A celebration of the career of Milton Rogovin, the photographer whose sensitive portraits of working people have inspired generations. After his refusal to answer absurd questions before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee ruined his optometry business, Rogovin began a new life with a camera. In the early 1970s, documenting lives on the Lower West Side of Buffalo, New York, he gave dignity to resident African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and poor whites. He has returned to photograph many of the same people in each of the following three decades. The remarkable results are in this book. 135 duotone photographs

Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones

Arts & Photography

David Miller

Dave Isay

Harvey Wang

Milton Rogovin

Individual Artists

Quantuck Lane Press

James McNeill Whistler was one of the most misinterpreted creative talents of his age. While devoted to the expression of the beautiful, he was among the first to recognize that popularized arts and commercialized leisure were complex, interrelated phenomena that made urban life "modern." Whistler's showmanship had far greater impact than countless imitations of his The White Girl and Portrait of the Painter's Mother might suggest. His purposeful use of past art; his intermingling of private and public spaces; his ability to tailor his work to the realities of the Victorian marketplace; his understanding and exploitation of shifting economic, class, and gender roles; and his clever use of fashion and decoration all lead us to a richer understanding of "modernism" and a broader assessment of his contribution to it. Whistler's emphatically aesthetic pictures, made the more inscrutable by purposefully confusing titles, remain uneasy pieces to the present time. Probing some of these tensions, Dr. Curry explores the intersection of Whistler's determined aestheticism with the commercial art world. Key examples of Whistler's paintings, drawings, and prints are set against related images from both fine art and popular culture drawn from the past two hundred years. Approximately 250 color and monotone illustrations.

James MacNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces

Curry, David Park

Humor & Entertainment

An informal history of sensational, scientific, silly, satisfying, and startling attractions based on seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century broadsides from Ricky Jay's extraordinary collection. It includes observations on the convention of promoting such appearances, digressions on the manner and method of printing advertisements to do so, and insights into the psychology employed to that end. All are compiled in a monograph that is itself a shameless attempt to entertain and elucidate. It is the contention of the author that neither the tongue of the most florid orator, nor pen of the most ingenious writer, can sufficiently describe the elegance, symmetry, and prodigious accomplishments of those who pass in review within these pages Included are broadsides advertising: an armless dulcimer player, a ghost showman, a singing mouse, a chess-playing automaton, a cannon ball juggler, an African hermaphrodite, a chicken incubator, a rabbi with prodigious memory, a ventriloquist, a spirit medium, a glass blower, a woman magician, a speaking machine, a mermaid, a bullet catcher, a flea circus, and an equestrian bee keeper. Illustrated throughout

Extraordinary Exhibitions: Broadsides from the Collection of Ricky Jay

History

100 beautiful nautical paintings, the first full presentation of Thomas Hoyne's work. Tom Hoyne was a successful artist in advertising when, in mid-life, he was diagnosed with cancer and given two years to live. Confounding his physicians, Hoyne lived for seventeen years, during which he produced some of the most dramatic paintings of America's maritime past. This beautiful volume is the first full presentation of Hoyne's work. More than 100 paintings are reproduced here, almost all of which portray the beauty of the fishing schooners and the terrors and hardships on the waters of the notoriously inhospitable Grand Banks. In addition to reproductions of his paintings, this book deals with the artist's life and techniques. It discusses the fishing schooners and their legendary designers. It also describes life and work on the most dangerous fishing grounds in the world with fascinating recollections of the great skippers of the fishing communities around Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the small villages that lined the East Coast. This book will confirm the artist's place as a master of marine realism. 100 color illustrations

Wooden Ships & Iron Men: The Maritime Art of Thomas Hoyne

Reese Palley

Marilyn Arnold Palley

Literature & Fiction

Designed to protect America's riches from every threat, these beautiful devices represent the evolution of lock technology during the nineteenth century, its most creative period. Many of the hand-crafted masterpieces are decorated with beautiful engraving and casting, despite the fact that their mechanical interiors would rarely be seen. They reflect the great pride in creative workmanship and the mechanical genius that characterized America at the time. Here for the first time is a comprehensive compendium of these marvels of complexity and their the fascinating history. Stunning photographs by Anne Day and learned text by the authors illuminates a remarkable but little-known chapter in American technological achievement. Over 400 color photographs.

