University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Art: Photography

Local Portraiture

Carmen Pérez González — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This thoughtfully and meticulously researched book explores the work of indigenous Iranian photographers and the way in which their photographs reflect their society and surroundings. In order to highlight how photography reflects local culture, Carmen Pérez González, a photographer herself, offers a comparative visual analysis of nineteenth-century Iranian photographs and paintings created during the same time period and in the same place in order to show that aesthetic preferences are rooted in the socio-cultural habits of artists. This lushly illustrated book is a testimony to the unique power and historical value of photographic portraits and their enduring power to capture local realities.

International Garden Photographer of the Year

Philip Smith — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The International Garden Photographer of the Year competition has blossomed into one of the premiere showcases for nature and landscape photography, receiving thousands of entries from both professional and amateur participants. The competition encourages photos that take fresh approaches to their subjects, pushing the boundaries of garden photography. New categories this year are Wildflower Landscapes and Wildlife in the Garden, joining others such as Beautiful Gardens, Greening the City, and a special Young Garden Photographer of the Year.

This eagerly anticipated sixth collection of finalists brings together an exceptional group of photos, ranging from a split-second shot of hummingbird wings to eerily beautiful x-rays of flowers. Photos spill across the pages, allowing readers to pore over every detail. And though the beauty of the images can speak for itself, each photo comes with descriptions that tell how the photographer caught each moment and what camera and settings were used. The collection reminds us that despite advances in technology, the people behind the cameras are still the true talent.

This year’s best photos will be shown in exhibitions across the world, with shows in New York City, London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Nuremburg, Lisbon, and more. With a winning combination of beautiful images and insight into the photographer’s process, this collection will be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of any gardener, nature lover, or photography enthusiast.

Cairo to Constantinople

Sophie Gordon — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the spring of 1862, Queen Victoria commissioned the leading British photographer Francis Bedford to accompany her son and heir, the future King Edward VII, on an ambitious journey across the Middle East. This beautifully illustrated book traces their tour throughout Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and Greece alongside excerpts from Prince Edward’s diary and other newly discovered archival material, published here for the first time.

Over the course of several months, Bedford produced more than two hundred negatives, including images of architecture and stunning landscapes, from a breathtaking view of the Garden of Gethsemane to shots of the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. He was the first Christian granted permission to photograph sacred sites in Jerusalem. Bedford also captured many photographs of the people he encountered on the tour, both locals and members of the royal party.

Cairo to Constantinople is the first book to focus on the photographs taken during Prince Edward’s travels in the Middle East. Taken during a time of great change in the area, these extraordinary photographs will fascinate anyone with an interest in the history of the Middle East or in photography’s role in documenting civilization.

Alberto Giacometti

Ernst Scheidegger — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess, Alberto Giacometti:Traces of a Friendshipis being published in a revised and expanded edition, which includes over forty previously unpublished photographs, an intimate new chapter, and amended captions.

Alberto Giacometti (1901–66) is inarguably one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century. Immensely gifted and prolific, Giacometti gave physical expression to his twin obsessions of the human form and the alienation of modern life. Because of his canonical position in the history of art and the reams of scholarship produced about him, Giacometti remains to many the elusive master artist, distant and remote on the Olympus of creative endeavor.

Ernst Scheidegger, a friend of the sculptor, knew a very different Giacometti. Scheidegger accompanied him to his studio, ate and drank with him, and relaxed with him in his family home. Alberto Giacometti: Traces of a Friendship is a document of this intimate life of Giacometti, consisting of photographs that Scheidegger made over the course of two decades. Scheidegger welcomes readers into Giacometti’s studio and house in Maloja, Switzerland, allowing them rare access to the most closely held aspects of the artist’s life. Sketching in his studio, having a cup of coffee, his works in progress, his art in installation views, even his sleeping cats—Scheidegger captures the essence of the artist's working life in images that are artful in their own right.

Photocinema

Neil Campbell; Alfredo Cramerotti — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Taking as its starting point the notion of photocinema—or the interplay of the still and moving image—the photographs, interviews, and critical essays in this volume explore the ways in which the two media converge and diverge, expanding the boundaries of each in interesting and unexpected ways. The book’s innovative approach to film and photography produces what might be termed a hybrid “third space,” where the whole becomes much more than the sum of its individual parts, encouraging viewers to expand their perceptions to begin to understand the bigger picture.

