Documentary-collections Books

Photography is about capturing light. The way light comes to life in these photographs, and dances over and through the subjects, is truly mesmerizing. Edward S. Curtis was undeniably an artist, and he left for his fellow mankind a wonderful gift. We benefit through his sight and likewise, his INsight. With the recognition of what was quickly vanishing, even as he strove to visually preserve it, Curtis dedicated his life to telling a story. One very true and also very sad due to its cessation.

Although certainly he achieved fame, his name is not as well known as it deserves to be. Just about any of his images contained within this collection can be termed a work of art. Each scene or vista is a pathway for the eye and mind to experience. These are unforgettable and deeply enriching. A wonderful beautiful compilation.

If you read this book you will never be able to look at a Curtis photograph in exactly the same way again. Most people have seen Curtis photographs (often not attributed to anyone in particular) of Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Red Cloud and other important Indian chiefs, but he also documented the lives of ordinary Indians. I have a number of inexpensive prints of these photographs and I knew he was an important American photographer, but that was all. This biography puts him in his proper place as one of America's great photographers and photographic artists. He was a successful Seattle photographer when in about 1900 he set himself the task of documenting the vanishing culture of the American Indian. This task resulted in the production of a 20-volume set of books on the North American Indian. He supported his work (or at least tried to) by selling subscriptions for the series. At $3000 per set they available for only the most limited of audiences. (In about 1910, $3000 was worth more than $200,000 in current dollars, so these books were only purchased by the likes of J.P.Morgan and the King of England.) He originally expected to finish in a few years, instead of the 30 years that it actually took. Instead of just abandoning the project when it became clear that even at $3000 per set he could not hope to cover his costs, he felt he had an obligation to the original subscribers to provide all 20 of the promised volumes. This cost him eventual control over the project (including the engraved plates of the photographs), his photographic studio and even his marriage. Along the way he became a pioneering ethnographer, using both glass plate photographs and early motion picture technology capture Indian life. His photographs do much more than document Indians and Indian life; his composition and use of light make them great art.

There are several books currently on the market that contain more extensive collections of Curtis photographs and if this is primarily what you want they would be better choices. Buy this book if you want to find out more about the man who took them and the price he paid to do so. This book, while not an extensive biography, details all of the aspects of his life, augmented with many of his photographs. It strikes a very good balance between text and pictures. It provides some famous Curtis photographs (such as that of Chief Joseph), some of his most artistic ones (such as "The Storm" and "An Oasis in the Bad Lands"), as well as providing a very informative text.

I had been waiting since May for the release of this book! It is an honor and a privilege to see our elders dipicted with such natural grace & beauty. Chester Higgins is a absolutely centered photographer! He sees with such clarity. He captured everyone's beauty, emotion, prowess & coutenance. I walk around with the book to show it to everyone I encounter, especially the elders & the children. Everyones' first expression is Ahh! The elders start to reminisce, the rest of us can see how we will grow old 'gracefully'!

Chester Higgins captures the beauty, strength and courage of the African-American elders he photographs. I am awestruck by the depth he achieves in these portraits. This collection of photos along with tips from the subjects on how to get along in life is truly an inspiring book for anyone interested in viewing a piece of history.

Gee, I wish I could find something other than what Mr. Stricker said in his review, but I can't. This is an incredible book of photos! If you've ever contemplated taking a series of photos of the many urban themes and sub-themes available, here's a catalog of some of the more amazing ones. My favorites? The duct tape series, the metal construction plates, all the signage, the blank billboards -- heck, they're all super.

As an added bonus for New Yorkers -- it's fun tying in the visual cues to the real places.

Superb.

Endcommercial does a spectacular job of bringing organization to New York's seemingly chaotic visual landscape. It digests all the nooks and crannies of the city into bite-sized chunks, transforming what is normally a sensory-overloaded experience into an urban symphony in which each color and texture has its own unique visual "sound."

This tour de force book brings a spotlight to New York City's minutia, and in so doing becomes far greater than the sum of its tiny parts (which, to the naked eye, might otherwise seem inconsequential).

If you live in NYC, this masterpiece will allow you to see your backyard through the filter of a beginner's mind. If you've never experienced New York, and you're curious, Endcommercial will give you an orientation that might take years to achieve by organic means.

Get ready to be floored by this anthology of virtuosity.

