Photographer Irving Penn (b. 1917) is renowned for his innovative contributions to portrait, still life, and fashion photography, and a career that has spanned more than six decades at Vogue magazine. In 1950, Vogue assigned Penn to photograph workers in Paris, and thus his monumental work The Small Trades began. Created in 1950 and 1951 in Paris, London, and New York, The Small Trades consists of portraits of skilled tradespeople dressed in their work clothes and carrying the tools of their respective trades. Capturing the humble coal heaver and the crisply dressed waiter with equal directness, Penn’s arresting portraits also underscore fascinating cultural differences.
The Small Trades was Penn’s most extensive body of work, and he returned to it over many decades, producing ever more exacting prints. Two hundred-six unique images from the series are flawlessly reproduced in this book. In addition, the introductory essay describes the history and context of The Small Trades series and its importance to Penn’s career and the history of photography. An interview with Edmonde Charles-Roux, the chief editor for French Vogue from 1952 to 1966, who assisted Penn on the assignment in Paris, provides fascinating insights of the Paris sittings.

Irving Penn: Small Trades

Arts & Photography

Heckert, Virginia

Lacoste, Anne

History & Criticism

J.paul Getty Museum

This first major monograph of Los Angeles-based artist Judy Fiskin includes reproductions of nearly three hundred images taken from 1973 to 1995. Since Fiskin turned to video in the late 1990s, this compendium represents her complete photographic oeuvre, including many images never before published. Distinctive in both subject matter and form, Fiskin’s photographs showcase the less-noticed aspects of the built environment, from vernacular and military architecture to period furniture and flower-arranging competitions. Her images are printed in small scale in black and white with black borders and set within a field of white photographic paper, thus becoming objects in and of themselves as well as windows into an earlier time and place. The text includes an introductory essay and an illuminating 1988 interview by the artist John Divola, as well as a chronology and bibliography. The book is published in conjunction with In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945–1980, an exhibition of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s holdings of photographs made in Southern California, on view at the Getty Center from December 20, 2011, to May 6, 2012, as part of Pacific Standard Time.

Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin

Photography & Video

Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Ed Ruscha is celebrated for his paintings, drawings, prints, and artist’s books, receiving widespread critical acclaim for more than half a century. Capturing the quintessential Los Angeles experience with its balance of the banal and the beautiful, his photobooks of the 1960s—such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Some Los Angeles Apartments, and Thirtyfour Parking Lots—are known for their deadpan cataloguing of the city’s functional architecture. This publication features thirty-eight Ruscha plates and an essay that traces the evolution of the artist’s thinking about his photographs initially as the means to the end of his self-published photobooks and eventually as works of art in and of themselves. Virginia Heckert contextualizes Ruscha’s photographs within the history of photographic documentation of vernacular architecture, using examples by such important photographers as Carleton Watkins, Eugène Atget, and Walker Evans, as well as contemporary photographers, many of whom have acknowledged Ruscha as an influence in their own depiction of the built environment. Ed Ruscha and “Some Los Angeles Apartments” accompanies an exhibition titled In Focus: Ed Ruscha, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from April 9 to September 29, 2013.

Ed Ruscha and Some Los Angeles Apartments

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

From its beginnings, photography has been shaped by the desire to understand and explore the essence of the medium. Light, Paper, Process features the work of seven artists—Alison Rossiter, Marco Breuer, James Welling, Lisa Oppenheim, Chris McCaw, John Chiara, and Matthew Brandt—who investigate the possibilities of analog photography by finding innovative, surprising, and sometimes controversial ways to push light-sensitive photographic papers and chemical processing beyond their limits. A panoply of practices emerges in the work of these artists. Some customize cameras with special lenses or produce images on paper without a camera or film. Others load paper, rather than film, in the camera or create contact-printing with sources of light other than the enlarger, while still others use expired photographic papers and extraneous materials, such as dust and sweat, selected to match the particular subject of the photograph. All of the artists share a willingness to embrace accident and chance. Trial and error contribute to an understanding of the materials and their potential, as do the attitudes of underlying curiosity and inventive interrogation. The act of making each image is like a performance, with only the photographer present. The results are stunning. This lavish publication accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from April 14 to September 6, 2015.

Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography

Individual Artists

Product Description A new look at the work of Mario Giacomelli, one of Italy’s foremost photographers of the twentieth century. Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000) was born into poverty and lived his entire life in Senigallia, a seaside town along the Adriatic coast in Italy’s Marche region. He purchased his first camera in 1953 and quickly gained recognition for the raw expressiveness of his images. His preference for grainy, high-contrast film and paper produced bold, geometric compositions with glowing whites and deep blacks. Giacomelli most frequently focused his camera on the people, landscapes, and seascapes of the Marche, and he often spent several years expanding and reinterpreting a single body of work or repurposing an image made for one series for inclusion in another. By applying titles derived from poetry and literature to his photographs, he transformed ordinary subjects into meditations on time, memory, and existence. Spanning the photographer’s earliest pictures to those made in the final years of his life, this publication celebrates the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive Giacomelli holdings, formed in large part through a significant gift from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 29 to October 10, 2021. About the Author Virginia Heckert is curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is the author of several books, including Light, Paper, Process (Getty, 2015) and Ed Ruscha and “Some Los Angeles Apartments” (Getty, 2013).

Mario Giacomelli: Figure/Ground

Candida Höfer creates meticulously composed images of public and institutional spaces marked with the richness of human activity, yet largely devoid of human presence. Whether a photograph of a national library or a lounge at Volkswagen's headquarters, Höfer's images ask us to conduct distanced, disengaged examinations through the windows she creates. The collected images present a universe wholly constructed by human intention, unearthing patterns of order and logic imposed on these spaces by their absent creators and inhabitants. The Architecture of Absence examines Höfer's oeuvre and its relationship to the work of other noted students of renowned professors Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Candida Höfer: Architecture Of Absence

Lombino, Mary-Kay

Glenn, Constance

Aperture

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