The latest edition in Intellect’s Critical Photography series, Photocinema represents a nuanced theoretical and practical exploration of the experimental cinematic techniques exemplified by artists like Wim Wenders and Hollis Frampton. In addition to new critical essays by Victor Burgin and David Campany, the book includes interviews with Martin Parr, Hannah Starkey, and Aaron Schumann, and a portfolio of photographs from various new and established artists.

Portraits from the Park

Thomas W. Harney — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Chicago’s old Comiskey Park, home to the White Sox until 1990, is as essential to the city’s cultural history as it is to baseball’s. From the first day that Thomas W. Harney set out to photograph fans in the ballpark, he felt at home there, owing to memories of games with his father and grandfather. It became his ongoing subject, as well as a setting that would inspire his growing reputation as a street photographer.

The sequence of portraits Harney took of White Sox fans between 1973 and the last game played at the park—September 30, 1990—captures the essence of baseball fandom: pregame excitement, exploration of the ballpark, the quiet moments in between plays, the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat. Most importantly, these portraits capture the aura of “Old Comiskey,” a ballpark that looms large in the memories of Chicagoans and baseball fans alike.

Women Changing India

Urvashi Butalia; Anita Roy — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

India is changing. And at the heart of this change are its women. The change is widespread and varied, individual and collective, reflecting the full spectrum of women’s lives, whether in politics or in economics, in business, or within their daily domestic work. This book maps—in words and in one hundred and fifty marvelous color photographs—some of the changes that are both visible and invisible in India today.

In Women Changing India, six writers flesh out the stories captured by photographers Raghu Rai, Martine Franck, Olivia Arthur, Alex Webb, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Patrick Zachmann from the world-renowned Magnum Photos. These beautiful and evocative photographs focus on the world of women working with the help of microloans, participating in grassroots governance, working behind the scenes in the Mumbai film industry, and moving into new jobs, often in male-dominated fields. Together, they are making contributions in varied fields and imagining a new future for themselves and other women. Featuring contributions from leading writers, Women Changing India offers a window into the lives of women living in South Asia today, bringing to public attention their complex realities and their aspirations for a better world.

Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine

Philippe D. Mather — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

From 1945 to 1950, during the formative years of his career, Stanley Kubrick worked as a photojournalist for Look magazine. Offering a comprehensive examination of the work he produced during this period—before going on to become one of America’s most celebrated filmmakers—Stanley Kubrick at "Look" Magazine sheds new light on the aesthetic and ideological factors that shaped his artistic voice.

Tracing the links between his photojournalism and films, Philippe Mather shows how working at Look fostered Kubrick’s emerging genius for combining images and words to tell a story. Mather then demonstrates how exploring these links enhances our understanding of Kubrick’s approach to narrative structure—as well as his distinctive combinations of such genres as fiction and documentary, and fantasy and realism.

Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, Stanley Kubrick at "Look" Magazine features never-before-published photographs from the Look archives and complete scans of Kubrick’s photo essays from hard-to-obtain back issues of the magazine. It will be an indispensable addition to the libraries of Kubrick scholars and fans.

Box of Photographs

Roger Grenier; Alice Kaplan — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

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.

About Face

Sage Sohier — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Through the influences of vanity, aging, and insecurities, many find fault with their own faces and few achieve their own notions of perfection. Yet, in the course of such self-criticism, most people take for granted their own ability to explore and employ the full range of facial expressions and the range of emotions those expressions convey.

In About Face Sage Sohier’s photographs portray people who have varying degrees of facial paralysis, a condition that usually occurs on just one side of the face and can result from a multitude of causes, including Bell’s palsy, tumors, strokes, accidents, and congenital nerve damage. Working in a clinic in Boston that provides physical therapy, Botox treatments, and sometimes surgery, Sohier documents patients before treatment, and in some cases captures their progress over time, witnessing hope and excitement as they regain the ability to smile, speak, and eat.

Modernism London Style

Christoph Rauhut; Niels Lehmann — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the 1920s, London was a city on the cusp of change. Just as dance halls and jazz-age decadence displaced wartime austerity, a new generation of artists and designers sought to enliven the city’s architecture, erecting dazzling buildings in the emerging art deco style. In contrast with the aging Victorian structures that dotted the city, these bright and colorful buildings—from the Hoover factory to the Ideal House by Raymond Hood, who later designed New York’s Rockefeller Center—communicated the city’s aspirations as a thriving, modern metropolis.

