Photography: portraits and self-portraiture Books

Book SynopsisWhite Shoes is a collection of self-portraits taken in locations around New York that were central to the city's once pivotal - and now largely obscured and unacknowledged - involvement in the slave trade. Nona Faustine depicts herself at the sites of slave auctions, burial grounds, slave-owning farms, and the coastal locations where slave ships docked, posing nude apart from a pair of white high-heeled shoes. Documenting herself in places where history becomes tangible, Faustine acts as a conduit or receptor, in solidarity with people whose names and memories have been lost but are embedded in the land. Through quiet but defiant self-representation, Faustine responds to a history of depiction of Black people that is shaped by subjugation, phrenology, and pseudo-science. Her complex large-format images refer and respond to a range of sources including daguerrotypes of slaves and photographs commissioned by naturalists, while her nudity - expressive of fearless self-possession as well as vulnerability - subverts the legacy of Black and female nudes in Western art. Running throughout the images, the talismanic white shoes that give the series its name suggest the many adaptations to dominant White culture that were and are still demanded of people of colour. At once historical and speculative, White Shoes confronts the relationship between the visible and invisible, between what is displayed and what is kept from view. Includes newly commissioned texts by Pamela Sneed, Jessica Lanay, Jonathan Michael Square and Seph Rodney, together with an interview of the artist by Jessica Lanay.

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Book SynopsisExecutive Order is a trenchant look at corporate America, featuring portraits and office interiors shot during the 1970s in Los Angeles and the Mountain West. A daring critique of wealth and power, Ressler wields photography with humor and insight, and her work is especially relevant today. Susan Ressler is an internationally renowned photographer, author and educator. An NEA fellow, her work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library Archives of Canada, among other important collections. Mark Rice is an award-winning author and the founding chair of the American Studies Department at St. John Fisher College near Rochester, New York.Trade Review“... recognized as an epochal and historically important record of the growth of corporate America which still resonates today.”, - Artdaily, December 19, 2018 “You can almost smell the polish and the cigarette smoke in her images, offering peeks inside board rooms, private offices and lobbies; and in doing so, opening doors into the world of the booming businesses of corporate America.”, - Creative Review, April 23, 2018 "As Executive Order proceeds, the book becomes increasingly surreal. ", - Fraction Magazine, October 2018 Also featured by The New York Times Lens Blog

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Book SynopsisThe American West, as we know it, is defined by the movies, and the Western is the oldest film genre. When the movies were born, it was not that long after Promontory Point and the Civil War, so those memories were still there in the minds of the very first movie audiences as they watched The Great Train Robbery. And the myth-making is as important as the brutal truths of history. As the reporter tells Jimmy Stewart in Fords The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. Rendered in rare, evocative tones reminiscent of Edward Sheriff Curtiss immortal photographs, Western Portraits of Great Character Actors provides readers with a collection of stylised portraits that capture the allure and mystique of the Old West, complete with authentic costuming, weaponry and settings. From the epic feature film to the TV series and serial, this coffee table book will put the story of character actors and the significance of their memorable roles into an entertaining perspective. The subjects include such popular, recognizable actors as Karl Malden, David Carradine, Denver Pyle, R G Armstrong, L Q Jones, Horst Buchholz, Henry Silva, Ruta Lee, Morgan Woodward, Bo Hopkins, Clu Gulager and 72 others.

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Book SynopsisHere, seeing double is normal. And that is not only because we are dealing with two photographers and their art projects. Sanne de Wilde and Bénédicte Kurzen travelled to Yoruba country in Nigeria, where the rate of twin births is ten times higher than elsewhere—a fact that is either celebrated with mythical fervour or condemned. While tracing this history, the photographers created richly intriguing, intensely colourful portraits of twins. They used their game of doubling to stage an imaginative photographic story, making use of double apertures, double exposures, reflections, and colour filters. With these inventive pictorial processes, the two artists produce magical double portraits. Page after page, this catalogue captures the vibrant, expressive force of this prize-winning series.

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Book SynopsisNoyan 20152022 is the first photo book by Zürich-based photographer Noah Noyan Wenzinger. It's the story of a young man coming of age, carrying his handy point-and-shoot camera around with him everywhere he goes to capture all sorts of different goings-on in his very own way. The protagonists are Noyan's close friends, keeping him company, inspiring him and growing up with him. His visual idiom is hard to categorize, for it's an amalgam of diverse influences from the worlds of cinema, music and gaming, as well as photographers like Nan Goldin, Sandy Kim and Walter Pfeiffer, his role models. Noyan's work is clearly about Zürich, and yet its inside look at the world of Switzerland's Generations Y and Z, aka millennials and zoomers, is not typically Swiss at allwhether in terms of pictorial content or form. And it's precisely this contrast that makes the project appealing and meaningful. Noyan 20152022 is a very personal selection culled from an already extensive archive, which the artist keeps at his Zürich home. It includes photographic documentation of his day-to-day life, shots of nightlife, concerts and vacations and even some music video stills. The book is rounded out by 16 drawings by Noah Stark (aka Clutterstew), who puts his idiosyncratic mark on everything he lays his hands on. The two artists are old friends with plenty of shared interests, aesthetics and stories to tell.

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Book SynopsisIn this unique and startling collection of photographic diptychs, we see average New Yorkers first clothed, then completely naked. Only their ages and professions are given as captions.

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Book SynopsisBased on the author's online photography project, this stunning collection features portraits of 500 women from more than 50 countries, accompanied by revelatory captions that capture their personal stories. Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors. Noroc's colorful and moving portraits feature women in their local communities, ranging from the Amazon rainforest to London city streets, and from markets in India to parks in Harlem, visually juxtaposing the varied physical and social worlds these women inhabit. Packaged as a gift-worthy, hardcover book, The Atlas of Beauty presents a fresh perspective on the global lives of women t

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Book SynopsisFrom the pub gigs of summer 1964 to the group''s triumphant performance at Live 8 in summer 2005, this book traces the progress of The Who from sharp-suited mods to psychedelic stars and pioneers of the rock opera. Following the band on the road and during the recording of numerous television shows, as well as stunning images of The Who''s festival appearances at Monterey and the Isle of Wight, plus shots from performances at such diverse venues as the Marquee Club and Wembley Stadium.

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Book SynopsisThis book argues for a renewed understanding of the fundamentally uncanny quality of the medium of photography. It especially makes the case for the capacity of certain photographs—precisely through their uncanniness—to contest structures of political and social dominance. The uncanny as a quality that unsettles the perception of home emerges as a symptom of modern and contemporary society and also as an aesthetic apparatus by which some key photographs critique the hegemony of capitalist and industrialist domains. The book’s historical scope is large, beginning with William Henry Fox Talbot and closing with contemporary indigenous photographer Bear Allison and contemporary African American photographer Devin Allen. Through close readings, exegesis, of individual photographs and careful deployment of contemporary political and aesthetic theory, The Photographic Uncanny argues for a re-envisioning of the political capacity of photography to expose the haunted, homeless, condition of modernity. Table of Contents1.A Political Uncanny: The Homelessness of Photographs.- 2.Eugene Atget’s Sacred Spaces: Uncanny Capitalism.- 3.August Sander’s Habitus.- 4.Walker Evans’s Emotions.- 5.Diane Arbus’s Uncanny Aura.- 6.Second Selves: Woodman, Meatyard, Allison.- 7.North American Uncanny: Shelley Niro.- 8.Ghosts of West Baltimore: Devin Allen.- 9.Conclusion: Revisiting the 18th-Century Visual Uncanny.

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