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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.

Internationally renowned as an exciting guide to unknown peoples and places, Norwegian Carl Lumholtz was a Victorian-era explorer, anthropologist, natural scientist, writer, and photographer who worked in Australia, Mexico, and Borneo. His photographs of the Tarahumara, Huichol, Cora, Tepehuan, Southern Pima, and Tohono O’odham tribes of Mexico and southwest Arizona were among the very first taken of these cultures and still provide the best photographic record of them at the turn of the twentieth century. Lumholtz published his photographs in several books, including Unknown Mexico and New Trails in Mexico, but, because photographic publishing was then in its infancy, most of the images were poorly printed, badly cropped, or reworked by “illustrators” using crude techniques. Among Unknown Tribes presents more than two hundred of Lumholtz’s best photographs—many never before published—from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway. The images are newly scanned, most from the original negatives, and printed uncropped, disclosing a wealth of previously hidden detail. Each photograph is fully identified and often amplified by Lumholtz’s own notes and captions. Accompanying the images are essays and photo notes that survey Lumholtz’s career and legacy, as well as what his photographs reveal about the “unknown tribes.” By giving Lumholtz’s photographs the high-quality reproduction they deserve, Among Unknown Tribes honors not only the Norwegian explorer but also the native peoples who continue to struggle for recognition and justice as they actively engage in the traditional customs that Lumholtz recorded.

In 1988 photographer Paul D’Amato was driving around Chicago with his camera when he decided to follow Halsted Street into Pilsen, the city’s largest Mexican neighborhood. Intrigued by the barrio and neighboring Little Village, he began to take photographs and would continue to do so off and on for the next fourteen years. D’Amato started with the public life of the neighborhood: women and children in the streets, open fire hydrants, and graffiti. But later—after he got to know the area’s Mexican residents better—he was allowed to take more intimate photos of people at work, families at weddings and parties, and even gang members.

Barrio collects ninety of these striking color images along with D’Amato’s fascinating account of his time photographing Mexican Chicago and his acceptance—often grudging, after threatened violence—into the heart of the city’s Mexican community. Some of the photos here are beautifully composed and startling—visual narratives that are surreal and dreamlike, haunting and mythic. Others, like those D’Amato took while shadowing graffiti artists in the subway, are far more immediate and improvisational. With a foreword by author Stuart Dybek that places D’Amato’s work in the context of the Pilsen and Little Village that Dybek has elsewhere captured so memorably, this book offers a penetrating, evocative, and overall streetwise portrait of two iconic and enduring Hispanic neighborhoods.

Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1822–1865) produced over eight hundred photographs during her all-too-brief life. Most of these were portraits of her adolescent daughters. By whisking away the furniture and bric-a-brac common in scenes of upper-class homes of the Victorian period, Lady Hawarden transformed the sitting room of her London residence into a photographic studio—a private space for taking surprising photos of her daughters in fancy dress. In Carol Mavor’s hands, these pictures become windows into Victorian culture, eroticism, mother-daughter relationships, and intimacy.
With drama, wit, and verve, Lady Hawarden’s girls, becoming women, entwine each other, their mirrored reflections and select feminine objects (an Indian traveling cabinet, a Gothic-style desk, a shell-covered box) as homoerotic partners. The resulting mise-en-scène is secretive, private, delicious, and arguably queer—a girltopia ripe with maternality and adolescent flirtation, as touching as it is erotic. Luxuriating in the photographs’ interpretive possibilities, Mavor makes illuminating connections between Hawarden and other artists and writers, including Vermeer, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and twentieth-century photographers Sally Mann and Francesca Woodman. Weaving psychoanalytic theory and other photographic analyses into her work, Mavor contemplates the experience of the photograph and considers the relationship of Hawarden’s works to the concept of the female fetish, to voyeurism, mirrors and lenses, and twins and doubling. Under the spell of Roland Barthes, Mavor’s voice unveils the peculiarities of the erotic in Lady Hawarden’s images through a writerly approach that remembers and rewrites adolescence as sustained desire.
In turn autobiographical, theoretical, historical, and analytical, Mavor’s study caresses these mysteriously ripped and scissored images into fables of sapphic love and the real magic of photography.

