Photography Books

A visual and conceptual conversation between two leading US photo-artists famed for their mutual explorations of race, class and power

Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems met in New York in the late 1970s, and over the next 45 years these close friends and colleagues have each produced unique and influential bodies of work around shared interests and concerns. This publication brings together over 140 photographs and video art from the 1970s through the 2010s by two of our most notable and influential photo-based artists.
Since first meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem five decades ago, Bey and Weems have maintained spirited and supportive mutual engagement while exploring and addressing similar themes: race, class, representation, and systems of power. Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue brings their work together in five thematic groupings to shed light on their unique creative visions and trajectories, and their shared concerns and principles.
Photographer Dawoud Bey (born 1953) had his first exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Since then, his work has been presented internationally to critical and popular acclaim. Recent large-scale exhibitions of his photographs have been presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, London. Bey’s writings on his own and others’ work are included in Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply and Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities. He is a professor of art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago.
Famed for her Kitchen Table Series, among other works, Carrie Mae Weems(born 1953) explores power, class, Black identity, womanhood, and the historical past and its resonance in the present moment. In addition to photography, Weems creates video, performance and works of public art, and organizes thematic gatherings which bring together creative thinkers across a broad array of disciplines. Her work has been exhibited across the world, at venues such as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo and the American Academy in Rome.

William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's hometown of Memphis--an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle, the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, gray-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table. For this edition of William Eggleston's Guide, The Museum of Modern Art has made new color separations from the original 35 mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the color will be freshly responsive to the photographer's intentions.

A Chicago Tribune 2020 holiday gift guide pick

In Tar Beach, photographer and Little Italy resident Susan Meiselas (born 1948) brings together found pictures that were made, kept and gathered by various families who handed them down from 1940 to the early 1970s. Reflections from the community offer perspectives of multiple generations, as local author Angel Marinaccio says: “If you had an accomplishment—communion, confirmation, wedding, graduation or birthday, you‘d dress up in your best outfit and go to the rooftop to take pictures and celebrate with your family.”

The introduction to Tar Beach is written by renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who grew up on the streets portrayed in this collection. He writes: “The roof was our escape hatch and it was our sanctuary. The endless crowds, the filth and the grime, the constant noise, the chaos, the claustrophobia, the non-stop motion of everything … you would walk up that flight of stairs, open the door, and you were above it all. You could breathe. You could dream. You could be.”

Meiselas, along with two of her neighbors, Angel Marinaccio and Virginia Bynum, collected and curated these vernacular photographs and memories to convey the feeling of this special place and time in the daily lives of Italian immigrants as they made their way to becoming part of American culture.

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.

Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stillsthere are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.

In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.

Cindy Sherman is a ground-breaking American photographer, born in 1954. She began her "Film Stills" series at the age of 23, gaining early recognition, and has followed it with remarkable experiments in color photography. Her art has won her wide recognition and praise, and been collected and exhibited by major museums throughout the world since 1980. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Dallas Museum of Art. Sherman is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She is represented by Metro Pictures gallery in New York.

The saturation of our social landscape by photographs and photographers is apparent from any public point of view. Photography is arguably the most democratic of mediums, even more accessible today across culture and class than language. In some regards, this has been Lee Friedlander’s most enduring subject—the way that average citizens interact with the world by making pictures of it, as well as how those pictures and the pictures constructed for advertising or political purposes define the public space.
In Lee Friedlander: The People’s Pictures we see photographs spanning six decades, most of the geographic United States and parts of Western Europe and Asia. These pictures are uniquely Friedlander photographs: as much about what’s in front of the camera as they are about the photographer’s lifelong redefining of the medium. Like his exploration of words, letters and numbers in the social landscape, these photographs of photography’s street presence seem inevitable to Friedlander’s vast visual orchestration of what our society looks like. But make no mistake, Friedlander’s photographs are not objective documents; they are intentional, authored, playful, intelligent creations made through his unprecedented collaboration with time and place.
Lee Friedlander (born 1934) has published more than 50 monographs since 1969, and has exhibited extensively around the world for the past five decades, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2005. Friedlander lives in New York.

