Working primarily from the 1940s through the early 1960s, the American photographer Gita Lenz (1910-2011) made documents of New York street life that won her early recognition and inclusion in two group shows curated by Edward Steichen for The Museum of Modern Art, a three-person show at the Brooklyn Museum and numerous articles and features in photography magazines of the time. Equally given to inflecting her portraiture with hints of social realism one on hand, and surrealism on the other, and also influenced by her close friend Aaron Siskind, Lenz produced abstract compositions, city still lifes, surreal still lifes and intimate portraits. She receded from view in the 1960s as financial demands impeded her practice, but in 2002, a chance meeting with photographer Gordon Stettinius led to the retrieval of this small but charming body of work, and the publication of this superbly printed first monograph.

Gita Lenz: Photographs

Arts & Photography

Stettinius, Gordon

Photography & Video

Candela Books

Shelby Lee Adams first encountered the communities of the Appalachian mountains as a child, while accompanying his doctor uncle on his rounds. In the mid-1970s he started to photograph in the region, using a 4 x 5 camera, gaining and building a special trust among its often impoverished people, who have tended to not always welcome would-be documentarians. Adams not only records their lives and hardships with great empathy, but also depicts the grace and humanity of his subjects, photographing with an ease evident in the results. Salt and Truth is Adams' fourth monograph, and presents 80 new photographs taken mostly over the past eight years. The photographs in this collection are of children and animals, of working people and of a way of life rarely glimpsed by photographers. Shelby Lee Adams (born 1950) is an American photographer renowned for his environmental portraiture, primarily in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky. Adams' work has been featured in three monographs: Appalachian Portraits (1993), Appalachian Legacy (1998) and Appalachian Lives (2003). In 2010 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Adams' work is represented in many major permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the International Center of Photography in New York; Musee De L'Elysee Lausanne in Switzerland; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Time Life Collection, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Adams was also the subject of a 2002 documentary film by Jennifer Baichwal, The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia.

Shelby Lee Adams: Salt & Truth

The photographs of Chris McCaw (born 1971) are produced with various hand-built view cameras as big as 30 by 40 inches, which are equipped with large aerial lenses designed to allow a maximum amount of light to pass through. Using large paper negatives, McCaw makes very long exposures ranging from several hours to a full day, which result in solarized final images. Besides the attractive neo-primitive qualities of his landscape imagery, the concentrated sunlight passing through the large optical elements actually scorches an etched path across the surface of the paper, rending open the charred skies to hint at a brighter light behind our sun. Sunburn brings together more than 60 of these landscapes, cooked visions in which blackened suns move stroboscopically through veiled skies that hang like curtains over vistas reduced to shadow. The violent shearing or destruction of each image contests the traditionally mellow aesthetic of the landscape photography tradition, and the marks left behind are a physical testament to the power of the sun, which is both subject and collaborator in this chance meeting of creator and destroyer. The excitement of discovering such a remarkable and untapped property of these particular lenses and expired gelatin silver papers is a testament to McCaw’s openness to the photographic process, and his continued experimentation over the past eight years has created an equally indelible mark on the tradition of landscape photography.

Chris McCaw: Sunburn

Ware, Katherine

Haeusslein, Allie

Black Forest is an arcane collection featuring the works of over 50 contemporary photographers, including Roger Ballen, Arthur Tress, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Elijah Gowin, Louviere and Vanessa, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Irina Ionesco, Julie Blackmon, Gilles Berquet and many other internationally known photographers. In this volume, editor Russell Joslin--long-time publisher of Shots magazine--follows in the steps of André Breton (from whom he borrows his title), exploring what he calls “subterranean beauty.” Darkly atmospheric sequences of surrealistic photographs become a metaphor for the unconscious and the mysterious, dark corners of the psyche. Suggesting loose, intuitive relationships between the works of contemporary artists, Joslin creates four visual narratives associated in tone, emotion and formal structure, but requires that his readers and viewers render for themselves the hidden, connective layers of meaning.

Black Forest: Four Visible Poems

According to the artists, this collection of photographed hairstyles was not originally intended to be disseminated, as the first image was conceived as a one-off piece. Gordon Stettinius, then a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, had given his students an assignment to create an edition of 16 images, which were collated into portfolios. Stettinius, having always contributed to these class portfolios, decided to get a perm at a hair salon and then visit a commercial photography studio to get a studio portrait. Thus an accidental collaboration was born. Terry Brown was the studio photographer at Mangini Studio at the time, and she wound up with the task of delivering a traditional studio shoot. Brown has been delivering the goods since, recording each hairstyle that Stettinius has put together. Seven years and nearly 50 studio portraits later, this project has been gathered in this extraordinary and witty volume.

Mangini Studio

Lensless-photography pioneer Willie Anne Wright (born 1924) has often worked with Cibachrome, compounding its instability with long exposures and the inherent distortions of her method. Direct Positive collects, for the first time, the artist’s Cibachrome work.

Willie Anne Wright: Direct Positive

Against a backdrop of ecological decline, this memoir/travelogue follows Dr. Falke (the narrator), Count Orlofsky, and Madame Lulu, three members of an itinerant theatrical troupe known as the Truppe Fledermaus, as they stage absurdist performances in various locations including Europe, England, America, and Japan. In these performances, often staged in nature with no audience, the Truppe are as apt to commemorate the passing of an unusual cloud as they are to be found documenting their own attempts to flee the rising waters of a warming planet, orusing black humor to comment upon the extinction of bats or other animals.The book, whose physical design format is modeled on Ukiyo-e series such as Hiroshige¿s `One Hundred Views of Edo, contains photographs of the Truppe, their travels, and their performances with corresponding text narrating the images. It is the author¿s preference to have the pages of the book be loose and non-linear so that readers can explore the images and story in any order they prefer. As the incidents related in the book are frequently based on the artist¿s personal experiences and travels, the reader is led to speculate about the somewhat arbitrary manner in which we build narratives out of our own experiences.The beautiful images and corresponding text vignettes represent an enormous effort by these artists and rewards repeated visits, as even one reading is a commitment and with each visit to this collection, the story will have been again re-imagined.

100 Views of the Drowning World

Kahn, Nicholas

Individual Artists

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