Results by title

20 books match the query 'Portraits & Selfies'

Sort by

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.

[more]

Community In-Between / Urur Dhex Dhexad Ah

Portraits of Somali-Americans in Columbus

Qorsho Hassan and Ruth M. Smith

The Ohio State University Press, 2017

Community In-Between / Urur Dhex Dhexad Ah: Portraits of Somali-Americans in Columbus by Qorsho Hassan and Ruth M. Smith is a collection of stories and portraits of fifteen young Somali Americans involved in community building in Columbus, Ohio. By using their unique skills, these individuals balance their identities, build bridges, and create spaces for success. The rich, multifaceted stories in this book represent the heterogeneous experiences of the participants and show the deep connection to the diaspora and the interconnectedness of individual experiences.

A combination of storytelling and research connect each narrative to another, creating a strong framework for capturing the roles of young Somali Americans in community building through innovative initiatives such as designing a mixer bottle, beginning charitable programs, and educating the Somali community on voter rights. Two community artists help to capture the participants in their natural spaces, and their journey, aided by their empowering mentor, Riya Jama, bridges the gap of Somali females and their access to photography.

The portraits, stories, and artifacts throughout the book create a modicum of belonging. This new generation resiliently overcomes challenges such as racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia while still maintaining their hope in the future. Community In-Between captures their spirit and unwavering faith.

The portraits, stories, and artifacts throughout the book create a modicum of belonging. This new generation resiliently overcomes challenges such as racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia while still maintaining their hope in the future. Community In-Between captures their spirit and unwavering faith.

[more]

Detroit Resurgent

Howard Bossen

Michigan State University Press, 2014

Detroit is frequently viewed as a city where hope has been lost, government is totally dysfunctional, and the infrastructure is beyond repair. For far too many people around the world, the Motor City is perceived as a city whose greatness is in distant memory. Detroit Resurgent, while not ignoring the problems facing the city, explores Detroit in a new way that reveals a culturally rich, very alive, and undeniably present side of the city. Through photographic portraits, interviews, essays, and poetry, it demonstrates the vitality and humanity of Detroit’s people, providing a powerful counternarrative to the vision of Detroit as a Rust Belt wasteland. Giving voice to people with hopes for a brighter future and aspirations to create a new city out of the old required recording their own words and engaging a portrait photographer grounded in humanism whose approach is based upon the traditions of social documentary photography. Detroit Resurgent explores the city through the voices of those working in a multitude of ways to reshape it into a twenty-first-century urban space, through the auto industry, urban agriculture and food production, entrepreneurial action and small business, visual and performing arts, activism, and visionary leadership.

[more]

Down to the River

Portraits of Iowa Musicians

Sandra Louise Dyas

University of Iowa Press, 2007

In 1987 photographer Sandra Dyas moved to Iowa City and began documenting the area’s vibrant live music scene, with its distinctive combination of folk, blues, roots/Americana, and rock sounds. The sixty photos in Down to the River capture her twenty years of photographing live music venues and shooting portraits of musicians in and around the city, resulting in a collection of images as compassionate and honest as the music itself.

Dyas’s photographs present both the sweaty intensity of live performances and the more contemplative moments of individual portraits. They are complemented by Chris Offutt’s empathetic essay, which also encapsulates the experience of connecting with a new home through its music. A companion CD with eighteen tracks by Iowa’s finest singer/songwriters, including Dave Moore, Greg Brown, Bo Ramsey, David Zollo, and Pieta Brown, add up to an unmatched perspective on Iowa music and musicians.

CD Tracks
1.     Iowa Crawl, Joe Price
2.     Poor Back Slider, Greg Brown
3.     Parnell, David Zollo
4.     #807, Pieta Brown
5.     Wheels of Steel, Radoslav Lorkovic
6.     Down to the River, Dave Moore
7.     Lucy and Andy Drive to Arkansas, Kevin Gordon
8.     Chuck Brown, Mike and Amy Finders
9.    Nobody But You, Joe Price
10.    Earleton, BeJae Fleming
11.    Ceremonial Child, High and Lonesome
12.    Sidetrack Lounge, Bo Ramsey
13.    On the Edge, Pieta Brown
14.    One Wrong Turn, Greg Brown
15.    Not in Iowa, Kelly Pardekooper
16.    Living in a Cornfield, Bo Ramsey
17.    ’57 Chevy, Tom Jessen’s Dimestore Outfit
18.    Roll on John, the Pines

[more]

Eye Dreaming

Photographs by Anthony Barboza

Anthony Barboza

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022

This richly illustrated book is the first monograph to explore the prolific career of the celebrated photographer Anthony Barboza.

