Documentary-collections Books

Hine was a documentary photographer whose images offer a peek into a lost world. His credo was "Work itself has ever been one of the deepest satisfactions that come to the restless human soul." That was not something he figured out while working in some summer job during his college days; he was personally acquainted with hard labor, hunger and poverty - as the text in the book explains. The photographs are of immigrants at Ellis Island, tenement dwellers, child laborers, rural families, and construction workers building the Empire State Building.

Review Summary: Lewis Hine was a pioneer in documenting the working conditions of children. His poignant images of coal mines, sweatshops, and factories shocked America into passing its first legislation to regulate and reduce child labor. Generations of Americans have benefited as a result. Review: The foreword by Walter Rosenblum describes Lewis Hine as being "a born teacher." Mr. Rosenblum recounts Mr. Hine's generosity in writing a letter or recommendation for him saying that Mr. Rosenblum was "a new and better Hine." This example captures his compassion and generosity towards others. He never saw a person he didn't respect and have compassion for. Each image in this fine book contains that "compassionate vision." His subjects included immigrants at Ellis Island and in their first tenement homes, working conditions in sweatshops and factories, the everyday life of the working poor, and the building of the Empire State Building (with views from the 100th floor girders).

The reader will get a "fresh insight through his vision" because Mr. Hine takes you places you never imagined existed. The scenes speak for themselves and cause you to have a visceral reaction. My sense of vertigo at thinking about swaying on a girder was palpable as I looked over the Empire State Building construction photographs. In viewing the sweatshops, I could feel heat building up in my body. In the images of breaker boys, I could feel the dusty despair of the coal mines in my bones and lungs.

From a technical point of view, the compositions are very fine and draw the eye into the scene. You get a strong sense of the moment, even though the scenes are 70-90 years old. The images strike hard at you with their messages . . . without using captions. They are as gripping as anything you have seen about work or slum life on the front pages of a newspaper.

Sadly, Mr. Hine's career hit a major snag in the Depression. Stieglitz and he were on different paths, and those who were showing interest in art photography were uninterested in social realism. He was impoverished, had his house foreclosed on, and lived on welfare. His wife died on Christmas 1938. He died in November 1940 "impoverished, dispirited, worn out." He was "malnourished to the point of starvation." One cannot help but think that he moved closer to living the life of a saint than many of us will ever achieve.

My favorite images in the book include: New York City Sweatshop, 1908; Climbing into America, 1908; Young girls knitting stockings in Southern hosiery mill, 1920; Cigar makers, Tampa, 1909; Breaker boys in coal chute, South Pittston, Pennsylvania, January 1911; Playground in tenement alley, Boston, 1901; Cannery workers preparing beans, c. 1910; and Photographs of building the Empire State Building, New York City, 1930/32.

I suggest that you follow Mr. Hine's fine example and think about how you can visualize important messages that others can best appreciate as images. What images would you capture? How would you share them? Who would benefit?

Be prepared to help others see the injustices that you do!

Over the past two years, in a personal examination of America's resolute
pursuance of the happiness to which it feels constitutionally entitled, Kate
Schermerhorn has photographed nearly a hundred parades and pageants across
the breadth of the continental USA. Her camera however never quite gets
around to recording glory of the spectacle, choosing instead to reach beyond
the razzmatazz and settle into the dust of the surrounding minutiae which
inform the structure of the whole. Intangibles such as concentration form a
fundamental part of the events: in Pasadena for example we find a perfectly
made up, high heeled, suspender and stocking clad gentleman applying the
final adjustments to his face paint before taking part in a parade. Lace
seems significant to a Hollywood Halloween party while a poodle in a pet
pouch across its owner's chest seems glued to a Washington tricycle race.
Taking the whole thing seriously is very much an issue here: there is a
commitment in the participants which is appreciated by the spectators. In
Phoenix Arizona for example spectators have brought living room furniture
out into their driveway and comfortably settled in to watch a parade: a
notion of communal spirit, both national and local flows throughout the
book. The High School Band rehearses in the back yard, while in Beaux Bridge
Louisiana a uniformly striped couple step seriously out for the annual
crawfish festival. The book opens with an image of Mount Rushmore, avoiding
the splendour and simply allowing the head of George Washington to break the
bottom of the frame. Whether he is to be viewed as sinking; or perhaps
resurfacing to once more regard the nation he fathered is a decision left to
the viewer. Quietly, behind it's humorous, light hearted, and gently
superficial veil, America's Idea of a Good Time asks some very subtle
questions. And as her Amish farmer rollerblades filmicly off into the sunset
I'm left with the conviction that Kate Schermerhorn's is a journey that's
only just begun. I look forward to her next book

Kate Schermerhorn has given us an affectionate look at Americans at play, in all their nutty glory. She highlights her subjects' quirkiness, to be sure, but never harshly. Her engaging, clever photographs convey a deliciously droll take on what it means to have fun - and what it looks like to watch others having it -- in today's America.

