572 books match the query 'Photography' and 18 start with w
Words by Tanya Zack, Photographs by Mark Lewis
Duke University Press, 2022
By Stephanie Schwartz
University of Texas Press, 2020
“NO POLITICS whatever.” Walker Evans made this emphatic declaration in 1935, the year he began work for FDR’s Resettlement Administration. Evans insisted that his photographs of tenant farmers and their homes, breadlines, and the unemployed should be treated as “pure record.” The American photographer’s statements have often been dismissed. In Walker Evans: No Politics, Stephanie Schwartz challenges us to engage with what it might mean, in the 1930s and at the height of the Great Depression, to refuse to work politically.
Offering close readings of Evans’s numerous commissions, including his contribution to Carleton Beals’s anti-imperialist tract, The Crime of Cuba (1933), this book is a major departure from the standard accounts of Evans’s work and American documentary. Documentary, Schwartz reveals, is not a means of being present—or being “political.” It is a practice of record making designed to distance its maker from the “scene of the crime.” That crime, Schwartz argues, is not just the Depression; it is the processes of Americanization reshaping both photography and politics in the 1930s. Historicizing documentary, this book reimagines Evans and his legacy—the complexities of claiming “no politics.”
Apel, Dora
Rutgers University Press, 2012
War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images. Simultaneously, she explores the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images.
As a result of the global visual culture in which anyone may produce as well as consume public imagery, the wide variety of visual and documentary practices present realities that would otherwise be invisible or officially off-limits. In our digital era, the prohibition and control of images has become nearly impossible to maintain. Using carefully chosen case studies—such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video projections and public works in response to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the performance works of Coco Fusco and Regina Galindo, and the practices of Israeli and Palestinian artists—Apel posits that contemporary war images serve as mediating agents in social relations and as a source of protection or refuge for those robbed of formal or state-sanctioned citizenship.
While never suggesting that documentary practices are objective translations of reality, Apel shows that they are powerful polemical tools both for legitimizing war and for making its devastating effects visible. In modern warfare and in the accompanying culture of war that capitalism produces as a permanent feature of modern society, she asserts that the contest of images is as critical as the war on the ground.
Thy Phu
Duke University Press, 2021
Kathryn E. Delmez
Vanderbilt University Press, 2023
Tom Phillips
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011
Franz Fühmann
Lever Press, 2021
Leigh Raiford
Duke University Press, 2026
Ashley Gilbertson
University of Chicago Press, 2007
M. Caren Connolly
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2010
Take an intimate journey through the family, history, and architecture of 20 residential treasures in Wisconsin’s Own by M. Caren Connolly and Louis Wasserman. Richly illustrated with the photography of Zane Williams and complemented by historical images and watercolors and line drawings, Wisconsin’s Own profiles the architectural history of state’s most remarkable residences built between 1854 and 1939. The houses are a mix of public and private homes that are representative of varied architectural styles, from an Italianate along the Mississippi River and an interpretation of a sixteenth-century northern Italian villa overlooking Lake Michigan to an Adirondack-style camp in the North Woods and a fourteen-bedroom Georgian Revival mansion on Lake Geneva. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School is, of course, represented as well with examples by Wright and his mentor Louis Sullivan.
Wisconsin’s Own tells the story of the considerable contribution that each of these historic homes have made to American residential architecture. It also answers the questions who built the house, what brought them to Wisconsin, why they selected that particular style, and how it is that this historic home still stands—and shines—today.
Anne Loftis
University of Nevada Press, 2014
In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Loftis examines the artists who put a human face on the farmworkers’ plight in California during the Great Depression, focusing on writer John Steinbeck, photographer Dorothea Lange, sociologist and author Paul Taylor, and journalist Carey McWilliams. Loftis probes the interplay between journalism and art in the 1930s, when both academics and artists felt an urgent need to be relevant in the face of enormous misery. The power of their work grew out of their personal involvement in both the labor struggles and the hardships endured by workers and their families. Steinbeck, Lange, and the other artists and intellectuals in their circles created the public images of their times. Works such as The Grapes of Wrath or Lange’s Migrant Mother actually helped mold public opinion and form government policies. Even today these works remain icons in our shared perception of that era. Loftis helps us understand why this art still seems the truest representation of those desperate times, three-quarters of a century later.
Tom Phillips
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2010
To celebrate the acquisition of the archive of distinguished artist Tom Phillips, the Bodleian Library asked the artist to assemble and design a series of books drawing on his themed collection of over 50,000 photographic postcards. These encompass the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, ordinary people could afford to own portraits of themselves. Each of the books in the series contains two hundred images chosen from a visually rich vein of social history. Their covers also feature thematically linked paintings, specially created for each title, from Phillips’s signature work, A Humument.
Women & Hats explores the remarkable range found in the world of millinery, from outrageous Edwardian creations to the inventive austerities of World War II. Each of these unique and visually stunning books give a rich glimpse of forgotten times and will be greatly valued by art and history lovers alike.
Mary Lee Fulkerson
University of Nevada Press, 2017
Judith Fryer Davidov
Duke University Press, 1998
In presenting one of the most important strands of American photography, this richly illustrated book will interest students of American visual culture, women’s studies, and general readers alike.
Melody Davis
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
Elspeth H. Brown
Duke University Press, 2019

Edited by Peter d'Agostino and David Tafler
Intellect Books, 2018
Michael A. Amundson
University Press of Colorado, 2014
The 117 locations feature street views of Wyoming towns and cities, as well as views from the state's famous natural landmarks like Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Devil's Tower National Monument, Hot Springs State Park, and Big Horn and Shoshone National Forests. In addition, Amundson provides six in-depth essays that explore the life of Joseph E. Stimson, the rephotographic process and how it has evolved, and how repeat photography can be used to understand history, landscape, historic preservation, and globalization.
Wyoming Revisited highlights the historic evolution of the American West over the past century and showcases the significant changes that have occurred over the past twenty-five years. This book will appeal to photographers, historians of the American West, and anyone interested in Wyoming's history or landscape.
The publication of this book is supported in part by the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund.