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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Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Overview

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.

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Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand: Masterworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand: Masterworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Overview

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), Edward Steichen (1879–1973), and Paul Strand (1890–1976) are among the most famous photographers of the 20th century. This handsome volume showcases for the first time the Metropolitan Museum’s extraordinarily rich holdings of works by these diverse and groundbreaking masters.

A passionate advocate for photography and modern art promoted through his “Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession” (also known as “291”) and his journal Camera Work, Stieglitz was also a photographer of supreme accomplishment. Featured works by Stieglitz include portraits, landscapes, city views, and cloud studies, along with photographs from his composite portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (selected by O’Keeffe herself for the Museum). Steichen—perhaps best known as a fashion photographer, celebrity portraitist, and MoMA curator—was Stieglitz’s man in Paris, gallery collaborator, and most talented exemplar of Photo-Secessionist photography. His three large variant prints of The Flatiron and his moonlit photographs of Rodin’s Balzac are highlighted here. Marking a pivotal moment in the course of photography, the final double issue of Camera Work (1915–17) was devoted to the young Paul Strand, whose photographs from 1915 and 1916 treated three principal themes—movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits—and pioneered a shift from the soft-focus Pictorialist aesthetic to the straight approach and graphic power of an emerging modernism. Represented are Strand’s rare large platinum prints—most of them unique exhibition prints of images popularly known only as Camera Work photogravures.

The rarely exhibited photographs gathered in Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand are among the crown jewels of the Metropolitan’s collection.

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The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Overview

Model as Muse explores fashion’s reciprocal relationship to iconic beauties that represent the evolution and changing face of the feminine ideal. Featuring a brief historical overview of the phenomenon of the supermodel, the book begins in the early 20th century and continues to the present day. Dorian Leigh and Lisa Fonssagrives in the 1940s are joined in the 1950s by Dovima, Sunny Harnett, and Suzy Parker. They are followed by Jean “The Shrimp” Shrimpton and Twiggy in the 1960s and Lauren Hutton in the 1970s. The 1980s witnessed such enduring personalities as Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista, while the 1990s brought on Kate Moss, whose edgy, street-inflected style has inspired not only fashion designers, editors, stylists, and photographers, but artists such as Chuck Close and Lucien Freud.

With an emphasis on styles from the 1950s onward, the book features designs from the great ready-to-wear and couture houses—Madame Grès, Christian Dior, and Balenciaga in the 1950s; Rudi Gernreich, Yves Saint Laurent, and Cardin in the 1960s; Giorgio di Sant’Angelo and Halston in the 1970s; Christian Lacroix, Versace, Comme des Garcons, and Calvin Klein in the 1980s; and Marc Jacobs, John Galliano, and Alexander McQueen in the 1990s.

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