Paul Strand circa 1916

Published to accompany an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from February 1998, this is a study of the achievements of the early career of the American photographer, Paul Strand (1890-1976). After studying photography in New York with the social reformer Lewis Hine, Strand began to absorb the ideas of the European avant-garde, and fellow-photographer and art entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz heralded Strand's pictures as the first images of an incisive modern vision. The photographs reproduced here are accompanied by text which traces the early development of Strand's ideas and the complex cultural context of his experiments.

Maria Morris Hambourg

Biographies & Memoirs

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Photographer Thomas Struth (b. 1954), one of the most intriguing, challenging, and gifted artists to emerge from Europe in the past two decades, has created a beautiful and distinctive body of images depicting the world - its buildings, people, society, and culture - in its present moment of perpetual change. Unlike many of his contemporaries who have investigated photography's fictional potential, Struth has adhered to a straightforward yet formally refined approach that makes his viewers become aware of their world in often entirely new ways. This catalogue is the first to encompass Struth's entire body of work, dating from the late 1970's to the early 2000's. His early black-and-white photographs of deserted city streets, his psychologically penetrating portraits of individuals and families, his renowned "museum pictures," and his large-format color landscapes of nature and industry from around the globe are all represented in this unsurpassed collection of images. Engaging essays by well known photography and art experts chronicle Thomas Struth's career: Charles Wylie examines the development of Struth's art and places him in the context of photographic history of the last century; Maria Morris Hambourg and Douglas Eklund review the artist's aesthetic and intellectual influences and maturation; and Ann Goldstein investigates the role portraiture has played in Struth's art. This survey attests to the unmistakable importance of his photographs and his valued place in the history of photography and contemporary art.

Thomas Struth: 1977-2002

Arts & Photography

Douglas Eklund

Ann Goldstein

Charles Wylie

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Dallas Museum of Art

Walker Evans

A tenant farmer's deprivation-lined face. Antebellum homes that have seen better days. The display windows of small-town main streets. The early subway commuter. Billboards. The images made by photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) are icons of national identity that have shaped Americans' views of themselves and directly influenced important currents of modern art. This major catalogue--published to accompany a retrospective exhibition originating at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and traveling to San Francisco and Houston--presents the full range of Evans's work, from his 1920s black-and-white street scenes of anonymous urban dwellers to the color photographs of signs and letter forms from his final years.
 Soon after he returned from Paris to New York City in 1927, Evans began contributing to the development of American photography. He captured the substance of people and buildings with a spare elegance that is utterly unpretentious. His gaze is serious but often amused as well, direct yet never simple. During the 1930s, Evans traveled throughout the South to chronicle the effects of economic hardship. The time that he and writer James Agee spent with Alabama sharecropper families yielded an evocative, honest record of the Great Depression, which was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Evans then turned his lens back on New Yorkers, photographing subway riders with a camera hidden in his coat. He continued to influence American self-perception as staff photographer for Fortune from 1945 until he accepted a professorship at Yale in 1965.
 Evans--who always chose art over what he criticized as artiness--wrote, in Photography (1969), "Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. This man is in effect a voyeur by nature; he is also reporter, tinkerer, and spy."
 Although his work has received many awards, been enshrined in the best museums, and been exhibited on several continents, Evans's total corpus is only now being fully examined. This important book revises our appreciation of Evans by presenting previously unknown material in an accessible context. Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Doug Eklund, and Mia Fineman offer novel insights into the sources and legacy of Evans's work. The result is a superb exploration of what was achieved by one of our finest, mostly deeply American artists.

Mia Fineman

Jeff L. Rosenheim

Individual Artists

Princeton University Press

A selection of works by the influential portrait photographer, packaged in an accordion-folding folio, spans his entire career and demonstrates his signature technique of portraying his subject without extraneous detail and against white backgrounds.

Richard Avedon Portraits

Richard Avedon

Philippe de Montebello

Harry N. Abrams

The photographs in this book span photography's first century, 1839-1939.

The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century : Selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection

Pierre Apraxine

Malcolm Daniel

Virgi

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A broad historical study of the provocative innovations of European and American photography between the World Wars. This volume presents more than 160 images from the Ford Motor Company Collection, a group of about 500 photographs formed by John C. Waddell, which Ford Motor Company and the collector recently gave to the Metropolitan Museum. The photographs illustrated here by Man Ray, Walker Evans, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Andre Kertesz, Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott and some 70 other artists chart the urban, technological and psychological revolutions of the modern age.

New Vision: Photography Between the World Wars : Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York

Christopher Phillips

N. Y.) Metropolitan Museum of Art (

Photography & Video

Nadar (1820-1910), whose real name was Felix Tournachon, was a conspicuous, even astonishing presence in 19th-century France. Engaging and quick-witted, he invented himself over and over--as a bohemian writer, journalist, romantic utopian, caricaturist, photographer, and scientific innovator. This book catalogues nearly 200 of his finest works, 98 of them in color.

Nadar

Book by Maria Morris Hambourg, Pierre Apraxine

The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century

Nadar (1820-1910), whose real name was Felix Tournachon, was a conspicuous presence in 19th-century France. He invented himself over and over: as a bohemian writer, a journalist, a romantic utopian, a caricaturist, a portrait painter, a balloonist, a scientific innovator. It is for photography that Nadar is most remembered. In just a few years he taught himself the young art and became one of its greatest practitioners. His sitters, who were often his friends, included many of the great men and women of his time: Dumas, Rossini, Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Daumier, Berlioz, George Sands, and Delacroix. In this book, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Metroploitan Museum of Art in 1995, some 100 photographs from Nadar's finest period are reproduced and their subjects described. The roots and development of his photographic art and the many types of prints in which his images were disseminated, are also discussed.

Françoise Heilbrun

Philippe Neagu

The catalog that accompanied an exhibition at the Met featuring items from the then acquired Walker Evans archives. Metropolitam Museum of Art/Princeton University Press, 2000. 318 pages; b&amp;w photos throughout; 10 x 11.5 inches. Bibliography, index.

Metropolitan Museum of Art / Princeton University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Maria Morris Hambourg. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Maria Morris Hambourg

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Maria Morris Hambourg. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Paul Strand circa 1916

Thomas Struth: 1977-2002

Walker Evans

Richard Avedon Portraits

The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century : Selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection

New Vision: Photography Between the World Wars : Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York

Nadar

The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century

Nadar

Walker Evans