Covering 30 years of sculptures, paintings, works on paper, large-scale wall drawings, installations and site-specific works, this book presents the art of Gary Simmons, one of the most respected artists of his generation. Since the late 1980s, Simmons has played a key role in situating questions of race, class and gender identity within art discourse. He is notable for combining pop-cultural imagery with conceptual artistic strategies to expose and analyze histories of racism inscribed in US visual culture. Over the course of his career, Simmons has revealed traces of these histories in the fields of sports, cinema, literature, music, and architecture and urbanism while drawing on popular genres such as hip-hop, horror and science fiction. His approach is cool and unflinching in its interrogation of historical and cultural narratives, yet the results consistently deliver a strong emotional charge. This publication offers readers the opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of the complex, profoundly moving work of this influential artist.

Gary Simmons was born in 1964 in New York City, where he was raised. Today he lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA in 1988 from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFA in 1990 from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; he also studied at Hunter College, New York. He has received numerous awards, including the Studio Museum in Harlem Joyce Alexander Wein Prize (2013), the George Gund Foundation USA Gund Fellowship (2007) and the National Endowment for the Arts Interarts Grant (1990).

Famously the most politicized and intellectual of the Abstract Expressionists, Robert Motherwell (1915–91) evolved a form of austere gesturalism reflective of both the human psyche and the political realm. Robert Motherwell: Pure Paintingoffers an in-depth exploration of his oeuvre—the first publication to do so in many years. Leading art scholars Jennifer Cohen, Susan Davidson, Simon Kelly, Monica McTighe and Sarah Rich examine Motherwell’s turn from Surrealism to abstraction and consider the major series that developed over his 50-year career.

The catalog also studies the dialogue between Motherwell’s art and the 19th-century French painting tradition, and investigates his relationship to Spanish painting techniques and processes, with an emphasis on underlying political significance of this relationship (as expressed in his great series Elegies to the Spanish Republic). Another section looks at Motherwell’s unique use of ocher pigment, with its evocation of deep geological time and of avant-garde strategies.

The radical cultural transformations that occurred in New York in the three years between January 1962 and December 1964 ramified across the world. In addition to a whole host of creative innovations across disciplines, the period also saw a shift in the center of artistic gravity from Europe to the United States and the rise of a new leadership in the arts—curators, gallerists and other impresarios. Modeled on the scale and format of Life magazine (one of the most widely read publications of the era), this lavishly illustrated oversized paperback traces a detailed itinerary of artists and curators, experimental exhibitions and museums, as well as historical and political events that transformed society during this explosive moment. From the New Realists exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 to Robert Rauschenberg’s unexpected win of the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale, every groundbreaking event from this incredible three-year period is documented.
Organized chronologically, the book is teeming with images of artworks and archival photographs, and artist interviews conducted by the late great curator Germano Celant.
Artists include: Diane Arbus, Lee Bontecou, Chryssa, Merce Cunningham, Jim Dine, Melvin Edwards, Dan Flavin, Lee Friedlander, Nancy Grossman, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Yayoi Kusama, Norman Lewis, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, George Segal, Jack Smith, Harold Stevenson, Marjorie Strider, Mark di Suvero, Bob Thompson and Andy Warhol.

Early work from Lee Friedlander capturing a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement

 On May 17, 1957, through the generosity of Bayard Rustin, Lee Friedlander was given full access to photograph the participants of the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington, D.C. This extraordinary event, organized by Mr. Rustin, as well as A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., brought together many of the great thinkers and leaders of the period, and was a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.

 Friedlander's photographs depict the famous individuals at the event―Mahalia Jackson, Ruby Dee and Harry Belafonte, among many other luminaries of the African-American community―but they also pay particular attention to the 25,000 men, women and children who gathered to give voice and energy to the ideas embattled by the movement.