Anthony Barboza (b. 1944) is a celebrated artist and writer who has made thousands of photographs in the studio and on the street since 1963. A member of the Kamoinge collective of photographers in New York, Barboza is largely self-taught and has an inimitable, highly intuitive vision that he refers to as “eye dreaming,” or “a state of mind that’s almost like meditation.” Throughout the years he has made countless commercial images, including celebrity portraits, advertisements, and album covers. His personal photographic projects illuminate his deep investment in the art and concerns of Black communities, not only in the United States but also around the globe.

This lavishly illustrated volume follows Barboza’s prolific career from his youth in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to his formative years in New York in the 1960s, to the present day. An introduction by renowned author and critic Hilton Als underscores Barboza’s importance and impact. An essay by curator Aaron Bryant contextualizes Barboza’s life and career as they map against major civil rights events in the United States. In an intimate interview between the artist and curator Mazie M. Harris, Barboza offers astute, humorous, and intimate musings on his long career, foundational influences, and artistic legacy. This monograph, the first on the artist, will appeal to aficionados of photography and Black art and culture.

[more]

Fantasy Travel

Vintage People on Photo Postcards

Tom Phillips

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2012

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.

Fantasy Travel compiles postcards of people sitting playfully in studio mock-ups of airplanes, cars, speedboats, and hot air balloons. Such modes of travel were beyond the means of most people at the time, and photographic studios allowed them to indulge their flights of fancy—and take away the resulting postcard.

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.

[more]

Lustron Stories

Charles Mintz

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

The Lustron Corporation manufactured porcelain-baked, enamel-coated all-steel houses between 1948 and 1950 in Columbus, OH. Virtually everything—exterior siding, roof, interior walls, cabinets, and ceilings—was made out of this material. The components were shipped to site on specially designed trailers and assembled by local contractors using only wrenches. About 2,500 Lustrons were sold, mostly in the eastern United States, but as far afield as Miami and Los Alamos. Roughly two-thirds are still being used today.
A remarkable cross section of individuals and families live in these modest (~1100 sq. ft.) homes. While certainly diverse in age and place in life, the homeowners are still firmly working class. Everyone who lives in a Lustron home has an opinion about it. The material is miserable to cut or drill into. Repairs are more about metalworking and enamel finishing than carpentry or house painting. And magnets tend to be a popular solution for hanging objects inside and outside the steel walls.
Four years ago, Charles Mintz set out to photograph the people living in these homes. The residents, owners, or both were photographed outside and occasionally inside. Mintz used a large format wooden camera and available light. This book features 65 of the resulting photographs and essays from Shannon Thomas Perich, Curator of the Photographic History Collection at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and Jeffrey Head, author and architecture critic.

[more]

Mario Giacomelli

Figure/Ground

Virginia Heckert

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021

A new look at the work of Mario Giacomelli, one of Italy’s foremost photographers of the twentieth century.

Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000) was born into poverty and lived his entire life in Senigallia, a seaside town along the Adriatic coast in Italy’s Marche region. He purchased his first camera in 1953 and quickly gained recognition for the raw expressiveness of his images. His preference for grainy, high-contrast film and paper produced bold, geometric compositions with glowing whites and deep blacks. Giacomelli most frequently focused his camera on the people, landscapes, and seascapes of the Marche, and he often spent several years expanding and reinterpreting a single body of work or repurposing an image made for one series for inclusion in another. By applying titles derived from poetry and literature to his photographs, he transformed ordinary subjects into meditations on time, memory, and existence.

Spanning the photographer’s earliest pictures to those made in the final years of his life, this publication celebrates the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive Giacomelli holdings, formed in large part through a significant gift from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 29 to October 10, 2021.

[more]

Mother Archive

A Dominican Family Memoir

Erika Morillo

University of Iowa Press, 2024

2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Shortlist, Nonfiction

2024 NBCC Award Finalist, Autobiography

A family murder kept secret, the mysterious disappearance of her father, the systematic erasing of family photographs, a turbulent relationship with her mother, layers of trauma and abuse. In Mother Archive, Erika Morillo reconciles these demons of her past by searching for and seeking out the roots of her family. Intertwining memories with archival family photographs, news clippings, film stills, and artistic images, Morillo revisits her childhood growing up in the Dominican Republic, a place and time riddled with a history of violence and a tradition of erasure.
Spanning three generations across three different countries, this memoir works as a map in which the author traces incidents in her family history to help her understand herself and her own experience as a mother.

[more]

Off the Walls

Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks

Sarah Waldorf

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2020

When life (in a global pandemic) imitates art . . .

