Publisher's Description

When Ferdinand Magellan set out to circumnavigate the globe in 1519, he wasn’t able to take a digital camera or a smartphone with him. Yet, as the eagerly awaited images from the Mars Rover prove, modern exploration is inconceivable without photography. Since its invention in 1839, photography was integral to exploration and used by explorers, sponsors and publishers alike, and in the early twentieth century, advances in technology – and photography’s newfound cultural currency as a truthful witness to the world – made the camera an indispensable tool. In Photography and Exploration, James R. Ryan uses a variety of examples from polar journeys to space missions to show how exploration photographs have been created, circulated and consumed as objects of both scientific research and art.

Examining a wide range of photographs and expeditions, Ryan considers how nations have often employed images as a means to scientific advancement or territorial conquest. He argues that, because exploration has long been bound up with the construction of national and imperial identity, expeditionary photographs have often been used to promote claims to power – especially by the West. These images also challenge the way audiences perceive the world and their place within it. Richly illustrated, Photography and Exploration shines new light on how photography has shaped the image of explorers, expeditions and the worlds they discovered.

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Size: 220 x 190 mm

192 pages, 100 illustrations, 50 in colour

Publisher's Description

The older paradigm for photojournalists was to simply record events, with the hope—and frequently the expectation—that people and their governments would be moved to respond to the injustices pictured, as witnessed by the impact of certain images during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Given evolving media and political climates, however, including the billions of images now available online from all kinds of sources, the purpose and effectiveness of media, in particular of visual journalism, has been called into question. Bending the Frame, by author and critic Fred Ritchin, addresses the new and emerging potentials for visual media to impact society. Also encompassing online efforts, uses of video, and a diverse range of books and exhibitions, this volume aims for as wide-ranging and far-reaching a discussion as possible, asking the critical question: how can images promote new thinking and make a difference in the world?

Publisher: Aperture

Size: 6 x 8 1/2"

176 pages, 40 four-colour images

Publisher's Description

This latest book in the "Photography and The Creative Process" Series offers readers the opportunity to engage in a selection of timeless and thought-provoking articles previously published in LensWork, but many now long out-of-print. The 203 pages of text are organized in three important sections: Being an Artist, The Creative Muse, and Productivity. This book goes beyond useful; it is truly a "must read" for photographers who are committed to their craft

Including:

• When Photography Becomes Art
• On Faith and Fame
• The Case of the Misplaced Identity
• The Context of the Question
• Why Make Art?
• Creativity Questions
• The Pragmatics of Creativity
• Photography and the Meaning of Life
• Commitment
• The Matter With Subject Matter
• Imaginative Photography
• Ten Motivations
• Your Inner Pragmatist
• Keys to Productivity
• Photography as a Verb
• Collaborations
• Finding the Project
• Printing for a Purpose
• Twenty-One Ways to Improve Your Artwork

Publisher's Description

Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty investigates the transformative experience of the photograph. In this book Deborah Willis explores historical perceptions of beauty and desire through artistic and ethnographic imagery and the role individual photographers play in constructing ways of seeing. Through the themes of idealized beauty, the unfashionable body, the gendered image, and photography as memory, Willis challenges and makes problematic the "reading" of photographic images in the twenty-first century.

Working from the significant photographic holdings of the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery, and the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, the author examines shifting gender attitudes that emerged in work by women photographers such as Gertrude Käsebier and Diane Arbus. Willis discusses ethnographic ideologies underpinning the work of Edward Sheriff Curtis and Fred E. Miller who worked with Native American subjects, as well as the framing and reframing of images of black people in the work of Samuel Montague Fassett and Carrie Mae Weems. Additionally, the effects of fashion and desire on the imaging of beauty are examined in the work of such artists as Don Wallen, Janieta Eyre, and Jan Saudek. The book includes full-page illustrations of works by more than fifty internationally recognized photographers including Lisette Model, Imogen Cunningham, Lewis Wickes Hine, Bruce Davidson, Cecil Beaton, Nan Goldin, André Kertész, Lee Friedlander, Lorna Simpson, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol.