The photography contained in this book is masterful! The black and white and color photos capture the essence of a country on the move. The captions help the reader to connect events and people to American history.

If, like me, you enjoy photography books more for the photos than for the accompanying text then you will find American Photographs 1900-2000 a joy. Of the 400 pages that make up this volume, only 6 pages have text. The rest are devoted to a wide and wonderful range of photographs. It is simply and stylishly laid out. Each left had page lists the photographer, the title, the date, size and type of the photograph. On the opposing right-hand page the accompanying photograph is beautifully reproduced. The plates are not 'cramped', as they can be in other books commemorating a century's worth of photography. Photojournalism, fashion photography, scientific photography, 'art' photography and Hollywood glamour photography are all covered. It is a pleasure to own.

American Ruins is far more than it appears. On the surface, it is a very well designed and exquisitely photographed essay on the vanishing farmsteads of the northern plains states in the USA. That's like saying the Mona Lisa is a woman.

On the next plane, the photographs-panoramics mainly, in black-and-white on infrared film-are beyond photography. They are a spiritual experience on paper that comes as close to the experience of truth as can be done without becoming it yourself. They are haunting, wistful, emotional evocations of the pain of time and loss, the invisible presence of people in what the picture does not, cannot, show, in the way that only black-and-white can push you out of "that" into "thisness." As the foreword puts it: "... as if the camera has recorded something going on inside your head and projected it onto a wall." Small wonder many feel black-and-white is the most difficult image recorder to work with, and also to many the most sublime when done well.

Sublime Mr. MacKenzie is. This is one of the most remarkably photographed books to come off the presses in a long time. Not just well done, but literally beyond compare; the sole occupant of its category. The photographs are closer to poetry without a pen than to the interaction between film and lens. Songs without words in an A-4 landscape book. The only thing to match them is the writing excerpts that "captions" them. (The captions in the conventional sense are Notes at the end of the book.) Mr. MacKenzie chose the excerpts himself, and he certainly did his homework well. Wallace Stegner is here, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Henry Miller, Frank Lloyd right, and two writers who would probably be surprised to find their sentences thrust alongside the eloquence of this book. But here they are, and no the less eloquent:

"When family love is displaced onto land, every change that happens there has meaning: the calibre of the light and the texture of the clouds in a day, the big changes of the seasons, most of all the slow transformation of the infrastructure of the place itself as the decades pass. When the deflection of love is also a deflection of pain, the gradual decomposition of such a place can be excruciating, a kind of lifelong torture, and yet, at the same time, a hypnotic, unfolding story. As the place declines, layers of meaning are revealed."

=Suzannah Lessard, "The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family"

To which Annette Atkins adds, in "Harvest of Grief: Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance* in Minnesota, 1872-78":

"Minnesota lost settlers during the dark days of the 1870s . . . but thousands remained. Some could afford to stay; some could not afford to leave. Debts held some. Others wanted to hold on to their investments of time and energy. Some held different attachments; as one man explained: `I have lost my all here, & somehow I believe that if I find it again, it will be in the immediate neighborhood where I lost it . . . I have a child buried on my claim & my ties are stronger & more binding on that account.'"

In between is writing that calls our attention to what the unrushed eye can see: ". . . leaning barns and windowless houses, jutting up like wreckage in oceans of furrowed wheat and sorghum, architecture that looks more like a visible absence of something, like a missing tooth, than it looks like a presence of sun-curled clapboard and tatters of tar paper. It looks like ruins . . . of dreams that didn't work out."

Then he goes beyond all that, to the lives unseen in these pictures, flesh long gone but souls still there, a kind of spirit of determination to match this spirit of place: ". . . boredom, bad luck, debt, despair; about the blizzard that leaves you burning your inside walls to stay alive because if you go outside for firewood you'll vanish; about a summer erupting with wheat until the grasshoppers darken the sky and eat everything-wheat, vegetable garden, even the leaves on the trees; about a husband who tells his wife he'll be right back after he rides out to round up two cows-she watches him ride around the cows and keep going and he never comes back."