The paintings, murals, and graphics of Ben Shahn (1898-1969) have made him one of the most heralded American artists of the twentieth century, but during the 1930s he was also among the nation's premier photographers. Much of his photographic work was sponsored by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration, where his colleagues included Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.

Ben Shahn's American Scene: Photographs, 1938 presents one hundred superb photographs from his most ambitious FSA project, a survey of small-town life in the Depression. John Raeburn's accompanying text illuminates the thematic and formal significance of individual photographs and reveals how, taken together, they address key cultural and political issues of the years leading up to World War II. Shahn's photographs highlight conflicts between traditional values and the newer ones introduced by modernity as represented by the movies, chain stores, and the tantalizing allure of consumer goods, and they are particularly rich in observation about the changes brought about by Americans' universal reliance on the automobile. They also explore the small town's standing as the nation's symbol of democratic community and expose the discriminatory social and racial practices that subverted this ideal in 1930s America.

In the words of guest editor Fernando Coronil, this special issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review on photography contributes “an expanding discussion across disciplinary boundaries of the role of visuality in social life.” Helping to overcome the split between image and word in Western theory, the essays pinpoint the need to recognize the “play of all senses in the construction of reality.” Turning photos and collections of photos into historical documents, the four authors read images as texts to be analyzed in the context of their production and circulation.

Each essay looks at the role of a particular photographic genre in the making of modern Latin American identities. Articles cover the adaptation in late-nineteenth-century Oaxaca of European type photography as a tool of imperialist enterprise and science, state consolidation, and consumer culture; the use of portrait photography by the K’iche Mayans of Quetzaltenango; and the family album—made up of snapshots, postcards, and other memorabilia—as a historical document.

Contributors. Greg Grandin, Daniel James, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Deborah Poole

Photographers Linda and Robert Scarth have an incredible eye for that magic moment when small becomes beautiful. Matched with patience and skill, their eye for magic produces dazzling images of Iowa nature up close. Revealing the miniature beauties hidden among the patches of prairie, woodland, and wetland that remain in Iowa’s sadly overdeveloped landscape, the seventy-five color photographs in Deep Nature give us a breathtaking cross section of the state’s smallest inhabitants.

The Scarths’ close-up images of showy orchis and northern monkshood, great spangled fritillary and painted lady, red-breasted nuthatch and eastern wood-pewee, ornate box turtle and gray treefrog, big bluestem and cotton-grass, and many other natural wonders look more like paintings than photographs. Beginning with an iridescent fly hovering over a neon-purple fringed gentian and ending with their iconic image of coneflowers refracted in dewdrops, they have created a sparkling jewelbox of images that will make us look at the small world around us with renewed appreciation.

Attending to the small things in the fabric of nature is the Scarths’ source of artistic inspiration. Taking Walt Whitman’s “every leaf is a miracle” as their beginning, they celebrate not only each leaf but each feather, insect, dewdrop, flower, lichen, and intricate organism in the evolving web of life.

Winner of the third biennial Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize
Robert Frank, Prize Judge

In Driftless, Danny Wilcox Frazier’s dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people, resources, and services are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier’s arresting photographs take us into Iowa’s abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi, veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as more recent arrivals: Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer, Latinos at work in the fields. Frazier’s camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever: harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving.

This collection of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural Iowa, but it is also more that that. It shows what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier’s photographs are rich in emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America. Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, Frazier’s stunning images evoke the brilliance of Robert Frank’s The Americans.

To view an image gallery, click here.