 The 58 previously unpublished photographs gathered here are among Friedlander's earliest work. Also included in this publication is the typescript of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Give Us the Ballot" speech and additional ephemera from the march produced in facsimile.

Annie Leibovitz began working as a photographer in the early 1970s, which was a volatile and frenetic time in America. The lines had yet to be drawn between journalists and the people they covered, so she had access that would now be considered unusual. This unique collection provides a vivid account both of Leibovitz’s development as an artist and of a pivotal era.

Hardcover, 8.5” x 10.6”, 182 pages

Stephen Shore: Elements is inspired by the Eakins Press Foundation’s celebrated debut publication, Walker Evans’ Message from the Interior (1966), gathering images from across Evans’ career. As with that book, the photographs of Stephen Shore (born 1947) have been carefully selected to represent the poetry of his approach to the world through photographs. The 24 images (16 color and 8 black and white), from the last of his work with the 8x10" view camera, range in location from New York’s Hudson Valley to the Yucatan, Italy, Texas, Israel and Scotland. As the book’s title suggests, what connects these photographs are the elemental resonances of the earth, humanity and time.

From his early days as a teenager at Andy Warhol’s Factory and his 1971 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (at the time only the second one-person show the museum had ever mounted of a photographer) to his celebrated Uncommon Places (1982), to his current pioneering use of social media platforms and print-on-demand books, Shore has not for a moment let up on his mission to challenge the norms of the photographic medium.

In Stephen Shore: Elements, the Eakins Press Foundation extends its historically important embrace of work by individual artists that represents the highest standard of human achievement in our society.

Featured photograph, of ceramicist Caroline Wallner and her daughter Lucille Reback, is reproduced from ‘Michael Stipe'.

By 1944, Gordon Parks had established himself as a photographer who freely navigated the fields of press and commercial photography, with an unparalleled humanist perspective. That year, Roy Stryker—the former Farm Security Administration official who was now heading the public relations department for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey)—commissioned Parks to travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to document the Penola, Inc. Grease Plant.
Employing his signature style, Parks spent two years chronicling the plant’s industry—critical to Pittsburgh’s history and character—by photographing its workers. The resulting photographs, dramatically staged and lit and striking in their composition, showed the range of activities engaged in by Black and white workers, divided as they were by roles, race and class. The images were used as marketing materials and made available to local and national newspapers, as well as corporate magazines and newsletters. However, they served as much more than documentation of industry, enduring as an exploration of labor and its social and economic ramifications in World War II America by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Featuring more than 100 photographs, many previously unpublished, this is the first book to focus exclusively on Parks’ photographs for the Standard Oil Company, illuminating an important chapter in his career prior to his landmark career as a staff photographer for Life.
Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. He worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. In addition to his tenures photographing for the FSA (1941–45) and Life magazine (1948–72), Parks evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. He died in 2006.

In his latest book, the great American fashion photographer Arthur Elgort presents photographs of women that he has taken throughout his career, in homage to their power, their beauty, their joy and their strength. Depicting a variety of subjects, from young ballerinas at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in St. Petersburg to snapshots of fashion’s most influential women, this collection portrays many aspects of femininity across generations. Designed in the style of his classic 1994 book Arthur Elgort’s Models Manual (by the same designer, Steve Hiett), and printed on sumptuous matte paper with a vinyl cover, this book combines text and photographs in one seamless flow, deploying a rich range of color with graphic snap. Featured here are idols such as supermodels Gia Carangi, Cindy Crawford, Karen Elson, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington, and legendary editors such as Franca Sozzani, the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, and Polly Allen Mellen, a former editor at Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Allure.

Arthur Elgort (born 1940) studied painting at Hunter College but quickly transitioned to photography, finding painting too slow and solitary. Elgort attributes much of his spontaneous and liberated style to his lifelong love of music and dance, especially jazz and ballet. In his long career he has worked on many major advertising campaigns, including for Chanel, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent, shot countless fashion spreads and published several books; his most recent publication is Jazz (2018).