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Size:9 x 12"

144 pages, 110 colour illustrations

Publisher's Description

Publisher's Description

Overseas deliveries  Please note that, as this is a heavy item, overseas postage will be charged at twice our standard rates.

Publisher's Description

Named a best book of 2012—Modern Art Notes

“[O]ne of the most interesting, liveliest art history books I’ve read this year.”—Tyler Green, Modern Art Notes podcast 

Photographic manipulation is a familiar phenomenon in the digital era. What will come as a revelation to readers of this captivating, wide-ranging book is that nearly every type of manipulation we associate with Adobe’s now-ubiquitous Photoshop software was also part of photography’s predigital repertoire, from slimming waistlines and smoothing away wrinkles to adding people to (or removing them from) pictures, not to mention fabricating events that never took place. Indeed, the desire and determination to modify the camera image are as old as photography itself—only the methods have changed.

By tracing the history of manipulated photography from the earliest days of the medium to the release of Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, Mia Fineman offers a corrective to the dominant narrative of photography’s development, in which champions of photographic “purity,” such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, get all the glory, while devotees of manipulation, including Henry Peach Robinson, Edward Steichen, and John Heartfield, are treated as conspicuous anomalies. Among the techniques discussed on these pages—abundantly illustrated with works from an international array of public and private collections—are multiple exposure, combination printing, photomontage, composite portraiture, over-painting, hand coloring, and retouching. The resulting images are as diverse in style and motivation as they are in technique. Taking her argument beyond fine art into the realms of politics, journalism, fashion, entertainment, and advertising, Fineman demonstrates that the old adage “the camera does not lie” is one of photography’s great fictions.

Publisher: Yale University Press

Size:  9 1/2 x 10 1/2"

288 pages, 276 color & black & white illustations

Publisher's Description

From James Agee to W. G. Sebald, there has been an explosion of modern documentary narratives and fiction combining text and photography in complex and fascinating ways. However, these contemporary experiments are part of a tradition that stretches back to the early years of photography. Writers have been integrating photographs into their work for as long as photographs have existed, producing rich, multilayered creations; and photographers have always made images that incorporate, respond to, or function as writing. On Writing with Photography explores what happens to texts—and images—when they are brought together.

From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this collection addresses a wide range of genres and media, including graphic novels, children’s books, photo-essays, films, diaries, newspapers, and art installations. Examining the works of Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Claude McKay, Man Ray, Dare Wright, Guy Debord, Zhang Ailing, and Roland Barthes, among others, the essays trace the relationship between photographs and “reality” and describe the imaginary worlds constructed by both, discussing how this production can turn into testimony of personal and collective history, memory and trauma, gender and sexuality, and ethnicity.

Together, these essays help explain how writers and photographers—past and present—have served as powerful creative resources for each other.

Contributors: Stuart Burrows, Brown U; Roderick Coover, Temple U; Adrian Daub, Stanford U; Marcy J. Dinius, DePaul U; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia U; Daniel H. Magilow, U of Tennessee, Knoxville; Janine Mileaf; Tyrus Miller, U of California, Santa Cruz; Leah Rosenberg, U of Florida; Xiaojue Wang, U of Pennsylvania.

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Size: 5 1/2 x 8 1/2"

368 pages, 74 black & white photographs

Publisher's Description

When you take a photograph, you flatten the world. This remarkable process is called perspective. In a clear, non-technical way, this book provides an introduction to perspective through looking at photographs. It covers practical issues such as what happens when photographs are joined together, and why photographs still look realistic when viewed obliquely. This is a book for anyone interested in perception, photography or geometry.

Publisher: Badsey Publications

Size: 210 x 148 mm 

64 pages with more than 60 photographs, most in full colour.