Van Gogh’s Starry Night made out of spaghetti? Cat with a Pearl Earring? Frida Kahlo self-portraits with pets and toilet paper? While the world reeled from the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), thousands of people around the globe, inspired by challenges from Getty and other museums, raided toy chests, repurposed pantry items, and enlisted family, roommates, and animals to re-create famous works of art at home. Astonishing in their creativity, wit, and ingenuity, these creations remind us of the power of art to unite us and bring joy during troubled times. Off the Walls: Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks celebrates these imaginative re-creations, bringing highlights from this challenge together in one whimsical, irresistible volume. Getty Publications will donate all profits from the sale of this book to a charity supporting art and artists.

[more]

One Small Farm

Photographs of a Wisconsin Way of Life

Craig Schreiner

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013

“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.

[more]

People of the Big Voice

Photographs of Ho-Chunk Families by Charles Van Schaick, 1879-1942

Tom Jones

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2027

A stunning photographic portrayal of the Ho-Chunk people during a challenging period that presents the resilience of a community whose story continues to this day.

People of the Big Voice tells the visual history of Ho-Chunk families at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond as depicted through the lens of Black River Falls studio photographer Charles Van Schaick. The family relationships among those who sat for the photographer are clearly visible in these images. Sisters, friends, families, and young couples appear and reappear, fleshing out a narrative of the period, from 1879 to 1942, referred to as "the dark ages” in First Nations tribal history.

Following introductory essays from three of the authors are more than three hundred beautifully detailed photographs. Unique to the project are captions that identify over ninety percent of the individuals pictured—made possible by the continuing efforts of tribal members and genealogists—and include both English and Ho-Chunk names.

Also featured are candid shots of Ho-Chunk people on the streets of Black River Falls, outside family dwellings, and at powwows. As author and Ho-Chunk tribal member Amy Lonetree writes, "A significant number of the images were taken just a few short years after the darkest, most devastating period for the Ho-Chunk. Invasion, diseases, warfare, forced assimilation, loss of land, and repeated forced removals from our beloved homelands left the Ho-Chunk people in a fight for their culture and their lives."

A significant contribution to the history of Native peoples, People of the Big Voice is a breathtaking portrayal of a resilient community whose story continues today.

[more]

Perimeter

A Contemporary Portrait of Lake Michigan

Kevin J. Miyazaki

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014

Commissioned by the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University to create an artwork reflecting on the importance of freshwater, Milwaukee-based photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki embarked on a two-week, 1,800-mile drive around Lake Michigan. He traveled its perimeter, through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, to produce what he calls “a contemporary portrait of Lake Michigan.” Miyazaki set up his portable studio on beaches, in parks, on boat docks, and in backyards, photographing those he met along the way. From residents, environmental scientists, and artists to a Native American water rights advocate, surfers, and commercial fishermen, Lake Michigan holds a powerful place in the life of each. Many shared their thoughts with him on why this body of water is important to all.

Miyazaki also photographed the water as he went, creating waterscapes of the ever-changing lake affected by weather and time. Perimeter gathers these images together, creating a diverse portrait of both people and a place, encapsulating Lake Michigan’s significance to those who are drawn to it.

[more]

Photographic Presidents

Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital

Cara A. Finnegan

University of Illinois Press, 2021

Defining the Chief Executive via flash powder and selfie sticks

Lincoln’s somber portraits. Lyndon Johnson’s swearing in. George W. Bush’s reaction to learning about the 9/11 attacks. Photography plays an indelible role in how we remember and define American presidents. Throughout history, presidents have actively participated in all aspects of photography, not only by sitting for photos but by taking and consuming them. Cara A. Finnegan ventures from a newly-discovered daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams to Barack Obama’s selfies to tell the stories of how presidents have participated in the medium’s transformative moments. As she shows, technological developments not only changed photography, but introduced new visual values that influence how we judge an image. At the same time, presidential photographs—as representations of leaders who symbolized the nation—sparked public debate on these values and their implications.

An original journey through political history, Photographic Presidents reveals the intertwined evolution of an American institution and a medium that continues to define it.

[more]

Photography on the Color Line

W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture

Shawn Michelle Smith

Duke University Press, 2004

Through a rich interpretation of the remarkable photographs W. E. B. Du Bois compiled for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Shawn Michelle Smith reveals the visual dimension of the color line that Du Bois famously called “the problem of the twentieth century.” Du Bois’s prize-winning exhibit consisted of three albums together containing 363 black-and-white photographs, mostly of middle-class African Americans from Atlanta and other parts of Georgia. Smith provides an extensive analysis of the images, the antiracist message Du Bois conveyed by collecting and displaying them, and their connection to his critical thought. She contends that Du Bois was an early visual theorist of race and racism and demonstrates how such an understanding makes the important concepts he developed—including double consciousness, the color line, the Veil, and second sight—available to visual culture and African American studies scholars in powerful new ways.

