Search results for ""Smithsonian Books""

Despite his prolific career as the first US federal photographer, John Wood has been largely forgotten. With 160 stunning, high-resolution images, MAGNIFICENT INTENTIONS establishes Wood as a leader among American photographers of the time and provides historical context for his overlooked work and legacy, which includes:The first inauguration photo, from James Buchanan''s inauguration in 1857Newly uncovered evidence that Wood was the photographer who documentedAbraham Lincoln''s first inauguration in 1861,the only surviving photograph of that historic eventHundreds of photographs of the construction of public buildings in DC, most notably the U.S. Capitoland the Washington AqueductPioneering innovations in the use ofphotography to duplicate maps and plansduring the Civil WarThe first panoramic photos of Washington, DCAdrienne Lundgren,senior photograph conservator at the Library of Congress, explores how Wood''s life shaped his photographic eye and examines innovative techniques that

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Celebrated for mobiles and stabiles that enliven city squares and museums around the world, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is not widely recognized as a portraitist. Throughout his career, however, Calder created portraits of a wide variety of subjects: well-known entertainment and political figures, sports stars, artist friends, family members, and himself. Some of these portraits are traditional likenesses in oil on canvas or ink on paper, but most explore new conceptions of form and identity in the medium of sculpture. Executed over a fifty-year period from the early 1920s to the 1970s, Calder's portraits reveal a real talent for portraiture, for encapsulating individual character traits in both representational and abstract art, and in two and three dimensions. Calder recorded his friendships in a remarkably vivid and generous way. Through his relationship with his subjects he continually defined and redefined himself, and his oeuvre in the genre of portraiture became a life narrative.

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