Search results for ""Author Alex Harris""

A richly illustrated birding guide to the nation’s first official wildlife refuge."Beautifully illustrated and written, this is a must-have for anyone who wants to better understand and appreciate our neighbors." —Jenny Odell, author of How to Do NothingThis charming full-color field guide introduces us to fifteen waterbirds easily found in the urban wildlife refuge of Lake Merritt. In his introduction, author-illustrator Alex Harris includes a history of the lake, providing context for a place that is alluring to humans and shorebirds alike. Each species profile of the lake’s feathered residents is accompanied by a beautiful, detailed watercolor that captures the bird’s distinctive coloring and sinuous physicality. The black-crowned night heron, Oakland’s official city bird, stares with its startling orange eyes, while the American coot flexes its fancy, flared feet. Along with straightforward notes on the identification of each bird, Harris features the voices of Oakland community members, sharing moments of delight from the birds’ most dedicated observers. A celebration of avian life and the human pleasure of witnessing it, Birds of Lake Merritt is an essential guide to the natural world in the heart of the city.

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The American South has become a nexus of film production in the United States. By 2016, more major features were being shot in Georgia than in California. Commissioned by the High Museum in Atlanta as part of their Picturing the South series, Alex Harris explored cinematic representations of the South by visiting and photographing the making of over 40 independent fiction films across the region. Using a documentary approach to capture scenes that unfolded on or around the set, Harris’ images tell the story of a new South while also hinting at more universal aspects of life – the ways in which we are all actors in our own lives, creating our sets, practicing our lines, refining our characters, playing ourselves. These photographs also tell a story about our increasingly visual culture and explore the rapidly evolving world of independent filmmaking, one that is little known to audiences outside the film festival circuit.

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Self-taught photographer Hugh Mangum was born in 1877 in Durham, North Carolina, as its burgeoning tobacco economy put the frontier-like boomtown on the map. As an itinerant portraitist working primarily in North Carolina and Virginia during the rise of Jim Crow, Mangum welcomed into his temporary studios a clientele that was both racially and economically diverse. After his death in 1922, his glass plate negatives remained stored in his darkroom, a tobacco barn, for fifty years. Slated for demolition in the 1970s, the barn was saved at the last moment-and with it, this surprising and unparalleled document of life at the turn of the twentieth century, a turbulent time in the history of the American South. Hugh Mangum's multiple-image, glass plate negatives reveal the open-door policy of his studio to show us lives marked both by notable affluence and hard work, all imbued with a strong sense of individuality, self-creation, and often joy. Seen and experienced in the present, the portraits hint at unexpected relationships and histories and also confirm how historical photographs have the power to subvert familiar narratives. Mangum's photographs are not only images; they are objects that have survived a history of their own and exist within the larger political and cultural history of the American South, demonstrating the unpredictable alchemy that often characterizes the best art-its ability over time to evolve with and absorb life and meaning beyond the intentions or expectations of the artist.

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New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo mountains are a place where two cultures -- Hispanic and Anglo -- meet. They're also the place where three men meet: William deBuys, a young writer; Alex Harris, a young photographer; and Jacobo Romero, an old farmer. When Harris and deBuys move to New Mexico in the 1970s, Romero is the neighbor who befriends them and becomes their teacher. With the tools of simple labor -- shovel and axe, irony and humor -- he shows them how to survive, even flourish, in their isolated village. A remarkable look at modern life in the mountains, River of Traps also magically evokes the now-vanished world in which Romero tended flocks on frontier ranges and absorbed the values of a society untouched by cash or Anglo America. His memories and wisdom, shared without sentimentality, permeate this absorbing story of three men and the place that forever shaped their lives.

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Entranced by Edward O. Wilson’s mesmerizing evocation of his Southern childhood in The Naturalist and Anthill, Alex Harris approached the scientist about collaborating on a book about Wilson’s native world of Mobile, Alabama. Perceiving that Mobile was a city small enough to be captured through a lens yet old enough to have experienced a full epic cycle of tragedy and rebirth, the photographer and the naturalist joined forces to capture the rhythms of this storied Alabama Gulf region through a swirling tango of lyrical words and breathtaking images. With Wilson tracing his family’s history from the Civil War through the Depression—when mule-driven wagons still clogged the roads—to Mobile’s racial and environmental struggles to its cultural triumphs today, and with Harris stunningly capturing the mood of a radically transformed city that has adapted to the twenty-first century, the book becomes a universal story, one that tells us where we all come from and why we are here.

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Discover the incredible combat machines that have graced the skies, land, and sea of the world's most famous conflicts. A fascinating account of the history and development of dozens of legendary military vehicles -- from the German Tiger tanks of the Second World War and the nuclear-powered submarine to the high-tech fighter jets of today and the military technology of the future -- Visual History of World Military Machines details the facts and figures of these incredible machines. Featuring complete breakdowns of the technology that makes these tanks, choppers, and battleships the best of the best, this guide spans the last 100 years of warfare and how it's evolved. Filled with informative and fascinating articles written by leading historians, scholars, and other military history experts, as well as high-quality photography and illustrations, this action-packed book is a must-have for any history buff!

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The eye is sovereign in every art but music. Reading, writing and painting are all but soundless deeds of sight."" These are the words of Reynolds Price (1933-2011), one America's greatest writers. In his novels, short stories, poems and plays - forty-one books in all - Price renders with keenness, clarity and profound eloquence the experience of life, both the visible and invisible, the outward and the interior. What is not well known is that Price was also a visionary collector. In his modest North Carolina house, nestled among southern pines and hardwoods, Price - confined to a wheelchair for the last three decades of his life - curated and arranged his books, photographs, paintings, sculptures, masks, religious icons, and objects he collected, purchased, or was given over the years, creating a visual environment that directly reflected his life, his experiences, his passions and preoccupations.After his death in 2011, Price's family invited acclaimed photographer, Alex Harris to photograph the house. In this remarkably intimate and revealing book, Harris and his wife, writer Margaret Sartor, pair sixty of Harris's color photographs with excerpts from Price's fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and interviews. As longtime neighbors and friends who spent time in his house over many years, they show the ways in which the art and memorabilia Price collected inspired his writing and illuminates connections between the visible world he constructed and the creations of his mind. As we turn the pages of this book, it is as if Reynolds Price himself takes us on a guided tour of his home. And as we walk through his rooms, he reveals his private world, recounts significant episodes in his life, and speaks with wisdom and humor about the people, ideas, and beliefs most important to him. As readers we follow, we listen, and we see. Reynolds Price's connection to his house - where he lived and worked for over four decades - offers insight into our own lives and loves, teaches us about the importance of place, shows how to be fully engaged in the world, how to strive to live a meaningful life.

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