Sports figures cope with a level of celebrity once reserved for the stars of stage and screen. In Game Faces , Sarah K. Fields looks at the legal ramifications of the cases brought by six of them--golfer Tiger Woods, quarterback Joe Montana, college football coach Wally Butts, baseball pitchers Warren Spahn and Don Newcombe, and hockey enforcer Tony Twist--when faced with what they considered attacks on their privacy and image. Placing each case in its historical and legal context, Fields examines how sports figures in the U.S. have used the law to regain control of their image. As she shows, decisions in the cases significantly affected the evolution of laws related to privacy, defamation, and publicity--areas pertinent to the lives of the famous sports figure and the non-famous consumer alike. She also tells the stories of why the plaintiffs sought relief in the courts, uncovering motives that delved into the heart of issues separating individual rights from the public's perceived right to know. A fascinating exploration of a still-evolving phenomenon, Game Faces is an essential look at the legal playing fields that influence our enjoyment of sports.

This handsome book captures in words and pictures the powerful emotions that circled around one man in Chicago in the early 1980’s: Harold Washington. More than one hundred pictures, from candid shots on the campaign trail to triumphant public appearances, give readers a window onto a man who won over an entire city. Washington’s mayoral win represented a faltering of the previously all-powerful Chicago Machine, and his campaign was a part of a larger civil rights crusade that forged unity in the black community in Chicago.

Antonio Dickey and Marc PoKempner were there with Washington throughout 1982-87, Dickey as his campaign and personal photographer and PoKempner on assignment for the New York Times, People, and Time, capturing the force of his personality and the inspiration he brought to Chicago. Their photographs have become the definitive documentation of the Harold years and were featured in the Chicago Historical Society’s 2003–2004 exhibit “Harold Washington: The Man and the Movement.” They were there for his underdog rise, his win, his first term, and his untimely death just seven months into his second term. The year 2007 marks the twentieth anniversary of Washington’s death, and this loving tribute in words and pictures will keep his message alive for future generations.

Hoover Dam was constructed during one of the most depressed economic climates in American history, in a remote desert canyon where temperatures ranged from single to triple digits. In order to visually document the project, the Bureau of Reclamation assigned employee Ben Glaha to photograph all aspects of the dam's construction. Glaha's photographs were used in press releases, periodicals, books, pamphlets, and slide shows to demonstrate that the dam was structurally sound and that government funds were being used wisely.

Hoover Dam: The Photographs of Ben Glaha is the first detailed examination of Glaha's images of the project, some of which have never before been published. Glaha photographed every aspect of the construction process—from details of how the dam was assembled to the overall progress as the dam rose from the bottom of the dry riverbed. Glaha not only provided the Bureau with the photographs it required, he also employed his own artistic abilities to produce images of the dam that were exhibited in museums and galleries as works of art. Because Glaha was able to create a selection of Hoover Dam photographs worthy of exhibition, he was unique among government documentary photographers.

Art historian Barbara Vilander's text places Glaha's efforts within the historical context of western landscape exploration and development and reveals how his particular qualifications led to his selection as the project photographer. Vilander then examines the many publications and venues in which the Bureau used Glaha's photographs to create support for the project. She also discusses how Glaha was recognized in his own era as an influential artist and teacher, and compares his work with that of other contemporary landscape photographers addressing western water management.

Glaha's Hoover Dam images were widely published, although in accordance with Bureau policy he was not usually given personal credit and therefore his name remains largely unknown. Vilander's book corrects that oversight by giving Glaha the technical and artistic credit he is due within the context of one of the most ambitious projects in American history.

Roman B.J. Kwasniewski, son of Polish immigrants, used his camera to document life in Milwaukee's Polish community during the early decades of the twentieth century. His images transform the particulars of everyday life at local businesses, in homes and classrooms, and at cultural, social, and recreational events into powerful depictions of the immigrant experience. With an introduction by well-known Milwaukee historian John Gurda, this book offers rare insight into the daily lives of a proud people struggling to maintain their heritage while living in a time of rapid change.

While Kwasniewski's camera captured the sights and sounds of Milwaukee at the turn of the century from the perspective of a single ethnic group in a single neighborhood, his photographs resonate far beyond Milwaukee's Polish South Side. They illuminate the particulars of American life during the early decades of the twentieth century. "What we see, reflected in the distant mirror," says John Gurda, "is ourselves."

