Arts!

A selection of our new and noteworthy materials on the Performing Arts as well as other Fine Arts

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Dinka: Legendary Cattle Keepers of Sudan

This seminal volume on the indigenous African Dinka group is a landmark documentation of a vanishing people in war-torn Sudan. World-renowned photographers Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith have devoted their lives to documenting the rapidly disappearing ceremonies and cultures of the indigenous people of Africa. In breathtakingly poignant images, they present a story that started with their first visit to the Dinka thirty years ago. Living in harmony with their cattle, the Dinka have survived years of war only to find their culture on the brink of vanishing forever. Where the White Nile River reaches Dinka country, it spills over 11,000 square miles of flood plain to form the Sudd, the largest swamp in the world. In the dry season, it provides abundant pasture for cattle, and this is where the Dinka set up their camps. The men dust their bodies and faces with gray ash—protection against flies and lethal malarial mosquitoes, but also considered a mark of beauty. Covered with this ash and up to 7’ 6" tall, the Dinka were referred to as "gentle" or "ghostly" giants by the early explorers. The Dinka call themselves "jieng" and "mony-jang," which means "men of men."
Request Dinka from the catalog.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) is one of the most influential and beloved figures in the history of photography. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this is the first major publication to make full use of the extensive holdings of the Fondation Cartier-Bresson--including thousands of prints and a vast resource of documents relating to the photographer's life and work. The heart of the book surveys Cartier-Bresson's career through 300 photographs divided into 12 chapters. A wide-ranging essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum, offers an entirely new understanding of Cartier-Bresson's extraordinary career and its overlapping contexts of journalism and art.
Request The Modern Century from the catalog.

Points Between ... Up Till Now















This book for the first time assembles images from Polidori’s major photographic series Beirut, Versailles, Havanna, New Orleans and Pripyat and Chernobyl, giving an overall impression of his oeuvre.
Each of the series constitutes an experimental entity whose goal is to reveal something that no longer exists. They reflect a particular world of memory, the relation between present and past, and delve deep into subjects of profound historical significance. Juxtaposing human suffering, destruction and the magnificence born of man’s imagination, these many-layered images provoke highly emotional reactions. In his soundings of reality, the artist creates a theatre of absence, of commemoration. (Steidl)
Request Points Between ... Up Till Now from the catalog.

Kodachromes

William Christenberry: Kodachromes is the first publication to showcase the artist's stunning and previously unknown body of work produced with 35 mm Kodachrome slide film. Spanning from 1964 to 2007, only a small number of the images have ever been published or exhibited. As in all of Christenberry's photographs, the subject matter is the rural Deep South: the twisting back roads, open landscapes, rusted signage, and ramshackle vernacular architecture found in Hale County, Alabama where the artist was born and raised. Though many of the sites pictured in this rare collection are new, other subjects grew iconic in Christenberry's oeuvre as he has returned to photograph them for decades—the red building in the forest, Sprott Church, the Palmist Sign, and the Bar-B-Q Inn, among others. However, the photographs in William Christenberry: Kodachromes, made with a camera that allowed for greater mobility, reveal new ways of considering Christenberry's perennial subjects and offer further insight into the working method of this venerable artist. With the recent discontinuation of Kodachrome film by Kodak, the work in this beautiful volume is rendered even more meaningful. (Aperture)
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Walker Evans: Decade by Decade

Walker Evans's reputation was initially established by his Depression-era collaboration with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. That tribute to Southern sharecropper families, as well as Evans's work for the Farm Security Administration, had a profound influence on later artists. However, from the 1940s through the 1960s his celebrity underwent a long dry spell during a commercial association with Fortune magazine, and it was only after the Evans partisan John Szarkowski succeeded Edward Steichen at the photography department of New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1961 that he was rehabilitated among the artistic cognoscenti. His 1930s and post-1960 photos remain those for which he is best known. In his latest book, Crump (Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970–1980) addresses Evans's entire oeuvre, making a decisive case that a cohesive visual unity runs throughout. Many of the 216 photos featured here were taken from the Fortune archive, others from earlier series (such as a 1933 trip to Cuba); all enliven the pages. Crump opens the monograph with an engrossing biographical account of the Evans-Szarkowski association, propelling his central point of Evans's qualitative consistency.(Library Journal)
Request Walker Evans: Decade by Decade from the catalog.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Photographic Composition: A Visual Guide




















However amazing the subject or technically excellent the photography, the single biggest factor in deciding whether a photograph is good or bad is how well it is composed. Photographic Composition Visualized offers a unique take on this fundamental issue by offering instruction in a visual format - the book is laid out in a unique spread format of a beautiful image on one page, with an in-depth break down of why the rule of composition works in the image, but also how a photographer can apply it to their own photography. Inspirational, instructive, and, most importantly, visually stunning and beautiful, photography master Richard Zakia teaches the lessons he has learned from over 40 years as a photographer. This is the book every photographer needs to own in order to create the outstanding images they always wanted to -but didn't know how.
Request Photographic Composition from the catalog.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression

This is an updated and newly revised edition of the classic book The Art of Photography (originally published in 1994), which has often been described as the most readable, understandable, and complete textbook on photography. With well over 100 beautiful photographic illustrations in both black-and-white and color, as well as numerous charts, graphs, and tables, this book presents the world of photography to beginner, intermediate, and advanced photographers seeking to make a personal statement through the medium of photography. Without talking down to anyone, or talking over anyone's head, Barnbaum presents "how to" techniques for both traditional and digital approaches. Yet he goes well beyond the technical, as he delves deeply into the philosophical, expressive, and creative aspects of photography so often avoided in other books.

Bruce Barnbaum is recognized as one of the world's finest landscape and architectural photographers, and for decades has been considered one of the best instructors in the field of photography. This latest incarnation of his textbook, which has evolved, grown, and been refined over the past 35 years, will prove to be an ongoing, invaluable photographic reference for years to come. It is truly the resource of choice for the thinking photographer.(Ingram)
Request The Art of Photography from the catalog.