Documentary-Collection Books

This is an outstanding baseball book for all ages. Our son and his boys absolutely loved looking at the older players and stories to go along with the pictures. It is knowledgable and enjoyable.

I have been following baseball since the 1954 World Series - Willie Mays' catch - Dusty Rhodes' hits - and this book brings it all back - all the sounds - the smells - it is fabulous. "A picture is worth 1000 words?" These are worth a million

Ran across this book when it was first published eons ago. I have always been captivated by Schiffer's breath-taking beauty and allure. Sexy beyond words, yet never trashy, always regal in her body of work.
I remember the book showcasing Claudia's advertisements and publicity photos and being blown away with her simply overwhelming camera presence.

Sadly, I never purchased the book on it's release and will have to await for a good bargain copy to snag.
If you remember this teutonic gooddess as the world-stopping peak of feminine evolution like I did; then this book is certainly what you're looking for.

In this book by Karl Lagerfeld you can find the favorite pictures of Claudia Schiffer. Included are various shots of Chanel advertising campaigns. Forword by Claudia Schiffer.

These photographs will take your breath away. The landscapes are incredibly beautiful, and the quality of the images is of the highest caliber. Ya gotta love this planet...

The photographs are so gorgious and real that they make you feel like you are right there. From the cliffs to the sandy beaches and from the light houses to the huge watery rocks make this book extremely unforgettable.

You really get your money's worth with Robert Walker's photography. Throughout the book so many photos are packed with extra dimensions and depth and you can visually crop them into several more images within one photo and I haven't even got to the dazzling color. Fortunately he works on city streets where everything is going on at once and somehow he manages to capture this visual busyness (or chaos even). I think his best photos are the ones where utility workers and equipment or traffic provide plenty of odd angles and pictures within pictures.

Of the six chapters only one: Redeem All (more or less in the middle of the book) slows the pace by using photos that are much simpler and in more subdued color. The other chapters, it seems to me, just blend into each other so that the chapter titles seem rather redundant.

The color vibrancy of these photos might not be everybody's taste but that is his style and you could never say his work is dull. I consider him the LeRoy Neiman of photography.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

This photographer has two great books, and is not nearly as well-known as people like Alex Webb, Costa Manos, etc. This particular book is one of the finest I've seen, with foldout double truck pages and amazing reproduction. A must for anyone seriously interested in color street work or the social study of outdoor advertising and its influence on city life.

A must! images are a compendium of color photography from it's birth to present day: And they are all exquisitelly beautifull. Highlly recomended

If you like photography but are wondering how relevant color photography (still) is? This is the book to return your emotions back on color. How serious color photography can be? Very...

This is the book to open your heart to the way we are born to see the world.

This handsome collection of 115+ color photographs captures the romance and drama of cowboy life as it's lived on the ranchland of Colorado, where the Rockies provide a grand backdrop under deep blue skies. There are images here of men and women at work outdoors in all seasons. Many are the kind of richly visual images that adorn calendars and that used to find their way into Marlboro ads. There are silhouettes against spectacular sunsets, men around campfires or fording streams on horseback, close-ups of saddles, boots, and tack, horses running in snow.

Others are unexpected surprises, like a rancher with a horse-drawn hay rake, or the end of a wide rainbow falling between two dilapidated ranch buildings. There's a brief introduction by cowboy actor Harry Carey, Jr., and cowboy poet and humorist Baxter Black also makes an appearance, with a photo and a poem, "Cowboy Heaven." The book is well designed, with two-page spreads balancing pages with clusters of smaller photographs. A few pages include anecdotes as told by cowboys. Great coffee table book.

This book is so special to us..We are spending the winter in Ariz. and Denny, who appears several times in the book is our wrangler...we brought our horses with and he has cared for them as if they were his own..Our memories will live on forever in the beautiful pictures of our special friend and our time with him this winter...