On February 2, 1968, the Electric Factory, Philadelphia's first major venue for the era's new music, opened with a show featuring the Chambers Brothers. Performing their neosoul and gospel sounds in a warm and inviting venue, they declared, "My soul's been psychedelicized!"-a feeling that the Factory's cofounder, Larry Magid, has been experiencing ever since.

In My Soul's Been Psychedelicized, Magid presents a spectacular photographic history of the bands and solo acts that have performed at the Electric Factory and at other venues in Factory-produced concerts over the past four decades. The book includes concert posters, photographs, and promotional items featuring both rising stars and established performers, such as Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bette Midler, Elvis Presley, Tina Turner, Pearl Jam and many, many more.

The images—candid and celebratory—create a one-of-a-kind history of rock and roll, from the wild 1960s to the Live Aid concert in 1985 and the closing of the Philadelphia Spectrum in 2009. Magid's vivid recollections constitute a who's who of pop music and culture. As one of the great concert producers, he shares his unique perspective on the business, talking about how it has changed and how lasting careers have been carefully developed.

For anyone who has ever attended a concert at the Electric Factory—or for anyone who missed a show—My Soul's Been Psychedelicized will bring back great memories of the music and the musicians.

“People’s lives are written on the fields of old farms. The rows of the fields are like lines on a page, blank and white in winter, filled in with each year’s story of happiness, disappointment, drought, rain, sun, scarcity, plenty. The chapters accumulate, and people enter and leave the narrative. Only the farm goes on.”—From the Introduction

In One Small Farm, Craig Schreiner’s evocative color photographs capture one family as they maintain the rhythms and routines of small farm life near Pine Bluff, Wisconsin. “Milk in the morning and milk at night. Feed the cows and calves. Plant crops. Grind feed. Chop and bale hay. Cut wood. Clean the barn. Spread manure on the fields. Plow snow and split wood in winter. In spring, pick rocks from the fields. Cultivate corn. Pick corn. Harvest oats and barley. Help calves be born. Milk in the morning and milk at night.”
There’s much more to life on the farm than just chores, of course, and Schreiner captures the rhythms and richness of everyday life on the farm in all seasons, evoking both the challenges and the joys and providing viewers a window into a world that is quickly fading. In documenting the Lamberty family’s daily work and life, these thoughtful photos explore larger questions concerning the future of small farm agriculture, Wisconsin cultural traditions, and the rural way of life.

A retrospective survey of Bruce Harkness’s striking social documentary photographs and an invaluable historical record that bears witness to irrevocably lost swaths of Detroit’s social and urban fabric.

In 1980, the cities of Detroit and Hamtramck, Michigan, exercised eminent domain to develop nearly five hundred acres of land for a new industrial park and General Motors assembly plant. But the land was not vacant. Some thirty-five hundred people lived there in Poletown—some of them for their entire lives. They attended neighborhood schools and churches, worked for and patronized small businesses, walked the sidewalks, drove the streets, and tended to lawns and gardens. Harkness began photographing the area in February 1981. He recorded street scenes, intersections, panoramic views, homes, businesses, churches, and people. Ten months, ninety visits, and six hundred photographs later, it all disappeared forever.

The Poletown series established Harkness as a major Detroit documentarian. It came on the heels of late-1970s projects located in and around the city’s skid row: Cass Corridor. The images include gritty streetscapes, a portrait series depicting residents living in a crumbling apartment building, and the lively cultural milieu of a local gay and transgender bar. Most of this old portion of inner-city Detroit since has been supplanted by urban redevelopment and gentrification.

During the late 1980s, Harkness collaborated with urban historian John J. Bukowczyk on a major documentary project, Urban Interiors. While the Poletown project had documented the exteriors of buildings and streetscapes on Detroit’s East Side, Urban Interiors captured the insides of inner-city Detroit homes and businesses and included extended oral history interviews.

While Harkness has always found human dignity and resilience in his subjects, the tone of his work brightened in the 1990s alongside Detroit’s revival. Photographs from this era include blues musicians performing in clubs and at outdoor concerts and the distinctive, robust youth culture that flourished in Dearborn’s now-defunct Zone Coffee House.