Publisher's Description

Publisher's Description

Publisher's Description

The Photographs Not Taken is a collection of essays by photographers about the times they didn’t use their camera. I have asked the photographers to abandon the conventional tools needed to make a photograph, and, instead, make one using words to describe the memories and experiences that didn’t go through the camera lens. Here, the process of making a photograph has been reversed. Instead of looking out into the world through a camera lens, these essays allow us to look directly into the photographer’s mind and eye and focus on where the photographs come from in their barest and most primitive form. These mental negatives depict the unedited world and the moments of life that do not exist in a single frame.

The Photographs Not Taken features contributions by: Dave Anderson, Timothy Archibald, Roger Ballen, Thomas Bangsted, Juliana Beasley, Nina Berman, Elinor Carucci, Kelli Connell, Paul D'Amato, Tim Davis, KayLynn Deveney, Doug Dubois, Rian Dundon, Amy Elkins, Jim Goldberg, Emmet Gowin, Gregory Halpern, Tim Hetherington, Todd Hido, Rob Hornstra, Eirik Johnson, Chris Jordan, Nadav Kander, Ed Kashi, Misty Keasler, Lisa Kereszi, Erika Larsen, Shane Lavalette, Deana Lawson, Joshua Lutz, David Maisel, Mary Ellen Mark, Laura McPhee, Michael Meads, Andrew Moore, Richard Mosse, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Laurel Nakadate, Ed Panar, Christian Patterson, Andrew Phelps, Sylvia Plachy, Mark Power, Peter Riesett, Simon Roberts, Joseph Rodriguez, Stefan Ruiz, Matt Salacuse, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Aaron Schuman, Jamel Shabazz, Alec Soth, Amy Stein, Mark Steinmetz, Joni Sternbach, Hank Willis Thomas, Brian Ulrich, Peter Van Agtmael, Massimo Vitali, Hiroshi Watanabe, Alex Webb, and Rebecca Norris Webb.

Publisher: Daylight

Size: 5 ½ x 8"

232 pages

Publisher's Description

Photography Changes Everything—drawn from the online Smithsonian Photography Initiative—offers a provocative rethinking of photography’s impact on our culture and our lives. It is a reader-friendly exploration of the many ways photographs package information and values, demand and hold attention, and shape our knowledge of and experience in the world.

At this transitional moment in visual culture, Photography Changes Everything provides a unique opportunity to better understand the history, practice, and power of photography. The publication harnesses the extraordinary visual assets of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, science centers, and archives to trigger an unprecedented and interdisciplinary dialogue about how photography does more than record the world—it shapes and changes every aspect of our experience of it.

The book features over three hundred images and nearly one hundred engaging short texts commissioned from experts, writers, inventors, public figures, and everyday folk—Hugh Hefner, John Baldessari, John Waters, Robert Adams, Sandra Phillips, and others. Each story responds to images selected by project contributors. Together they engage readers in a timely exploration of the extent to which our lives have been transformed through our interactions with photographic imagery.

Publisher: Aperture

Size: 10" x 7"

356 pages, approx. 250 four-color images

Francesca Woodman (1958 1981) was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring herself and female models. Many of her photographs show young nude women, blurred by camera movement and long exposure times, merging with their surroundings, or with their faces obscured. Her work continues to be the subject of much attention, years after she committed suicide at the age of 22. This book focuses on Woodman's late 1970s Roman sojourn, reproducing a selection of her letters and writings from that time, as well as exploring the influence that the classics, in art as well as in literature, had upon her work. It also includes a number of pictures taken by her friends that portray the photographer herself, as well as ancillary visual material. This is an intense and intimate portrayal of Francesca Woodman's universe.