In the decades since, London’s art deco buildings have lost none of their appeal. Millions of visitors gaze up at the headquarters of the Daily Telegraph and the nearby Daily Express, take in the elegance of Eltham Palace, or sip a martini at the Savoy. The city’s most popular art deco attraction, however, is the London Underground, which boasts a series of art deco and modernist stations, designed throughout the 1920s and ’30s by noted architect Charles Holden. In Modernism London Style, architectural historian Christoph Rauhut, with the help of three hundred photographs by Niels Lehmann, captures the architectural art deco heritage of London in a thrilling photographic tour. A portrait of the city during the interwar years, it chronicles the creativity of the artists and designers of the period—and the currents in the city’s culture that helped shape their work.

Insightful essays and an introduction by architecture scholar Adam Caruso shed light on some of the key features that characterize art deco, from floral and animal motifs to Egyptian themes. For readers planning a trip to London and hoping to place these striking buildings, the book also includes a detailed register and maps.

Reframing the New Topographics

Greg Foster-Rice; John Rohrbach — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In 1975 the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape crystallized a new view of the American West: the sublime “American” vistas of Ansel Adams were replaced and subverted by images of a landscape inundated with banal symbols of humanity. Organized by William Jenkins for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, New Topographics showcased such photographers as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke. Their pictures, illustrating the vernacular, human-made world of contemporary America, punctured the myth of the pristine, wild American landscape—and definitively changed the course of landscape photography.

Reframing the New Topographics offers the first substantive analysis of this shift and the continuing influence of an exhibition that not only reshaped the look and subject matter of landscape photography, but also foreshadowed environmentalism’s expansion beyond the mere preservation of wilderness. The essays in this anthology will add an important new dimension to the studies of art history and visual culture.

Whistling Dixie

Anderson Scott — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

At hundreds of events held year-round across the southern United States, thousands of individuals spend their time, energy, and money recreating the battles of the Civil War. The number of participants involved ranges from tens to tens of thousands; those among them span the spectrum from casual spectators to amateur historians who seek to immerse themselves in the experience of living and fighting in the 1860s—from the cuisine to the very stitches in their uniforms.

With Whistling Dixie, photographer Anderson Scott captures these latter-day Confederates at a series of reenactments in the years leading up to the 2011 sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Always maintaining the perspective of a keen and sometimes ambivalent observer, Scott’s photographs convey the earnestness and enthusiasm of this subculture while exposing its idiosyncrasies and contradictions.

Scott’s photographs span the southern countryside, documenting reenactments in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, and the Carolinas as well as living histories and Confederate Memorial Days. An essay by Scott, describing his experience at a reenactment of the Battle of Selma, and a cultural essay by Chip Benson, of Yale University, provide context for the photographs and the subculture of their subjects.

Born to Run

Albert Lewis — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

It’s a familiar image: a line of dogs surging through snow along the Iditarod trail. It can be easy to forget that each team is made up of individual dogs, each one bred and trained to perform at the pinnacle of canine ability.

Albert Lewis, a professional photographer and dog lover, was skeptical of the race when he first moved to Alaska, but after seeing the dogs’ excitement at the Iditarod starting line and experiencing the mushers’ deep connection with these athletes, his perception of the race was forever changed. Determined to show the world the heart and soul of these animal athletes that run thousands of miles, he took his camera and set out to revolutionize our image of sled dogs.

In Born to Run, Lewis stops the dogs long enough to spotlight them as individuals, letting their personalities shine through. Lewis draws on his experience as a fashion photographer, capturing unique moments of stunning beauty and stoic grace, emphasizing their athleticism even as they're standing still. Additional photos show the dogs interacting with their mushers during care and training. The full-page photos are finely detailed, and readers will find themselves nearly reaching out to stroke the dogs on the pages. Accompanied by just enough text to provide each dog’s name, age, and trail miles, the photos are left to speak for themselves.

The hundreds of thousands of Iditarod fans across the globe have made the race a historic event, and race fans and dog lovers alike will be drawn to this book.