Beauty of a special kind, these-of death, decay, the falling to ruin-but life of a kind all the more: eonic, seasonless as a century, brutal cold and brutal heat, wind vying only with grass for endlessness, and to the human who endures these and thus surpasses the self, transfiguration. Into this, the Great Plains, families came, filled with grit and ambition and not a few starry-eyed dreams. They are still here, here in these pictures. Look around the corners and there they are, in the boards of the barn they nailed, among the leaves in the trees they planted. With all that's in this book, we can see what we never would have before, the eyes of dreams become the last remains of a rainbow.

That said, this is what books used to be in the highest sense of the craft. And still are, if only we seek out and buy the work of presses like the Afton Historical Society.

This is the book for people who didn't think that they liked landscape photography. MacKenzie takes you through a voyage to the abandoned worlds of farms, schools and other building in the middle of the nowhere lands of midwestern America. Here we find that ruined farmhouse, strangely sculpted by the winds and snow of many winters, but not depicted as some quaint, picturesque image, but as a stark vision in long Puritan panoramic views that work to make the landscapes appear as through they are suspended in time, a strange reminder of once active places, now abandoned and ruined, but notheless spectacular in their setting. This is the photographer that will make you throw away your Nan Goldins and your Cindy Shermans and discover what is it that makes photography the newest vibrant member of the visual fine arts.

Anchorage: Early Photographs Of The Great Land is a splendidly produced compendium of historic black and white photography showcasing the Native Americas, landscape, settlement, construction emergences of the largest city in Alaska and the Cook Inlet. From its beginnings as a little railroad town to a thoroughly metropolitan community, Ann Chandonnet has gathered striking and memorable photos enhanced with her informative and engaging text telling the stories of the people who made the city what it is today. Anchorage is a superb photo history.

These early photos of Anchorage, Alaska provide a fine capsule history of the town's beginnings and evolution, creating a paperback packed with image sure to appeal to any who live in the region or to those with a special affection for early Alaskan history. A fine collection of involving images.

I saw this exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in NY recently and it was incredible. I'm usually not a fan of giant color photo exhibits, but this one really struck me. The complexity and beauty in his photographs will hit on something that you have most likely never seen. He has a gift of bringing common scenes like the supermarket into view in a way that makes you doubt you have ever shopped at one. If so, you would say, how did I miss that which is shown in this photograph? Looking at his photographs will bring on that same sense of smallness as pondering your little place on this little, common blue/green planet, around this one star that is the norm among billions upon billions.

Andreas Gursky: Photographs From 1984 To The Present offers a grand, hugely diverse collection of larger than life images which taken as a whole conveys a gently ironic commentary of modernity in all its disparate manifestations. Although profoundly concerned with the role (and fate!) of man in the dis-articulated social tableau created by late-stage hyper-capitalism, Gursky is not making judgments about what he observes. To Quote from one of three introductory essays, this one written by Marie Luise Syring, "Gursky's work...reflects both the art forms and the everyday aesthetics of 20th-century society without resorting to open polemics-his images display too much indifference and beauty."

I was initially drawn to this series of photographs by the dust jacket illustration which is a somewhat unusual composition for Gursky, it turns out. I was touched immediately by the sparse, geometrically pleasing landscape running on endlessly in a striated banner of perfectly matched colour. There are several other 'naturalistic' studies included in this portfolio of 76 plates but most of the work examines the controlled chaos of urban settings, often featuring countless humans perambulating pointlessly in endless motion. "Being modern can also involve the danger of losing one's individuality and right to self-determination," Marie Luise Syring reminds us.

Gursky works on the boundary between painting and art photography. He tests and retests the critical distinctions seemingly inherent to these two representational domains. Thus many, but not all, of Gursky's photographs seem to have an explicitly clinical orientation. He is probing a fragile boundary and we know it. The cold truth which emanates from a stark objectification of the subject matter which compels Gursky is however always balanced by the way in which he floods his overrun visual fields with light and riotous colour. That I might personally prefer the warmer emotional tones of his naturalistic work to the harsher elements of the cityscapes is of course hardly the point. All of his work makes you think! And sometimes gasp at the sheer excess of talent and technique which propels the creation of such intensely intelligent, beautiful art.

