An unparalleled survey of American photography from its genesis through the nation’s coming of age The Origins of American Photography chronicles the emergence of a new visual paradigm, from the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839 through the Civil War and the exploration of the West to the rise of popular photography in the 1880s. Beautifully designed and produced, with over 600 reproductions in tritone and four-color, this important volume features works by all the leading practitioners of the time and by others who remain unknown. Many of these images are published here for the first time; all are from the acclaimed Hallmark Photographic Collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In a detailed and authoritative text, Keith F. Davis examines photography’s social history and aesthetic development in an era of rapid national growth. He demonstrates how key themes and genres—including the business of daguerreian portraiture, the markets for Civil War images, and the art of Western landscape photography—reflected the concerns and values of 19th-century society. Photographers of this era expressed a new national consciousness while, at the same time, helped to shape it. They also explored the visual language of a radically new medium, laying the foundation for all of photography’s subsequent history.
This essential book will be the most definitive study of this period in American photographic history. It will be of interest to all scholars and enthusiasts of the medium, and to anyone interested in the visual history of 19th-century American culture.

The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-1885: The Hallmark Photographic Collection at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Davis, Keith F.

History

Nelson Atkins

This stunning volume represents a major photo-historical discovery: it is the first book on Homer Page (1918–1985), a brilliant but overlooked photographer active in the late 1940s and 50s. It focuses on his previously unpublished photographs of New York taken while a Guggenheim Fellow from 1949 to 1950. First recognized by Ansel Adams in 1944, California-born Page exhibited in a major show of young artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1946. Four years later, he was invited to participate in MoMA’s seminal photography symposium, alongside 10 other prominent photographers, including Walker Evans, Irving Penn, and Aaron Siskind. 
In photographs that echo those of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Frank, Page uniquely synthesized documentary and artistic concerns. His work as a Guggenheim Fellow––which depicts pedestrians in motion, friends and family members conversing, commuters, children playing, political rallies and protests, and isolated figures resting and watching––offers a fascinating look at New York during the late 1940s and represents the culmination of Page’s most important work. 
The Photographs of Homer Page features a plate section of these compelling and often poignant images together with texts by the artist, a bibliography, and an essay by noted scholar Keith F. Davis examining Page’s life and career––
including his connections with Lange, Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, and Edouard Steichen.

The Photographs of Homer Page: The Guggenheim Year: New York, 1949-50

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Ray K. Metzker (b. 1931) is one of the greatest living photographers of the modern era, although his name may not be as broadly familiar as that of some of his peers. Richly illustrated, The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker brings his extraordinary work to the attention of a larger audience, summarizing his life and achievements over the past six decades. With a fresh perspective, curator and author Keith F. Davis explores the roots of Metzker’s innovative vision, from his early interest in photojournalism through his studies with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Chicago’s Institute of Design in the late 1950s, and his bold innovations of the 1960s and 1970s. Metzker’s work is richly diverse, embracing landscape, city scenes, and the expressive potential of the multiple image. These many themes are united by Metzker’s technical precision and daring, and his graphic use of sunlight and shadow. He has repeatedly reinvented his approach to the medium, and this book testifies to the remarkable range and originality of his work.

The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker

Photography & Video

Clarence King's Survey, undertaken between 1867 and 1872, covered a vast swath of terrain, from the border of California eastward to the edge of the Great Plains. It was the first survey to include a full-time photographer—Timothy O'Sullivan—who produced about 450 finished photographs in large-format and smaller-format stereographs. O'Sullivan's images convey a distinct individual quality of perception, at once direct and laconic, as well as a perfect union of objective fact and personal interpretation. As such, O'Sullivan remains the most admired, studied, and debated photographer who worked on the great western surveys of the 19th century. This handsome and enlightening book aims to enrich and enlarge our understanding of O'Sullivan's pivotal body of western photographs by emphasizing the idea of context. This ambition encompasses several frames of reference: O'Sullivan's best-known images in relation to his larger body of survey work; the function his photographs served in relation to the survey's overall goals and methodologies; and the King Survey itself as a logical part of a complex and prolonged expeditionary endeavor. The volume also includes an essential catalogue raisonné of O'Sullivan's King Survey work.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)

Aspinwall, Jane L.

The landscape and people of the American Midwest have captivated photographer Terry Evans (b. 1944) throughout her forty-year photographic career. Evans has a deep connection to her native region, which she has explored from a variety of visual and thematic perspectives. Heartland traces the evolution of Evans’s vision, beginning in the early 1970s with her social documentary images of people in Kansas. She became a landscape photographer in 1978, focusing on the grasses, land, and skies of the prairie; this was followed by an aerial survey of the entire Great Plains, from Texas to Canada. She has also photographed Chicago from the air, an abandoned military site, small-town life in Kansas, and historical samples of prairie flora and fauna from Chicago’s Field Museum. More recently, she has documented the steel industry in the Midwest and oil and gas drilling in North Dakota. This generously illustrated book examines all of these works, which together reveal the enduring beauty of the prairie landscape.

Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans

Watson, April M.

A glimpse into the development of the American West through startling photographs of the frontier landscape and the rich culture of American Indian tribes Best known for his Civil War photographs, Alexander Gardner (1821–1882) also created two extraordinary bodies of work depicting the transformation of the American West: Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railway and Scenes in the Indian County. In 1867, after joining the survey team for what became the Kansas Pacific Railroad, Gardner photographed the path of the proposed extension, emphasizing the ease of future railroad construction and economic development, while including studies of American Indians and settlements along the way. The following year, Gardner recorded peace talks with Indian tribes at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. Distinctly sympathetic to the plight of the American Indian, Gardner made candid documentation of individual chiefs, their encampments and daily life, burial trees, and the peace proceedings themselves. With a full catalogue raisonné of these two rare series, Alexander Gardner offers a complete visual index of these remarkable photographs, made at a critical moment in the history of the American West.

Alexander Gardner: The Western Photographs, 1867–1868 (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)

The work of American photographer Dave Heath (b. 1931) stuns with its emotional potency. Exploring themes of loneliness and alienation in modern society, Heath’s photographs depict strangers riding the train, watching a Thanksgiving parade, staring pensively at their dining room table, or kissing on the side of a street. Entirely self-taught, Heath stretches the boundaries of the medium and explores the potential of the photo-narrative—through handmade book maquettes, innovative multimedia slide presentations, and other photographic experimentations. This is the first comprehensive survey of Heath’s deeply personal work, focusing on his astounding contributions to black-and-white photography. These images span the first 20 years of his career, 1949 to 1969, and many of them are previously unpublished. Filling a major gap in scholarship, the catalogue surveys the most groundbreaking facets of Heath’s creative work and highlights its historical importance. Heath’s art is ripe for rediscovery, and this book reaffirms his status as a key figure in 20th-century American photography.

Multitude, Solitude: The Photographs of Dave Heath

The first publication to situate the work of Richards in the long photographic tradition that merges personal artistic vision with documentary practice Eugene Richards (b. 1944) is a documentary photographer known for his powerful, unflinching exploration of contemporary social issues from the early 1970s to the present. This handsome book is the first comprehensive and critical look at Richards’s lifelong achievements. Reproduced in tritone and color, the extraordinary images in this volume explore complicated and controversial subjects, including racism, poverty, drug addiction, cancer, aging, the effects of war and terrorism, and the erosion of rural America. The authors of the book situate Richards’s work in the long photographic tradition that merges personal artistic vision with documentary practice, following in the tradition of W. Eugene Smith and Robert Frank.

Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time

Hostetler, Lisa

An in-depth and current investigation of how the spiritual is manifestly present in contemporary art The spiritual is everywhere evident in contemporary art, and this publication fulfills a long-awaited need. Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art addresses the subject in depth for the first time in over three decades. It significantly broadens the scope of previous studies to include new media and non-Western and Indigenous art (in addition to that of the West), presents art from diverse cultures with equal status, promotes cultural specificity, and moves beyond notions of “center and periphery,” celebrating the plurality and global nature of contemporary art today. Major essays based on cultural affinities are interspersed with brief thematic essays to provide diverse perspectives and expand the knowledge of academic and general audiences. Encountering the Spiritual provides an alternative to the main currents of presentation and interpretation prevalent in contemporary art, appealing to believers, agnostics, and inveterate skeptics alike. This essential publication demonstrates that the need to address the fundamental questions of life are both innate and ongoing.

Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art

Fanning, Leesa

History & Criticism

Best known for his modernist paintings and prints, the multitalented artist Ralston Crawford (1906–1978) maintained a deep and intensive interest in photography throughout his career, using the camera as a tool of both documentary and artistic expression. This exquisitely produced publication provides a fresh, comprehensive look at Crawford’s photographs from 1938 through the mid-1970s, including both well-known works and previously unpublished images. Some of his photographic images served as the basis for paintings and prints, but many more were made for their own sake as photographs, capturing a wide variety of subjects, from pristine industrial forms to the vibrant street life and musical culture of New Orleans. This volume locates Crawford’s photographic production in the context of his overall artistic career and within the creative currents of his time, enhancing our understanding of Crawford as an artist and serving as the best and most up-to-date study of his photographs.

The Photographs of Ralston Crawford

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