On Common Ground

Meret Wandeler; Ulrich Görlich — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

On Common Ground presents a history of spatial development in post-war Switzerland through 250 images. The authors draw on a vast collection of photographs found in archives of all sorts: local government offices, building companies, local and national newspapers, publishers of postcards, cultural heritage societies and amateur photographers.This carefully assembled volume looks specifically at the town of Schlieren, which today is a suburb of Zürich, and Upper Engadine, the world famous mountain resort near St. Moritz in the Canton of Grisons. Tracing the rise of the suburb, On Common Ground arranges images of each location in more or less chronological sequence—the top of each page shows Schlieren, while Upper Engadine is shown on the bottom, allowing for an easy visual comparison between the two regions. This unique study offers a novel way to understand the urban transformation of Switzerland since WW II, and by extension the modern rise of suburbs in central Europe. Two essays are provided in order to contextualize the photographs within Swiss history and the socio-economic developments during the second half of the twentieth century.

Gustave Caillebotte

Karin Sagner; Max Hollein — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The paintings of Gustave Caillebotte depict striking Parisian street scenes, from Boulevard Haussmann and The Bridge of Europe looking out onto the Gare Saint-Lazare to Caillebotte’s best-known work, Paris Street, Rainy Day, which hangs in Chicago’s Art Institute today. Caillebotte has long been acknowledged as an important painter—and munificent patron—of the French impressionist movement. Yet his paintings, in their near-photographic precision, stand apart from the works of Renoir and Monet in important ways.

Gustave Caillebotte: An Impressionist and Photography sets out to explore the development of the artist’s distinctive style. Though there is no evidence that Caillebotte practiced photography, he took an early interest in the art form, influenced perhaps by his brother, the photographer Martial Caillebotte. As a result, Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings show an emphasis on realism and often take on the composition and perspective of a photograph as well, with figures toward the center in sharp focus, while those in the foreground or background remain indistinct. Karin Sagner and Max Hollein have carefully chosen from among Caillebotte’s works a selection of paintings that exemplify this characteristic of the artist’s style. They are presented here alongside critical essays and works by photographers who were Caillebotte’s contemporaries and shared an affinity for documenting the nineteenth-century French capital, including André Kertész, Wols and László Moholy-Nagy, Édouard Baldus, Charles Marville, and Eugène Atget.

While there have been many studies of Caillebotte’s work, this is the first book to publish his paintings side-by-side with a selection of early photographs taken between 1850 and 1930. Together, they establish Caillebotte as the pioneer of a radically modern photographic form that added a new dimension to French impressionism and exerted an important influence on later photography.

Passage 2011

Christian Schoen — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In May 2011, Munich-based artists Thomas Huber and Wolfgang Aichner set off with a seventeen-foot boat on a journey of a few hundred miles that would nonetheless take several weeks—because the route would take them across Italy’s Zillertal Alps. Destined for the 2011 Venice Biennale, Huber and Aichner conceived of this seemingly Sisyphean task, Passage 2011, as a metaphor for human hubris and the pursuit of success. As neither expected to complete the pass, Passage 2011 would also serve as a study of failure.

Passage 2011: An Actionistic Transalpine Drama draws on the artists’ photographs and detailed journal entries to reconstruct this epic journey, its moments of heartwarming success and its physically and mentally testing travails, including one instance in which they had to rappel the cheery red boat down a steep rock face that dropped more than two hundred feet. As a finale, Huber and Aichner launched the boat in the Venice Lagoon for a triumphant cruise along the Grand Canal, where, as expected, it rapidly sank and had to be retrieved in order to be installed in its place at the Biennale.

Steel

Joseph E. B. Elliott — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Aware of the decline and imminent demise of many integrated steel mills in the United States and fascinated by their monumental architecture, machinery, and the culture of work, Joseph Elliott photographed the mills in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from 1989 until final shutdown. Working with historian Lance Metz, he amassed more than 1,000 large format photographs and hundreds of archival images and documents, in an effort to preserve a record of the development, workings, and human dimensions of an integrated steel plant typical of machine age America.

A steel mill is a visually thrilling place, and Elliott’s meticulously designed photographs embody much more than a technical record. The scale, architecture, and material qualities of the site are compelling referents for an audience of the post-industrialage. An essay by art historian Betsy Fahlman situates Elliott’s work in the context of the industrial sublime. This book will appeal all who are fascinated with industrial art and archaeology, and will be an inspiration for the preservation and re-use of these relic structures.