I WAS IN GA. WHEN BILLY HOWARD WAS TAKING THE PHOTOGRAPHS FOR THIS BOOK I WAS VISTING AN AIDS PATIENT THAT IS IN THE BOOK, HE NOT ONLY WAS THERE AS A PHOTOGRAPHER, BUT AS A FRIEND. AFTER THE BOOK WAS IN PRINT HE CAME BY TO SEE HIM. I WOULD LIKE TO THANK HIM FOR THAT. THE BOOK IS GREAT . C.S.

The collection of words truly was an inspiration of life. After I finished reading the book, I had a new profound feeling about life. I feel that everyone should read this book once, because many of people in our materialistic society, including myself, take life for granted. But for me, that is a thing of the past. HAPPY READING!!!

I believe this is the fourth volume of Duane Michael's work to be published by Twin Palms. This relationship has provided Michaels with a well-deserved vehicle for his creativity. If Alan Ginsberg is the quintessential gay poet, drawing on his sexuality when needed, but never letting his work be overwhelmed by it. Then Michaels holds the same position in the world of light.

"Eros & Thanatos" is a combination of verse and photography that probes love and its mortality, seeking wisdom, and, of course, peace. The metaphysical nature of its theme is echoed in the artist's choices of printing styles and manipulations. Often there is a sense of 'looking through a glass darkly," at some distant hermetic time. The images are dark, with careful use of composition and focus. Many pages are black which makes the images alternate between leaping off the page to floating delicately beneath it.

Michaels use of male models works perfectly for this setting. There is nothing to offend here, the models have a quiet beauty and sensuality that blends with, rather than intrudes upon the images. This allows Michaels to escape from the sometimes cliche-ridden atmospherics of the female figure, and leaves his innovation undiluted.

The poetry that frames the images is surprising. Michaels' writing is misleadingly primitive, lacking in the slick polish that contemporary criticism seems to prefer. Yet, the words and phrases themselves are rich in content, and touch on the myriad forms that love can experience death. Loss, betrayal and grief all make their appearance and are expressed openly. Nor is this mere expostulation. Instead, Michaels has invited us to share some of his own experiences.

The final poem is an homage to Paul Cadmus, an important American painter, who, like Michaels, has shared his homosexuality in his art. Indeed, a study of their images shows many common threads and a shared sense of lighting and imagery.

Twin Palms production qualities are, as usual, immaculate, with much attention paid to the tonal quality of the images. I am reviewing from the limitied edition, which includes a fine slipcase. Other than that, and the signature page, there is no difference from the regular edition.

Duane Michals' book Eros and Thanatos is a beautiful product. Michals combines poems and photography in a way that is not sentimental and seems fresh. The reason for this fresh view on a format that has been repeated by others, is that his photography is very direct with minimal manipulation of the setting and models; his poems are not polished but rather straight-forward rhymes that seem familiar, as if you found them in your own diary.

The photos and poems explore the love of human life and the creeping sensation of approaching death. Sometimes the poems become prose as "Death was not invented just for me alone. Armies of armies have proceeded me, marching into the shadows, not once turning back to look, singing their songs until their sounds become a whisper, and the whispers becomes a silence". The pensive handsome young male, sometimes nude, sometimes in costume, runs throughout the book. The young male is shown fully aware of his life force while simultaneously aware of the distant call of forces that will one day draw that life away. One of my favorite photographs and prose poems is a photograph of a beautiful nude young man, wrapped in thin cotton sheets, laying on a mattress on the floor with the phrase: "The father prepares his dead son for burial. He washes his body slowly, deliberately,looking hard at him for the last time. He touches him with oil, carefully as if not to awaken him. The father leans to his ear and whispers something. He wraps him in white cotton like a child asleep and embraces him. Then the father begins to quiver with grief, and the vibration of his movement becomes a sound, like a deep moan and grows louder and louder, into a terrible shout of anguish." Michals knows death well to have written this. Another photograph shows a young male holding a photograph to his face in an act of quite grief. The prose says "Only one person could console him, and he was the one mourned." Michals knows mourning well.

The theme of the book is captured in a wonderful photograph of a strong young man, holding a candle, bare chested with the prose "Eros, that dazzling sun, attracts to its light, and burns us in the consumation of our desires. Thanatos, that enigmatic moon, pulls us inevitably to its shores like the tide."

Another series of photos shows a nude boxer in a fighting pose and then in a pensive pose looking at sea shells with the prose "But most of all, in my bodies deepest consciousness is the memory of touching you."

