Still: American Silent Motion Picture Photography

Still: American Silent Motion Picture Photography Overview

The success of movies like The Artist and Hugo recreated the wonder and magic of silent film for modern audiences, many of whom might never have experienced a movie without sound. But while the American silent movie was one of the most significant popular art forms of the modern age, it is also one that is largely lost to us, as more than eighty percent of silent films have disappeared, the victims of age, disaster, and neglect. We now know about many of these cinematic masterpieces only from the collections of still portraits and production photographs that were originally created for publicity and reference. Capturing the beauty, horror, and moodiness of silent motion pictures, these images are remarkable pieces of art in their own right. In the first history of still camera work generated by the American silent motion picture industry, David S. Shields chronicles the evolution of silent film aesthetics, glamour, and publicity, and provides unparalleled insight into this influential body of popular imagery.

 

Exploring the work of over sixty camera artists, Still recovers the stories of the photographers who descended on early Hollywood and the stars and starlets who sat for them between 1908 and 1928. Focusing on the most culturally influential types of photographs—the performer portrait and the scene still—Shields follows photographers such as Albert Witzel and W. F. Seely as they devised the poses that newspapers and magazines would bring to Americans, who mimicked the sultry stares and dangerous glances of silent stars. He uncovers scene shots of unprecedented splendor—visions that would ignite the popular imagination. And he details how still photographs changed the film industry, whose growing preoccupation with artistry in imagery caused directors and stars to hire celebrated stage photographers and transformed cameramen into bankable names.

 

Reproducing over one hundred and fifty of these gorgeous black-and-white photographs, Still brings to life an entire long-lost visual culture that a century later still has the power to enchant.

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American Eros

American Eros Overview

Intimate Glimpses With his previous works, Mark Henderson successfully transformed the man into an American Dream sex object. This fifth work celebrates this success and presents for our enjoyment hundreds of pages of men at home and by the pool, intimately and very private.

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Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman

Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman Overview

Today color photography is so ubiquitous that it's hard to believe there was a time when this was not the case. Color Rush explores the developments that led us to this point, looking at the way color photographs circulated and appeared at the time of their making. From magazine pages to gallery walls, from advertisements to photojournalism, Color Rush charts the history of color photography in the United States from the moment it became available as a mass medium to the moment when it no longer seemed an unusual choice for artists. The book begins with the 1907 unveiling of autochrome, the first commercially available color process, and continues up through the 1981 landmark survey show and book, The New Color Photography, which hailed the widespread acceptance of color photography in contemporary art. In the intervening years, color photography captured the popular imagination through its visibility in magazines like Life and Vogue, as well as through its accessibility in the marketplace thanks to companies like Kodak. Often in photo histories, color is presented as having arrived fully formed in the 1970s; this book reveals a deeper story and uncovers connections in both artistic and commercial practices. A comprehensive chronology and examples of significant moments and movements mark the increasing visibility of color photography. Color Rush brings together photographers and artists such as Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, László Moholy-Nagy, Irving Penn, Eliot Porter, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Laurie Simmons, Edward Steichen, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston and many others, and examines them in a fresh context paying particular attention to color photography's translation onto the printed page. In doing so, it traces a new history that more fully accounts for color's pervasive presence today.

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Photography and the American Civil War (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Photography and the American Civil War (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Overview

Six hundred thousand lives were lost between 1861 and 1865, making the conflict between North and South the nation’s deadliest war. If the “War Between the States” was the test of the young republic’s commitment to its founding precepts, it was also a watershed in photographic history, as the camera recorded the epic, heartbreaking narrative from beginning to end—providing those on the home front, for the first time, with immediate visual access to the horrors of the battlefield.

Photography and the American Civil War features both familiar and rarely seen images that include haunting battlefield landscapes strewn with bodies, studio portraits of armed Confederate and Union soldiers (sometimes in the same family) preparing to meet their destiny, rare multi-panel panoramas of Gettysburg and Richmond, languorous camp scenes showing exhausted troops in repose, diagnostic medical studies of wounded soldiers who survived the war’s last bloody battles, and portraits of both Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

Published on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg (1863), this beautifully produced book features Civil War photographs by George Barnard, Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, and many others.

