This book provides the reader with a unique opportunity to confront and compare the visions of two seminal photographic masters, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans.
Converging looks gathers emblematic images of the 20th century, the work of three great masters of photography: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. The book is published in line with the exhibition of the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, which echoes the historic exhibition dedicated to the same photographers at the Julien Levy Gallerry (New York, 1935). The texts propose a critical and historical reading of the photographs, within the scope of their vast universal resonances.
Henri Cartier-Bresson's photography came to define the 20th century. This book tells his life story through his images; all the major events from his youth to his death in 2004 are described, contextualized and analysed in light of his photographic work.
Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this is the first major publication to make full use of the extensive holdings of the Fondation Cartier-Bresson, including thousands of prints and a vast resource of documents relating to the photographer's life and work.
'American Photographs' is regarded as one of the most important photobooks ever published. It was originally an exhibition catalogue of his one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1938, the first solo show MoMA had given to a photographer. It documents the lives of the poor and dispossessed in 1930s, depression era America.
This resplendent volume is the most comprehensive study of Walker Evans’s work ever published, containing masterful images accompanied by authoritative commentary from leading photography historians. The name Walker Evans conjures images of the American everyman. Whether it’s his iconic contributions to James Agee’s depressionera classic book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his architectural explorations of antebellum plantations, or his subway series, taken with a camera hidden in his coat, Evans’s accessible and eloquent photographs speak to us all. This comprehensive book traces the entire arc of Evans’s remarkable career, from the 1930s to the 1970s. The illustrations in the book range from his earliest images taken with a vest pocket camera to his final photos using the then new SX-70 because his regular equipment had become too heavy to carry around. The book includes commentary from three of Evans’s longtime friends, photographers John T. Hill and Jerry Thompson and professor emeritus (Yale University) Alan Trachtenberg. Their insight and first-hand experience give depth to their critical writings on Evans’s work. In addition to offering a broad perspective on Evans’s work, the book also clarifies the photographer’s "anti-art" philosophy. Eschewing aesthetic hyperbole, Evans wanted his pictures to resonate with a wide audience. At the same time, his natural curiosity made him one of the most inventive photographers of all time. What these photographs and writings attest to is a huge and timeless talent, which came not from a camera, but from Evans’s uniquely hungry eye.
A book of photographs that examines Harlem's paradox of place:the tension between the everyday reality of its streets - often contentious, always complex- and the cultural brand it has established in our collective imagination. While exploring one of America's great "main streets" during a time of profound transition, the project raises questions about urban flux, gentrification, and the loss of cultural memory. The coffee-table book measures 10.5 x 12 inches / 26.7 x 30.5 cm, features 68 color plates in a linen-clad hardcover with deboss, typeset in Helvetica Neue Light. Offset printing is on Galerie Art Silk 176/gsm paper. Book design is by Patricia Childers with contributions from historian Jonathan Gill and an insightful text by noted author and photography critic Vicki Goldberg.
Every photograph - whether family snapshot or museum masterpiece - comes to life out of the silver shadows in the negative. Yet the value and intrinsic beauty of the photographic negative have been woefully underappreciated. Auction houses disdain negatives of even the most celebrated photographs, insurance companies routinely underestimate their worth, and the general public never gets to see them. Only archivists, dealers and photographers themselves understand how priceless, unique and visually stunning negatives truly are. Celebrating the Negative rectifies matters in glorious fashion. John Loengard has tracked down and photographed the negatives of some of the most famous images ever made: Alexander Gardner's legendary portrait of Abraham Lincoln and Walker Evans' haunting portrait of Bud Fields and his family; Ansel Adams' serene Moonrise, Hernandez, N. Mex. and Robert Capa's D-day beachhead. Loengard's work literally and figuratively illuminates these negatives, revealing how the photographer has manipulated the image to produce the final print by choosing what to crop or enlarge, what to darken or lighten. The mastery of Man Ray, Yousuf Karsh, Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz and Edward Weston, to name but some of the many photographers represented here, shows up in their negative capability.