This united edition of the correspondence was long overdue. The letters of the Emperor and Empress appear together for the first time, cleansed of the transcription errors which spoiled the first (1923) edition of her correspondence, and of the tactful editing which expunged the more intimate passages from the 1929 version of his. Joseph Fuhrmann's footnotes are helpful, thoroughly researched and not unsympathetic to the writers. For students of Russian history, this book is an extraordinarily important source on the government of Russia immediately before the Revolution; it repays careful and open-minded reading. For those interested in the personal life and the characters of the last Tsar's family, it is arguably better still: here we have Nicholas II, affectionate and gentle, occasional author of rather poetic descriptions of scenery (this is not the Nicholas of the blandly factual diary). Here too his beloved Empress, sharp-tongued and energetic and interested in everything, very different to the tragic-eyed lady of legend. High politics and war jostle for attention with amusing little accounts of the childrens' activities, but there is never any doubt that the letters were written in serious times by people who understood and sought desperately to find a solution to the problems Russia faced. They certainly don't make light reading, but if you have the patience, these letters repay your perseverance.

It's hard to believe these letters and telegrams were exchanged by a ruler and his wife under the immensely stressful conditions of WWI. I'm an aficionado of Imperial Russian History, but the unbelievable banality of this couple, relentlessly exposed in their own words is hard to take. A terrifically thorough book, it's a slow read--which certainly makes you feel you're getting your money's worth. I'm glad I bought it, and have learned more about these Romanovs even though their correspondence reveals shallowness and self-interest. Very good book, pitiful subjects.

I was drawn to the book by the powerful and fun photographic images. Ledbetter does an outstanding job capturing the images of Cuban life in a way that allows you to both celebrate it and to empathise with the struggle of the Cuban people.

The Essays are an unexpected extra in a book of this nature that make the work a multi-dimensional experience. It appeals to those interested in both Photography and Cuba. I highly recommend it!

This magnificent collection of photographs captures the beauty, spirit and mystery of Cuba, the USA's often-overlooked neighbor... Ledbetter's clear, passionate and respectful eye has created a stunning work -- the book takes us far more deeply into the Cuban culture than the soundbites of recent news stories (Elian Gonzales, President Carter's visit) allow. Ledbetter's photographs and the accompanying essays make this book essential for anyone who wishes to understand Cuba more fully; the book also richly rewards the reader who simply appreciates great photography.

I admit I don't know much about art, that's why I read this book. I learned a lot about the Dada movement and also about Ms. Hoch. I'm still not sure if she is much of an artist, but I know she makes a damn fine sandwich.

This is a wonderful resource for information on Hannah Hoch, and Berlin dada. Great account of Hannah's life,
and a complete collection of her work.

This landmark survey of Czech avant-garde photography is the first time we have seen how Central European experimentalists found the same mainstreams and explored many of the same byways as did their American and European cohorts. And yet, as the images in this book testify, almost every shot has a quality distinctive enough to be called Czech.

Czech photographers had a vision of modernity that resembled Bauhaus in its desire for a major houseclean of old forms, but avoided the Bauhaus's smothering insistence on theory first and reality later. The Czech vision was really many visions. We see aesthetic old friends here: pictorialism, picture poems, abstraction and its quasi-abstract variant called nonfiguration, social journalism, surrealism-and a home-grown movement named Poetism.

The text is an anthology of essays. They have a elbowy reach as they knock into each other introducing the period and movements; exploring the background of the photographers and their mutual influences on each other; and much more.

Photography came to Czechoslovakia well after film had been put onto rolls. They could spend their spare time thinking. It is tempting to compare the Czech efforts with the boundary-pushing experiments of North American and Western European photographers in the Twenties and Thirties. They were, after all, conducted almost simultaneously. Yet there is a clear difference in technique between images by Paul Strand, Minor White, Ansel Adams, and Edward Steichen, and their Czech counterparts named Jeromir Funke, Jindrich Styrsky, and Drahomir Ruzicka. The difference is largely due to the Czechs being essentially untrained, unlettered hobbyists with very little aesthetic theory to distract them, and therefore an ability to see objects and scenes on their own terms.

It shows.

Take some of the high-angle panoramic portraits of cafe terraces and outdoor restaurants of Josef Ehm, Jan Lauschmann, Arnost Pickart, and Eugen Wiskovsky. They resemble the overhead shots of Atget and Cartier-Bresson. The big difference is that Cartier-Bresson was consciously seeing a "decisive moment" to push the shutter, while the Czechs seem more preoccupied with panorama in and of itself. For example, there are almost no humans in the pictures; unoccupied cafe tables march off in rows like stamped-metal plates on a production line. From the flat, even light one knows the skies were overcast. Did the photographers go there on such days because they sought a scene without life? If so or even if not, they succeeded.