Smith reads Du Bois’s photographs in relation to other turn-of-the-century images such as scientific typologies, criminal mugshots, racist caricatures, and lynching photographs. By juxtaposing these images with reproductions from Du Bois’s exhibition archive, Smith shows how Du Bois deliberately challenged racist representations of African Americans. Emphasizing the importance of comparing multiple visual archives, Photography on the Color Line reinvigorates understandings of the stakes of representation and the fundamental connections between race and visual culture in the United States.

[more]

Pictures from a Drawer

Prison and the Art of Portraiture

Bruce Jackson

Temple University Press, 2009

For more than forty years, Bruce Jackson has been documenting—in books, photographs, audio recording and film—inmates' lives in American prisons. In November 1975, he acquired a collection of old ID photos while he was visiting the Cummins Unit, a state prison farm in Arkansas. They are published together for the first time in this remarkable book. The 121 images that appear here were likely taken between 1915-1940. As Jackson describes in an absorbing introduction, the function of these photos was not portraiture— their function was to "fold a person into the controlled space of a dossier." Here, freed from their prison "jackets" and printed at sizes far larger than their originals, these one-time ID photos have now become portraits. Jackson's restoration transforms what were small bureaucratic artifacts into moving images of real men and women. Pictures from a Drawer also contains an extraordinary description of everyday life at Cummins prison in the 1950s, written originally by hand and presented to Jackson in 1973 by its author, a longtime inmate.

[more]

Remote Access

Small Public Libraries in Arkansas

Sabine Schmidt

University of Arkansas Press, 2021

Winner, 2024 Arkansiana Book Award, Arkansas Library Association

With their cameras and notebooks in hand, photographers Sabine Schmidt and Don House embarked on an ambitious project to document the libraries committed to serving Arkansas’s smallest communities. Remote Access is the culmination of this fascinating three-year effort, which took the artists to every region of their home state.

Schmidt’s carefully constructed color images of libraries and the communities they serve and House’s rich black-and-white portraits of library patrons and staff shine alongside the authors’ personal essays about their experiences. The pages here come alive with a deep connection to Arkansas’s history and culture as we accompany the authors on visits to a section of the Trail of Tears near Parkin, to the site of the tragic 1959 fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, and to Maya Angelou’s childhood home in Stamps, among many other significant destinations.

Through this testament to the essential role of libraries in the twenty-first century, Schmidt and House have created a clear-eyed portrait of contemporary rural life, delving into issues of race, politics, gender, and isolation as they document the remarkable hard work and generosity put forth in community efforts to sustain local libraries.

[more]

The Other Half

Forty Men Reveal Life After Fifty

Ellen Warner

Brandeis University Press, 2026

An insightful and intimate look at aging and masculinity that includes interviews and portraits of men from around the world.

What do men really think? From a taxi driver to a prince, a fishmonger to a professional boxer, The Other Half reveals the inner thoughts of men over fifty from different nationalities and different walks of life in their own words, illuminated by their portraits. Author and photojournalist Ellen Warner traveled the world to find out what men really think about love, work, and aging, speaking with well-known figures like film director James Ivory and journalist Bill Keller, as well as a philosopher, a chess grandmaster, a hair stylist, a financier, and more. Interviewing men from Colombia, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Sweden, and everywhere in between, Warner assembles a moving portrait of their reflections, insights, challenges, and hard-won triumphs.

A companion to The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty, Warner’s latest book shares the diverse, vibrant experiences of men over fifty.

[more]

The Selfie Machine

Selfies, Platforms, and Digital Image Culture in India

Anirban K. Baishya

Rutgers University Press, 2027

The Selfie Machine offers novel insight into personalized communication practices in the digital age through the medium of the selfie. While the selfie has achieved notoriety due to pop-psychology accounts of Narcissism-related selfie "disorders," this book examines the selfie as a mode of meaning making and self-presentation that includes not just still images, but also short videos, hashtag practices and economies of liking and following. In taking India as the starting point of its investigation, The Selfie Machine inverts the "West-then-the-rest" model of understanding global digital media practices. The book considers selfie culture’s impact on personal and public digital practices and trends—ranging from cellphone markets, to influencer entrepreneurship and microcelebrity, to the conduct of politics and protest. In doing so, it not only offers an expanded definition of selfies in digital media culture, but also demonstrates how “global” digital media (including selfies) cannot be understood as a monolith.

[more]