This book is incredibly detailed and is a must for any Warhol fan. It was worth the money,

Very comprehensive retrospective of Andy Warhol's photography. I especially liked the fact that the book presents the orginal photographs used as the source material for so many of his silkscreens. Wonderful section on photos of Andy Warhol taken by others. A must for any Warhol fan. I have many books about Warhol. There is material in this book that I've never seen anywhere else. You'll love it!

ANGELS IN AFRICA: Profiles of Seven Extraordinary Women (2006) by Beth O'Donnell & Kimberley Sevcik, documents seven African women working to overcome devastating problems in their African communities. Organized by country, each chapter of Angels in Africa introduces us to a remarkable woman who is tackling an issue that is particularly prevalent in that country. Ann Wanjiru represents 2,000 grassroots women of GROOTS Kenya; In Tanzania, Edina Yahana helped plant more than one million trees in an effort to save the rainforests from decimation; Celina Cossa, Founder and President of the General Union of Agricultural Cooperatives (UGC) of Mozambique, is one of the most respected women in Africa; In Rwanda, Pascasie Mukamunigo, a Tutsi woman brings together the Hutus and Tutsis through a community weaving project; We learn about the work of Prudence Mwandla of South Africa who has dedicated her life to sheltering AIDS orphans who had been abused, abandoned, sick, and hungry; Aminata Dieye of Senegal created a program that trains young girls in non-traditional jobs. In Senegal, that's not an easy thing to do, and Mme Dembélé Jacqueline Goïta, Directrice Exécutive, CARITAS of Mali, Fighting Poverty, Hunger, and Homelessness.

This is a beautiful book, with sensational stories and wonderful illustrations.
I thoroughly recommend it.

An amazing and thought-provoking book! The simple title belies the depth of meaning of these photographs and the way they are arranged. When all is said and done, Art Shay will likely go down as an American icon, and works such as this will be the reason. You will surely find yourself wondering time and again, "How did he get that shot?!" Shay is not only a master of his equipment, but seems to have also mastered the art of being the fly on the wall that we all wish we could be at times.

You owe it to yourself to go through this book at least three times. I suggest that you initially not read any of the notes, but dive right into the viewing. During your first perusal, it's probably best to look at each picture singly, absorbing the essence of each according to what it has to offer to you. As you turn the pages during your second viewing, notice how the two photographs facing you each time you turn a page relate to each other in some way - be it theme, animal type, photo structure...it's up to you to see it. (I apologize for giving this aspect away to those who would have noticed it on their own, but I saw no mention of it anywhere in the notes, and felt it too important a feature to allow to go unmentioned.)

Now, before and during your third trip through the book, turn to Art Shay's notes at the front of the book, which tell the stories behind the photos. See if you aren't moved even further as you turn each page. Personally, after reading Shay's description of the animal control officer removing a cancer-ridden lady's only pet, I get teary-eyed every time I view that picture. Other pages now cause me to smile or laugh every time I turn to them.

Animals indeed! Yes, this book has lots of pictures of animals, but once you jump on board you'll find yourself on the roller coaster ride of emotions that comes with being fully alive.
Tickets, please!

'Contact'! is the title of the last photo in Art Shay's new book of photographs, 'Animals.' It shows a human hand and a hairy simian hand with a peanut between them; it isn't clear who is the giver and who is the receiver. The theme of this book is the ways in which we share the planet with other animal species and the things we have in common with each other. The cover photo shows a woman wearing a leopard coat, walking past a leopard in its cage. Photos of horses and dogs at work, a hog drinking beer, a squirrel eating matzoh and other animals going about their ordinary daily lives remind us of the ways in which we identify with and influence each other. What is particularly appealing about this book is the spontaneity and unpretentiousness of these photos which take us all over the world, from various locations in the United States to Europe and Africa. This book will delight anyone who has had a warm or interesting or unusual contact with an animal, and who hasn't?

This book is a treasure trove for artists of all ages. Every photo is a gorgeous abstract of wonderful colors, textures, and patterns, just as the title says. The text is limited, but the scientific names of every subject are provided, so one can do further research as desired. Well worth the money.

This is an amazing and stunning collection of photographs. It opens new ways of seeing sea creatures, helping us discover things, that we never noticed before, like the beautiful pattern of a coral or the sculpted detail of a featherstar. The many colours are amazing and dazzling. The pictures all come with short but very good explanations and the book has an excellent introduction.
I think this book is not only of interest for divers and people interested in the ocean world, but also for artists and designers, as I find it highly inspirational. This is definitely my favourite book about sea creatures and it truly takes you into another world.
Highly recommended!!!