This same sense of dyspersonalization also occurs with the nudes. If ever there was a case for elan as a series of curves, the nude is it. Yet the nudes of Frantisek Drtikol are so embedded in (and mostly behind) angularities and factory-hewn curves that the figures come off as union-shop amazons fresh from the factory floor. While the text assigns terms to the various classes of imagery-Constructivism, Futurism, Functionalism, and the like-the impact on the eye is rather different: of all the catchalls one can apply to remove being from reality, industrial photography is as cold and correct as a calculus solution.

The rather smallish amount of commercial photography presented likewise is unremarkable, even the page layouts trying to be with-it in an era when Art Deco dominated almost everything a few longitudes to the west. This surprises, because the American experimentalist Man Ray, living in Paris, was a formidable esprit de l'oeil to Jaroslav Rossler and others. Ray's was is the most energizing foreign influence on Czech photo imagination of the time.

All this took an abrupt swerve when Surrealism arrived. Photographers such as Jindrich Styrzsky, Hugo Taborsky, Frantisek Vobecky, and Bohumil Nemec spared us Western Europe's metaphysics of dripping clocks and life-vacated forms to concentrate on a more local product: the magical encounters to be found on a human visage. With surrealism the Czechs utterly reversed themselves. A human-seed sensibility blossomed into a broad meadow whose subtext was poetry, imagination, creativity, and the inner model. Literature was as much a part of photography as photograph was of literature, just as complexity, too, contains its own antonym. The term "Surrealism" as defined in Paris didn't quite fit this heady mix, so it was aptly called Poetism by the locals. Antonin Dufek's chapter on the subject is arguably the most stimulating in the book.

The most striking images in the book are Surrealist. In Jeroslav Rössler's "Untitled, 1931" on page 117 (and the cover jacket), a woman's face fills the frame, tilted at 45 degrees as she looks the lens in the eye. The pictorial strength may come from her thin line of almost black lipstick and one eye encircled by a black ring, but the psychic strength comes from the translucent panes before her that divide the image into portions of clarity and bad focus. What we see isn't a reality, it is a focusscape.

The book is as complete a view as we can find of the entire Czech world between the White Carpathians and the mountain rim that barriers off Czechoslovakia from the rest of Europe. Photographers had a great old time in the years between the arrival of democracy with Jan Masaryk's government in 1918 and its end with Hitler's invasion in 1938. An astonishing number of them were hobbyists with little interest in what today would be called a career path. It is quite something to watch them trying the same experiments and making the same mistakes-finding their own metier like good artists should-with results quite different that events further westward.

They defined aesthetics, possibilities, and learned the limits of their medium. But much more. They ventured well beyond the typical hobbyist's preoccupation with technique and equipment. Their great contribution was essentially the same as that of Atget and Bressai: a vivid glimpse into the realities of their part of the world-Westernized Slavs-which no one had paid much attention to. It turned out that society and commonplaces were more relevant to them than theory and manifesto.

First published as "Ceska fotograficka avantgarda 1918-1948," this book shows how great the photographers of Czechoslovakia of the first half of the 20th century were. They did not have digital techniques, but nevertheless produced wonderful art (as suggested by the original title of the exhibition, "Modern Beauty: Czech Photographic Avant-Garde 1918-1948"). I had heard of Frantisek Drtikol, Jaromir Funke, and Josef Sudek, but I had never seen a good sampling of their images before reading this book. New to me were artists such as Jindrich Heisler, Jaroslav Rossler, Karel Teige, and Eugen Wiskovsky. The authors must have carefully chosen the photographs published in the book from collections in Prague and elsewhere. Most of the photos are in black and white, but some are in color, and all are well reproduced. The text is illuminating, with discussion of the relationship of the Czech photographers' work to that of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Rodchenko, Man Ray, and other contemporaries. The chapters on "optical words," "hidden sources" (e.g., collages), and surrealism were the most interesting to me. Toward the back of the book, the chronologies, biographies, bibliography, and index are useful for future reference. I hope you purchase it!