Germany.

Reflecting on Klee’s, Benjamin’s, and Quaytman’s strategies of superimposing conflicting images, Annie Bourneuf reveals new dimensions of complexity in this iconic work and the writing it inspired.

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Beyond the Reach of Time and Change

Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection

Edited by Simon J. Ortiz

University of Arizona Press, 2004

Around the turn of the twentieth century, most photographs of Indians pandered to shameless, insensitive stereotypes. In contrast, photographic portraits made by Frank A. Rinehart conveyed the dignity and pride of Native peoples. More than 545 Native Americans representing tribes from all over the country attended the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha in 1898 to be part of an event known as the Indian Congress. Rinehart, the exposition’s official photographer, and his assistant Adolph Muhr made more than 500 glass-plate negatives depicting Native Americans in their traditional dress, now housed at Haskell Indian Nations University and regarded as one of the best photographic documentations of Indian leaders from this era.

This book provides an unusual perspective on the Rinehart collection. It features one hundred outstanding images printed from the original negatives made by Rinehart and Muhr at the Congress and over the course of the next two years. It also includes 14 essays by modern Native American writers, artists, and educators—some of them descendants of the individuals photographed—reflecting on the place of these images in their heritage.

Beyond the Reach of Time and Change is not another coffee-table book of historical Indian photographs but rather a conversation between Indian people of a century ago and today. Just as the Rinehart collection offers today's Native Americans a unique connection to the past, this book offers all readers a positive understanding of continuity and endurance within the American Indian community.

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Bluegrass Odyssey

A Documentary in Pictures and Words, 1966-86

Carl Fleischhauer and Neil V. Rosenberg

University of Illinois Press, 2006

The fruit of four decades of collaboration between bluegrass music’s premier photographer and premier historian, Bluegrass Odyssey is a satisfying and visually alluring journey into the heart of a truly American music. Combining more than two hundred of Carl Fleischhauer’s photographs with Neil V. Rosenberg’s expert commentary, this elegant visual documentary captures the music-making with the culture and community that foster it.

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Blues Legacy

Tradition and Innovation in Chicago

David Whiteis

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Chicago blues musicians parlayed a genius for innovation and emotional honesty into a music revered around the world. As the blues evolves, it continues to provide a soundtrack to, and a dynamic commentary on, the African American experience: the legacy of slavery; historic promises and betrayals; opportunity and disenfranchisement; the ongoing struggle for freedom. Through it all, the blues remains steeped in survivorship and triumph, a music that dares to stare down life in all its injustice and iniquity and still laugh--and dance--in its face.

David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis.

Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.

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Borrowed Time

Survivors of Nazi Terezín Remember

Dennis Carlyle Darling

University of Texas Press, 2024

Honorable Mention — The International Photography Awards 2024 Book Category

Documentation, through photographs and interviews, of those who survived the unique Nazi ghetto/camp located at Terezín, Czech Republic.

Dennis Carlyle Darling has photographed and interviewed hundreds of Holocaust survivors who spent time at the German transit camp and ghetto at Terezín, a former eighteenth-century military garrison located north of Prague. Many of the prisoners were kept there until they could be transported to Auschwitz or other camps, but unlike German captives elsewhere, they were allowed to participate in creative activities that the Nazis used for propaganda purposes to show the world how well they were treating Jews. Although it was not classified as a “death camp,” more than 33,000 prisoners died at Terezín from hunger, disease, and mistreatment.

In Borrowed Time, Darling reveals Terezín as a place of painful contradictions, through striking and intimate portraits that retrace time and place with his subjects, the last remnants of those who survived the experience. Returning to sites of painful memories with his interview subjects to photograph them, Darling respectfully depicts these survivors and tells their stories.

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