Publisher's description

This is the long-awaited compendium of Lewis Baltz’s writings from 1975 until 2007, drawn from his critical writing for magazines such as Art in America, the Times Literary Supplement, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui and Purple. The book includes Baltz’s texts on Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Adams, Michael Schmidt, Allan Sekuka, Chris Burden, Thomas Ruff, Barry Le Va, Jeff Wall, Félix González-Torres, John McLaughlin, Slavica Perkovic and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others. This important publication gives Baltz’s literary output the standing it deserves and offers a unique insight into some of history’s leading photographers.

Publisher: Steidl

Size: 135 x 210 mm

160 pages

Over the past 30 years, Victor Burgin (born in 1941) has become both a highly influential artist and a renowned theorist of the still and moving image, with work in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern in London. Burgin rose to prominence in the late 1960s as an originator of Conceptual art. In the 1970s he worked in large framed photographic sequences, in which printed texts were either juxtaposed with or superimposed on the images. In the 1990s he turned towards digital video. The historian and critic Stephen Bann has written that Burgin's "exploitation of new technologies is itself fairly uninteresting compared with the remarkable consistency of the underlying themes and propositions of his work," among them narrative, memory and fantasy. These duotones refute all that uninteresting technology to offer Burgin's reflections on Pompeii, gleaned through his research of nineteenth-century photographs.

Publisher - Thames & Hudson

Binding - Hardback

Publication Date - 2011

Size - 28.00 x 26.00 cm, 320 pages

The Unseen Eye is one of those rare books that has the quality of a revelation.

It not only gives a new perspective on the work of many of the greatest names in the history of photography but also tells us something new about ourselves with all the associated nuances of memory, wit, eroticism, fear, grief and horror.

The photographs have a common theme – the gaze of the subject is averted, the face obscured or the eyes firmly closed. They range from André Breton’s self-portrait to Ruth Snyder in the electric chair in 1928 and from Weegee’s multi-image portrait of Andy Warhol in sunglasses to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of the artist Alice Neel. The images present a catalogue of anti-portraiture, characterized at first glance by what its subjects conceal, not by what the camera reveals.

The author has gathered the images over many years and his selection includes not only many works by famous practitioners from across the history of the medium – Nadar, Brassaï, Walker Evans, Philip Jones Griffiths, Annie Leibovitz, Martin Parr – but also photographs of strange origin taken by anonymous figures from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

Running through the book is a commentary which offers the author's own intense and perceptive responses to the images, as well as insights into the psychology of collecting. William A. Ewing, the distinguished curator of photography, contributes an introduction.

Revised and expanded 2011

This lavishly illustrated, accessible survey presents the work of over seventy international artists at the forefront of the boom in photography (e.g. Gursky, Sherman, Calle, Parr, and Barney). Introductions to each section outline the genres and how themes and how issues like memory, time, objectivity, politics, identity and the everyday are tied to certain approaches. Each photographers work is then presented in sequence, with commentaries by the author highlighting the arts most important aspects.

‘Stocked with invaluable commentary, techniques, strategies and subjects as diverse as the society in which we live, Face covers all the bases’ – Amateur Photography

‘Beautiful … fascinating … all [the photos] are captivating in some way’ – Professional Photographer

‘Endlessly fascinating … inspiring and reassuring’ – Image

‘Seminal … both enlightening and interesting … This intriguing collection of portraits is inspiring for anyone wanting to explore and experiment with the exciting aspects of modern-day portraiture’ – Amateur Photography

Now in paperback, this groundbreaking publication announces the death of the conventional portrait.

Exploring bold new strategies of representation – computer manipulation, retouching, photomontage, found imagery and methods of veiling and disguising – the artists here present provocative faces to the world that are sometimes alluring, sometimes touching, sometimes frightening, but never less than riveting.

Whether Gillian Wearing’s masked self-portrait, Aziz + Cucher’s neutral façades, Lawick Müller’s composite portrait of a couple, Cindy Sherman’s disquieting disguises or Orlan’s disturbing experiments with cosmetic surgery, these faces demand our attention.