Featuring images from these and other projects, Photographs from Detroit, 1975–2019 includes Harkness’s extensive notes, which describe and contextualize the encounters he shared with the people and places he photographed, and offer insight into his working methods and equipment. The volume and quality of Harkness’s work merits him recognition as one of Detroit’s most important documentary photographers during this pivotal, transitional era in the city’s history.

Harkness’s images depict the struggles and resilience of ordinary individuals and families in working-class communities who together have indelibly shaped the spirit of Detroit. This book is a must-have for Detroiters past and present as well as historians, anthropologists, social documentary advocates, and photobook collectors everywhere.

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

Advisor for Ken Burns The American Revolution on PBS®
The Stories of the Final Six Surviving Soldiers Who Fought in the American Revolution
During the Civil War that threatened to tear the United States apart came the realization that only a handful of veterans of the American Revolution still survived—men who had fought the war that created the nation. Six of these men were photographed and interviewed for a book by Reverend E. B. Hillard that appeared late in 1864. Their images have captivated generations since then; but—through a combination of faded memories and the interviewer’s patriotic agenda—the biographies accompanying these amazing photographs were garbled and distorted, containing information that ranged from inaccurate to implausible. Now for the first time the military careers of these men have been researched in detail using a wide range of primary sources. The result is a new perspective on the actual service of these soldiers, from enlistment to discharge, along with new details of their relatively quiet postwar lives. The Revolution’s Last Men presents the original biographical interviews published in 1864, pension depositions and other first-hand accounts given by each man later in life, and an up-to-date biography examining each soldier’s service and discussing the inaccuracies and uncertainties of the previously published accounts. To complement the photographs taken in 1864, original drawings depict the men as they may have appeared when they were soldiers, using current research on military artifacts and material culture. Also included are additional photographs of some of the men that were not part of the 1864 collection but taken when their status as the last known survivors of the American Revolution made them celebrities. While the photographs of these aged veterans continue to inspire, this book puts their service into perspective and allows these men to be appreciated for who they really were and for their great and unique service to their country.

In compelling, often stunning black-and-white photographs, The Weather and a Place to Live portrays the manmade landscape of the western United States. Here we come face to face with the surreal intersection of the American appetite for suburban development and the resistant, rolling, arid country of the desert West. Steven B. Smith’s extraordinary photographs take us into the contemporary reality of sprawling suburbs reconfiguring what was once vast, unpopulated territory. With arresting concision and an unblinking eye, Smith shows how a new frontier is being won, and suggests too how it may be lost in its very emergence. Since the early 1990s Smith has been making large-format photographs in California, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Based on this body of work, he was chosen as winner of the biennial Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

The power of these photographs lies in part in Smith’s unusual knowledge of the places he portrays. Raised in Utah, Smith has worked on construction crews, and he was a contractor in California after living on the East Coast for a few years. When he moved to Los Angeles in 1991, he writes, “I was so astounded by what I saw happening to the landscape as it was being developed that I started photographing it immediately. The landscapes I saw were scraped bare, re-sculpted, sealed, and then covered so as not to erode away before the building process could be completed.”

Smith’s photographs offer a disturbing vision of the future of our planet, where the desire for home ownership is pitted against the costs of development in epic proportions. These altered landscapes force us to consider the consequences of human design battling natural forces across great expanses, a fragile balancing act and a contorted equation in which nature becomes both inspiration and invisible adversary. Smith’s elegant photographs of this constructed universe confront us with the beauty of images as images, yet push us to reflect on the devastation possible in the simple act of choosing a place to live.

Olin investigates the publication of photographs in mass media and literature, the hanging of exhibitions, the posting of photocopied photographs of lost loved ones in public spaces, and the intense photographic activity of tourists at their destinations. She moves from intimate relationships between viewers and photographs to interactions around larger communities, analyzing how photography affects the way people handle cataclysmic events like 9/11. Along the way, she shows us James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, dusts off Roland Barthes’s family album, takes us into Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and logs onto online photo albums. With over one hundred illustrations, Touching Photographs is an insightful contribution to the theory of photography, visual studies, and art history.