Walker Evans (1903-75) is now considered perhaps the finest documentary photographer ever and his images have had considerable influence on other artists, and not only in the field of photography. He is well known for his 1930s work for the Farm Security Administration, documenting the effect of the Great Depression o

Walker Evans (55)

Arts & Photography

Luc Sante

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

In Evidence, Luc Sante, the author of Low Life, offers an eerie, insider's visit to the scene of the crime. This collection of rarely seen evidence photographs, taken by the New York City Police Department between 1914 and 1918, presents startling images, some brutal, some poetic and all possessed of a strange and spectral beauty. In his introduction, Sante explains his attraction to this murderous gallery: "Here was a true record of the texture and grain of a lost New York, laid bare by the circumstances of murder. Lives stopped by razor or bullet were frozen by a flash of powder......

Evidence: NYPD Crime Scene Photographs: 1914-1918

Biographies & Memoirs

True Crime

Barnes&Noble

Amusingly strange and curiously compelling, Charles Addams' cartoons give a sly wink and a nod to scenes of everyday life in New York, Addams-style. His dark wit and deft hand lend themselves to subterranean themes of love and relationships, secrets and obsessions, subway stations and Lady Liberty. In Addams' Apple: The New York Cartoons of Charles Addams, we witness an artist inspired by the quirks of his fellow New Yorkers and the singular nature of their city—itself one of Addams' characters. In her foreword, Sarah M. Henry (Museum of the City of New York) highlights Addams' offbeat insights into the institutions and mindsets that define the city s culture. Luc Sante s preface explores Addams' unique place in American culture. Addams Apple presents more than 150 cartoons created by Chas Addams (American, 1912–1988) throughout his prolific career; some have never been published before.

Addams' Apple: The New York Cartoons of Charles Addams

Sarah M. Henry

Pomegranate Communications

Abelardo Morell, author of the award-winning A Book of Books, makes magical camera obsucra images in darkened interiors. The deceptively simple process - he blacks out all the windows, leaving just a pinhole opening in one of them - produces photographs of astonishing, complex beauty. Because of the nature of refracted light, the world outside is projected upside down into the nearly blackened room, in essence converting the space into the interior of a camera. Morell then photographs the results with a large-format view camera, often requiring exposures of eight hours or more. Locations around the world were chosen for the interesting details and juxtapositions they would elicit - the Empire State Building lies across a bedspread in a midtown Manhattan interior; the Tower of London is imprinted on the walls of a room in the Tower Hotel; the countryside in rural Cuba, Morell's birthplace, plays across the walls of a crumbling chamber that is rich with the patina of its own history. Every image is full of surprises and revelations.

Camera Obscura

Abelardo Morell

Bulfinch

American photography from the turn of the century through the mid-1960s offers one of the richest and most coherent traditions in the history of the medium. This book explores that tradition in depth through superb reproductions of 183 photographs from the outstanding collection of The Museum of Modern Art.Toward the end of the nineteenth century photographs became radically easier to make and to reproduce. The result was a vast new range of audiences and applications for photography. From untutored snap-shooter to specialized professional, the swelling ranks of photographers produced a sprawling diversity of new pictures, which recorded and helped to create modern America. At the same time, there arose an elite movement that withdrew from the undisciplined bustle of the modern world and claimed for photography a position among the fine arts.The first part of the introductory essay concisely outlines the evolution and interplay of photography's high-art and vernacular traditions. The second part traces the growth of the pioneering photography program at The Museum of Modern Art in which Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen, and other leading American photographers played decisive roles.Luc Sante's essay, "A Nation of Pictures," places photography at the center of a lively reconsideration of modern American culture, which touches on music, the movies, the magazines, and a great deal more.A splendid gallery of photographs follows the essays. American photography from Jacob Riis and Alfred Stieglitz to Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus is set forth through a carefully ordered sequence, in which groups of pictures conceived as works of fine art alternate with groups of pictures that served a myriad of worldly functions. Major figures, such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Harry Callahan, and Robert Frank, are each represented by six or more photographs. Dozens of other distinguished photographers are included as well, and many remarkable but unfamiliar pictures join the landmark works.

American Photography, 1890-1965

PETER GALASSI

Photography & Video

MODERN ART

This is the true underground history of crime, drugs and violence in one of the modern world's most glamorous city - New York - where corrupt cops and immigrant gangs act out the outlaw dream of America.

Low Life : Drinking, Drugging, Whoring, Murder, Corruption, Vice and Miscellaneous Mayhem in Old New York

Granta Books

In his books and in a string of wide-ranging and inventive essays, Luc Sante has shown himself to be not only one of our pre-eminent stylists, but also a critic of uncommon power and range. He is one of the handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of American experience,” says the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl. Kill All Your Darlings is the first collection of Sante’s articlesmany of which first appeared in the New York Review of Books and the Village Voiceand offers ample justification for such high praise. Sante is best known for his groundbreaking work in urban history (Low Life), and for a particularly penetrating form of autobiography (The Factory of Facts). These subjects are also reflected in several essays here, but it is the author’s intense and scrupulous writing about music, painting, photography, and poetry that takes center stage. Alongside meditations on cigarettes, factory work, and hipness, and his critical tour de force, The Invention of the Blues,” Sante offers his incomparable take on icons from Arthur Rimbaud to Bob Dylan, René Magritte to Tintin, Buddy Bolden to Walker Evans, Allen Ginsberg to Robert Mapplethorpe.

Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005

Yeti Publishing

The viewing public's image of Weegee is of the prototypical New York tabloid news photographer: tough, garrulous and on the scene, ready to cover two murders in one night. But the inventive Jewish immigrant Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), who assumed the self-mocking nickname Weegee, was also one of the most original and creative photographers of the twentieth century. His work for The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, World-Telegram, Daily News, Post, Journal-American and Sun, his images of the masses at Coney Island, the confrontation of wealth and poverty at opening night at the opera, and the aftermath of brutal crime scenes are, by now, classics. But beyond the iconic images that have been so widely circulated, what do we know of Weegee the photographer--his history, his methods, his meaning? Drawing on ICP's unique archive of nearly 20,000 prints by this celebrated master, Unknown Weegee presents 120 photographs that have never been made available to the public. They reveal a politically astute and witty social critic and attest to the seriousness and self-consciousness of his photographic endeavors. With essays by Luc Sante and ICP curator Cynthia Young.

Unknown Weegee

Arthur 'Weegee' Fellig

Cynthia Young

Steidl/International Center of Photography

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Books by Luc Sante