The book ends with a wonderful self portrait of Michals and a touching poem on his own mortality. The strength of Michals lies in his transparent vulnerable willingness to reveal himself in the poems and photographs with a sincere directness free of artifice and over-intellectualism. This book is a lovely statement of his philosophy and vision.

Esther Bubley was a late joiner to Roy Stryker's small team of FSA/OWI photographers who captured the Depression and war years with such compassion and honesty. I first saw her work in 'Documenting America 1935-1943' (ISBN 0520062213) with nineteen photos of a cross-country Greyhound bus trip taken in 1943. This was her first and last major assignment for the OWI before Stryker left for Standard Oil in 1943, she joined him in 1944.

In 1947 she photographed another Greyhound bus journey and the five photos in the book show why I think her work is exceptional. They show passengers waiting in a New York bus terminal but you are there too, sitting in a seat opposite two ladies talking (page twenty) or opposite the mother with two children (page twenty-four). Somehow these public photos draw the viewer into them without intruding on the privacy of those being photographed. Looking through the pages I think nearly all her photos have a bit of this intriguing quality.

The surprise in the book, for me anyway, are the 1952 Charlie Parker jam session photos. Bubley was a friend of David Stone Martin, the graphic artist who created the album cover look for Norman Grantz's jazz record labels. Martin asked her to photograph the session so he could use the work as reference for his cover art. (Her 314 studio shots were published in a 1995 book, 'Charlie Parker', in France).

The book is arranged chronologically with Bonnie Yochelson's sympathetic essay running through the various photo chapters. A nice touch is the inclusion of several small reproductions of magazine spreads from Pageant, Ladies Home Journal and in particular Life showing how Bubley's photos were used. Design of the book is excellent and the printing (with 200 dpi) gives the photos great clarity.

Esther Bubley was a great photojournalist who quietly got on with her work with honesty and integrity. This book celebrates her professionalism.

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

On Assignment is a collection of black-and-white and a few color photographs by Esther Bubley, one of America's leading photojournalists who free-lanced for national magazines from the 1940's to the 1960's. Enhanced with a narrative essay describing the working and daily life of a photojournalist in an era before television became as prolific as it is today, On Assignment is remarkable in how its images perfectly capture the subjects, from stills depicting a life-saving emergency tracheotomy to work at a Pepsi-cola refinery to the gracious opportunity for a rare portraits around the home allowed to her by renowned genius Albert Einstein. An emotional, vivid, and exquisitely memorable monograph.

There are so many good-looking young men and couples in this 13th Euros Edition, it's amazing. Kraus Gerhart knows how to pose his men and make it very pleasing to the eye. A very talented photographer who already has four books in print, and who produces yearly calendars as well as many magazine spreads. He knows how to bring out the warmth and sensuality in his images. This is one of my favorite of the Euros Series and I truly enjoyed it. I loved the cover shot. Highly recommended!

A small sampling of the extraordinary work of this master photographer of the male nude. With 7 books of his work published, this book is a taste of the style for which Klaus Gerhart is renowned. A bit of Ritts, a dash of Gorman, tons of beautiful naked men and a whole lotta class.

Everyone Had Cameras: Photography and Farmworkers in California, 1850-2000 is essential reading for everyone who cares about photography history, California history, labor history, or the relationship between photography and social change. This book documents the epic, heartbreaking, and untold story of California farmworkers. It also reveals the crucial role that photography played in their struggles to live, work, and be seen as human beings. Historian and photographer Richard Steven Street writes with a rare blend of eloquence, accessibility, integrity, and uncompromising scholarship. Although I was intimidated at first by the book's sheer heft (700-plus pages), I soon found myself mesmerized and moved by the human stories and faces behind the key events of farmworker history, including the Lodi grape strike and Salinas lettuce strike of the 1930s and the emergence of César Chávez and the United Farm Workers in the 1960s.

Street's masterful storytelling is matched by his carefully selected photographs (I counted 138) and pre-photographic images, including pen and ink drawings, oil paintings, and murals. The photography is a revelation; some images shock with inhuman brutality, while others inspire with powerful solidarity. Street includes the work of Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, alongside that of more obscure photographers such as Otto Hagel, Hansel Mieth, and Max Yavno. The book traces the evolution of farmworker photography from romanticized, turn-of-the-century portraits to startlingly candid photojournalism of strikers and vigilantes during the 1930s cotton and lettuce strikes to a suppressed and heart-wrenching 1996 image of Felipe Franco, a young boy born without legs or arms because of his mother's exposure to pesticides.