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Front Row Seat: A Photographic Portrait of the Presidency of George W. Bush (Focus on American History Series)

Front Row Seat: A Photographic Portrait of the Presidency of George W. Bush (Focus on American History Series) Overview

America’s forty-third president, George W. Bush, presided over eight of the most dramatic years in recent history, from the 9/11 attacks early in his administration to the worldwide economic crisis of 2008. By his side, recording every event from the momentous to the intimate, was his personal White House photographer, Eric Draper. From a collection of nearly one million photographs, Draper has selected more than one hundred images of President Bush that portray both the public figure and the private man.

Front Row Seat presents a compelling, behind-the-scenes view of the presidency of George W. Bush. Through Draper’s lens, we follow Bush through moments of crisis that called for strong leadership, such as 9/11; emotional meetings with troops in war zones, wounded soldiers at home, and Katrina survivors; and happy, relaxed times with his wife Laura, daughters Barbara and Jenna, and parents President George H. W. and Barbara Bush. We also see Bush at work within his inner circle of trusted advisors, including Vice President Richard Cheney, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Capturing moments that reveal the essence of the man, Front Row Seat is an irreplaceable portrait of George W. Bush.

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American Religions: A Documentary History

American Religions: A Documentary History Overview

Religion has played a complex, vibrant, and multifaceted role in our nation's history. One of the most effective ways to help students explore its vitality is through primary sources. American Religions: A Documentary History is the only one-volume, up-to-date collection of primary sources available for American religious history courses. Featuring a creative dual structure--the readings are arranged both chronologically and thematically--this indispensable sourcebook can be used in both historically and topically organized courses.
Balancing canonical works with those by newly discovered voices, American Religions: A Documentary History includes seventy-five classic and contemporary selections from the colonial period through the present day. It offers readings by a uniquely wide range of religiously, socially, and ethnically diverse writers: theological conservatives and liberals, northerners and southerners, women and men, and African Americans and Mexican Americans alongside Anglo-Americans. The selections are long enough to stimulate serious discussion yet concise enough for students to digest easily. The volume is organized into six sections that cover different chronological periods, each of which contains writings on five themes: theological reflections, ritual and performance, spiritual autobiography, interreligious conflict and negotiation, and more expansive conceptualizations of religion. Enhanced by brief biographies of the authors, a general introduction, and section introductions, the text also includes two sample syllabi--one oriented toward a historical approach and the other toward a thematic approach. Ideal for introductory courses in religion in America and American religious history--taught both in religious studies and history departments--American Religions: A Documentary History offers students a broad yet in-depth and engaging gateway into the subject.

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Walker Evans: American Photographs: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition

Walker Evans: American Photographs: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition Overview

More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the images of essential America that we have long since accepted as fact, and his work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film and visual arts in other mediums. The original edition of American Photographs was a carefully prepared letterpress production, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Evans that captured scenes of America in the early 1930s. As noted on the jacket of the first edition, Evans, "photographing in New England or Louisiana, watching a Cuban political funeral or a Mississippi flood, working cautiously so as to disturb nothing in the normal atmosphere of the average place, can be considered a kind of disembodied, burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers." This seventy-fifth anniversary edition of American Photographs, made with new reproductions, recreates the original 1938 edition as closely as possible to make the landmark publication available for a new generation. American Photographs has fallen out of print for long periods of time since it was first published, and even subsequent editions--two of which altered the design and typography of the book in small but significant ways--are often available only at libraries and rare bookstores. This version, like the fiftieth-anniversary edition produced by the Museum in 1988, captures the look and feel of the very first edition with the aid of new digital technologies.
Walker Evans (1903-1975) took up photography upon his return to New York in 1927, following a year in Paris when his aspiration to become a writer withered in the shadow of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Joyce. In 1935, Evans was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to photograph the effects of the Great Depression in the Southeast. During this time he took many of the photographs that appeared in his collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a book which has become a defining document of that era. Evans joined the staff of Time magazine in 1945 and shortly thereafter became an editor at Fortune, where he stayed for the next two decades. In 1964, he became a professor at the Yale University School of Art, where he taught until his death in 1975.