American Genius: Nineteenth Century Bank Locks and Time Locks

David Erroll

John Erroll

In 1989, at the suggestion of his analyst, designer Larry Vigon began to record every dream he could remember. He wrote each into an 11 x 14-inch sketchbook, along with an acrylic painting inspired by the dream. The result, over time, is an astonishing body of work, represented by the selections in this beautiful full-size facsimile volume. After seeing advance materials for the book, a writer in Graphis magazine said it "preserves the intimate presentation of the original warts-and-all artist's notebookwith words scratched out in first-draft fashion, blobs of ink, traces of transferred paint throughout, all the glorious imperfections. Unmediated as it is, Vigon's work functions like a form of meditation. At the same time the quality of the painting is that of finished art, so we experience the journal as a kind of heightened sketchbook of the unconscious." 74 color illustrations.

Dream: A Journal

Larry Vigon

Marvin Spiegelman

History & Criticism

Erich Lessing is a legend in photography. Born in 1923 in Vienna, he became a photo-reporter for Associated Press in 1947, and in 1951 he became one of the earliest members of the legendary Magnum photo cooperative. His remarkable 1950s images documenting post-World War Europe, and particularly his pictures of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, garnered worldwide admiration. Lessing's works always revolve around the human condition at the moment when power and powerlessness come face to face, when the joy of living is suddnely overclouded with pain. His photographs seize the opportunity to recount an instant of history that will never be repeated. This monumental book is a tribute to Lessing's talent as a photojournalist and a visual record of a time of turmoil and great change. Lessing has received international honors, including the American Art Directors' Award, the Grand Austrian State Prize for Artistic Photography, and many others. 400 duotone photographs.

Arresting Time: Erich Lessing, Reportage Photography, 1948-1973

Crawford, Alistair

Although numerous international treaties and organizations work tirelessly to improve conditions for children, there are still 320 million children under the age of sixteen working around the world―150 million of those in the most harmful industries, such as prostitution and forced military service. This is their story, in words and photographs. Physician and photographer David L. Parker takes us beyond the headlines and into the textile factories, stone quarries, and garbage dumps where children are forced―by unscrupulous adults or by lack of any other economic opportunity―into the desperate cycle of child labor. His haunting and sensitive portrayal of these children preserves their dignity and humanity while exposing their often tragic circumstances. The hazards of harsh working conditions are visited exponentially on still-growing bodies and minds, whether they are cleaning elephant stables in India, picking cotton in Turkey, or extracting gold from Nicaraguan mines. Mercury used in mining causes brain damage; stone dust destroys young lungs; circus contortions cause serious muscular harm. But even beyond the disastrous physical consequences of child labor, simply having to work means that children are deprived of the education, nurturing, and socialization that are the necessary foundations of lasting health, development, and progress. Dr. Parker's riveting portraits of children continues in the brave documentary tradition of Lewis Hine, Milton Rogovin, and Sebastiao Salgado, who have contributed to the legal and humanitarian advances of previous generations. We can only hope, as Hine said in the early twentieth century, that one day soon heartbreaking images like these will simply be "records of the past." Until then, Before Their Time is an essential call to action. 135 duotone photographs

Before Their Time: The World of Child Labor

David Parker

Photography & Video

"This is a haunting and insightful work that transcends the picturesque to approach the profound."―Robert Stone Route 22 is a 350-mile highway that connects Manhattan and Montreal. One day while driving on it, Benjamin Swett was struck by the contrast between the landscape he could see through his car window and the more romantic one he remembered from his childhood. Without any particular plan, he set out to discover how the upstate New York of James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Cole became this other place―a seemingly lost, untended region of Off-Track Betting Parlors and Tattoo Emporiums, abandoned diners, and ancient buildings crumbling into forgotten canals. The result of his exploration is this book―an insightful and deeply personal meditation on this complicated and beautiful landscape, accompanied by ninety evocative photographs. 90 duotone photographs

Route 22

Swett, Benjamin

Have you ever wondered why the Guggenheim is always covered in scaffolding? Why the slashes on the exterior of Libeskind's Jewish Museum, supposed to represent Jewish life in prewar Berlin, reappear, for no reason, on his Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto? Or why Gehry's design for an MIT lab for sensitive research has glass walls? Not to mention why, for $44.2 per square foot, it doesn't keep out the rain? You're not alone. In Architecture of the Absurd, John Silber dares to peek behind the curtain of "genius" architects and expose their willful disdain for their clients, their budgets, and the people who live or work inside their creations. In his twenty-five years as President of Boston University, Dr. Silber oversaw a building program totaling more than 13 million square feet. Here he constructs an unflinching case, beautifully illustrated, against the worst trends in contemporary architecture. He challenges architects to derive creative satisfaction from meeting the practical needs of clients and the public. He urges the directors of our universities, symphony orchestras, museums, and corporations to stop financing inefficient, overpriced architecture, and calls on clients and the public to tell the emperors of our skylines that their pretensions cannot hide the naked absurdity of their designs.

Architecture of the Absurd: How "Genius" Disfigured a Practical Art

Silber, John

Architecture

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