Street--like several of the photographers he profiles--is both observer and participant in the stories he tells. For the last 30 years, he has immersed himself in the farmworkers' struggle. He has not only documented the painfully slow changes in their wretched working conditions and their sometimes deadly struggles to organize, but he has also lived and worked among them. Everyone Had Cameras represents a lifetime of committed scholarship, social activism, and close observation. Above all, it is a compelling story beautifully told and well grounded in primary sources and scholarly literature.

Richard Steven Street documents the history of Cesar Chavez and his farmworker movement 1962-1993 through the camera lenses of photographers - a meticulous and amazing achievement! The author not only explains the background, the craft and the personal hardships endured by these free lancers, but also their many-times-fruitless efforts to publish and exhibit their work. Dr. Street demonstrates to his readers how these photographers made a significant visual contribution to the movement by putting a public face on the plight of farmworkers.

As an eyewitness/participant for the first decade of that movement (1963-1973), I met dozens of free lance photographers who came to Delano to shoot "La Causa" - George Ballis, John Kouns, Jon Lewis, Nick Jones, Bob Fitch, Ruben Montoya, Hub Segur, Rick Tejada-Flores, Gayanne Fietinghoff, Glen Pearcy and many more - all working on a financial shoestring and all dependent upon the hospitality of farmworkers to meet their daily needs. I marveled at their dedication and hard work, and their ability to provide prints (frequently overnight) under the most difficult and chaotic living conditions imaginable. Some were more gifted than others, but every photo documented the struggle for social justice.

Now many years later, as a Website publisher (www.farmworkermovement.us) of primary source documents about Cesar Chavez and his farmworker movement, I am very much indebted to "Everyone Had Cameras," Richard Steven Street's well-documented and easy-to-read book, especially because visitors to the Website who comb through the 9,000+ movement photos exhibited there will have a better understanding of their historical context and the conditions under which they were created.

Whether a few chapters only, or the entire book, readers of "Everyone Had Cameras" will not be disappointed. I salute Dr.Street's take on history!

Koudelka is an amazing photographer! Every young photographer must see these pictures.

In the past couple of weeks, with the war in Kosovo, I was reminded of these photographs...seeing the images of the refugees, Albanian Kosovars in exile, day after day on the news is a stunning experience...I'm curious as to how other people process these images, what kind of individuality they attribute to the people that make up the masses in flight....if they have any way of identifying with them or forming true sympathetic feelings. I remember that seeing these photographs by Koudelka was a lesson of sorts in processing this kind of experience that is impossible to imagine in any real way unless you ever find yourself in the middle of it. News photos don't do enough to bring the reality home...Koudelka's photos and poetry fill in the gaps.

Graciela Iturbide finds strange creations through her photographic lens. She is able to document both people and events without manufacturing false perceptions, but she is also able to show us the darker aspects of the human and animal spirit in a way few other photographers achieve. This large, elegantly produced book is a fine survey of her portraits of subjects from Mexico and South America to India and North America, a handsome and varied group of self portraits, and photographic essays on cemeteries and other aspects of death as well as animals and expansive views of birds in flight.

Iturbide studied with Manuel Alvarez Bravo in the late 1960s and his well-known influence is felt in her work. But this fine artist has found her language beyond Bravo and manages to take the raw realism of Bravo's images and transform them with the magic of the spirit world and the mystical elements that inform her photographs. Her images are all in brilliant black and white and for the most part are 'constructed' or posed. The gradations between dark and light add a sense of the surreal to her images, whether the subjects are friends of the artist, couples at weddings, burial sites, East LA Cholas, or her very strange images of women with iguana hats or of her own face inhabited by live snails or wings of dissected birds!

An excellent feature of this book is the addition of Graciela Iturbide's comments on pages facing her photographs, and the book opens with an informative 'Conversation with Graciela' by Fabienne Bradu. This is a sophisticated portfolio of works by one of our contemporary gifted artists. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, April 08

Graciela Iturbide photographs the Zapotec women of Juchitan and the Mixtee goat butchers of Oaxaca: EYES TO FLY WITH includes a range of black and white images, from previously unpublished works to those she's famous for, and this provides an outstanding monograph of her achievements. Each full-page photo is accompanied by either a quote from her explaining the photo's inspiration or a title line and date, while an article about her and interview with her provide foundations for reference for newcomers. Art library holdings, especially those strong in contemporary photography, will find it a fine pick.