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Leave No Trace: The Vanishing North American Wilderness

Leave No Trace: The Vanishing North American Wilderness Overview

North America’s pristine, remote, and very much endangered lands as seen through the award-winning aerial photography of Jim Wark. The expanse of North America seems boundless, and its wild lands encompass some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. Though timeless in their majesty, some areas are at risk of vanishing or changing forever, and Jim Wark’s passion is to capture many of these beautiful regions before they are developed or environmentally impacted-and lost. From the lush coasts of the Great Lakes to the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains, from the deep crevasses of Utah’s Canyonlands to the picturesque valleys of the Appalachians, this breathtaking volume captures these remote gems with glorious vistas and unique and detailed perspectives only available from the air.
Piloting his high-wing bush plane for unobstructed camera work and unique low-level angles, Wark’s artistic eye for detail makes this book an incomparable trip to the last North American wildernesses.  
 

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The American Barn

The American Barn Feature

• ISBN13: 9780785825869
• Condition: New
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The American Barn Overview

An examination of nearly 400 years of the American barn’s form and function illustrated with more than 200 of the authors stunning photographs. Barns come in many flavors: freshly painted or collapsing, adorned or plain, towering or long and low; tucked away in valleys or spotted from the highway; wood, stone or brick. The American Barn will be treasured by anyone intrigued by the country’s rich agricultural history and these deceptively complex buildings.

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Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment

Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment Overview

Censored by the U.S. Army, Dorothea Lange's unseen photographs are the extraordinary photographic record of the Japanese American internment saga.

This indelible work of visual and social history confirms Dorothea Lange's stature as one of the twentieth century's greatest American photographers. Presenting 119 images originally censored by the U.S. Army—the majority of which have never been published—Impounded evokes the horror of a community uprooted in the early 1940s and the stark reality of the internment camps. With poignancy and sage insight, nationally known historians Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro illuminate the saga of Japanese American internment: from life before Executive Order 9066 to the abrupt roundups and the marginal existence in the bleak, sandswept camps. In the tradition of Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World, Impounded, with the immediacy of its photographs, tells the story of the thousands of lives unalterably shattered by racial hatred brought on by the passions of war.

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Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930

Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930 Feature

• ISBN13: 9780922233342
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Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930 Overview

"Cadavers, camera, action!" (The New York Times Book Review). From the advent of photography in the 19th and into the 20th century, medical students, often in secrecy, took photographs of themselves with the cadavers that they dissected: their first patients. Featuring 138 of these historic photographs and illuminating essays by two experts on the subject, Dissection reveals a startling piece of American history. Sherwin Nuland, MD, said this is "a truly unique and important book [that] documents a period in medical education in a way that is matched by no other existing contribution." And Mary Roach said Dissection "is the most extraordinary book I have ever seen--the perfect coffee table book for all the households where I'd most like to be invited for coffee."

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Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History

Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History Feature

• ISBN13: 9780810959408
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History Overview

New York City's American Museum of Natural History is a national treasure, attracting four million visitors annually. Its dioramas-a dazzling mixture of nature, science, and art-have inspired young and old alike, and are world-renowned examples of the unique diorama craft: art in the service of science. Now, in the only book of its kind, readers get an insider's view of these "windows on nature," witnessing their creation step by meticulous step.

More than forty of the museum's finest dioramas are featured here, depicting the fauna and flora of myriad ecological environments. Stephen Quinn, a diorama artist at the museum, introduces the explorers, naturalists, painters, sculptors, taxidermists, and conservationists behind these three-dimensional marvels, and explains how their collaborations make the displays so lifelike. This enchanting book is the perfect gift for nature lovers, art enthusiasts, and museum goers everywhere.

Customer Reviews

My father introduced me to the wonders of the American Museum of Natural History at the age of five.The Hall of African Mammals was the highlight of my first interest in the 1930`s.The dinosaur exhibit and ocean life can capture the imagination and fascination of any child.
Windows on Nature is a must have in the library of any one with an interest in Natural History.

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English Cottage Gardening: For American Gardeners, Revised Edition

English Cottage Gardening: For American Gardeners, Revised Edition Overview

Thanks to the extraordinary photographs and gardening wisdom in this classic book, the elegant intimacy of the English cottage garden is a practical possibility for amateur gardeners in diverse regions of the United States. The author has analyzed the aesthetic and horticultural elements in ten representative cottage gardens--eight in England and two in the United States. Her spectacular photographs render the look and atmosphere of these gardens, while her text focuses on easily grown, readily available plants that are adaptable to a wide variety of climatic and soil conditions. In the back of the book--completely updated for this new edition--may be found specific horticultural information on a wide variety of cottage garden plants commonly available in the United States, glossaries of Latin and common names, and a list of sources for old rose varieties. The gardens in this beautiful book are not those of the great estates of England, manicured by staffs of professional gardeners. They are, instead, labors of love on the part of individual homeowners, many of whom started with bleak, rubble-strewn lots and went on to create the enchanted settings pictured here.

Customer Reviews

This is a garden book to keep by the side of your easy chair. Every time I pick it up, I start reading and enjoy the straight forward descriptions and plant recommendations and flower combinations.

I've made the mistake of ordering a book or two from the internet only to find that "English Gardening" is all about estate gardening. Lovely, but I don't own an estate. Margaret Hensel has traveled through England and brought back practical advice about how to get the look of a small, intimate garden outside English cottages not castles.

It's an easy read of information about what makes a cottage garden have the charm and intimacy that I think of when I envision my own plot of land. There are diagrams of the landscapes as well.

There's encouragement about what makes a English cottage garden rather than the usual approach that it's not possible to create this kind of garden outside of England. So many books fall short because they begin with this premise and this leads to how to add tropical plants or other such nonsense.

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The North American Indian

The North American Indian Overview

A unique pictorial record of more than 80 American Indian tribes At the turn of the century, the American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952) started on his thirty-year project to produce a monumental study of North American Indians. Using an approach that was both artistically and scientifically ambitious he recorded, in words and pictures, the traces of the traditional Indian way of life that was already beginning to die out.

With tireless personal commitment Curtis visited American Indian tribes from the Mexican border to the Bering Straits, gaining their confidence by his patience and sensitivity. This, his photographic life’s work, was printed in 20 volumes between 1907 and 1930 as The North American Indian. There were only 272 copies in total, so original copies are now extremely rare. This book gives lasting life to Curtis’s great achievements by making the photographs available again.

The North American Indian Specifications

Originally used to illustrate a 20-volume encyclopedia of Native American history and culture, these photographs from the first decades of the 20th century are a valuable document of history. From a striking 1905 portrait of Geronimo to the seal-hunting Eskimos of Nunivak Island, Edward S. Curtis's pictures reflect the diversity of cultures that existed among the various Indian tribes. Their quality is superb--Curtis used the then-state-of-the-art photogravure process to reproduce his images--and the 1906 critique from Theodore Roosevelt remains valid: "In Mr. Curtis we have both an artist and a trained observer ... whose work has far more than mere accuracy, because it is truthful."

Customer Reviews

I caught a special on the Documentary Channel called "Coming to Light: Edward Curtis". I realized right then and there that I had to see this book they were talking about: The North American Indian. This is truly a ONE-OF-A-KIND book. I leave this book out on my coffee table and it gets attention. And because it's mostly pictures, my 7 year old daughter loves it. The most beautiful and meaningful collection of photos ever. I wish more people knew of it. What Curtis went through to make this is equally intriguing as the book itself. BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT.

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