In 1994, Chinese artist Liu Zheng conceived of an ambitious photographic project called The Chinese, which occupied him for seven years and carried him throughout China. Inspired by the examples of August Sander and Diane Arbus, he has captured a people and country in a unique time of great flux, providing a startling vision of the deep-rooted historical forces and cultural attitudes that continue to shape China and its people. Liu seeks out moments in which archetypal Chinese characters are encountered in extreme and unexpected situations. His photographs are divided among a number of topics which betray a dark vision, albeit one that is laced with mordant humor. His main subjects to date have included street eccentrics, homeless children, transvestite performers, provincial drug traffickers, coal miners, Buddhist monks, prison inmates, Taoist priests, waxwork figures in historical museums, and the dead and dying. This is the first monograph of his work to appear outside of China and accompanies Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, a major exhibition at the International Center of Photography, New York.

Liu Zheng: The Chinese

Arts & Photography

Christopher Phillips

Gu, Zheng

Meg Maggio

Individual Artists

Steidl/ICP

Cornell Capa began the 1960 campaign season as a stalwart Adlai Stevenson supporter, having closely covered Stevenson's 1952 and 1956 presidential bids for Life magazine. Then, during the Wisconsin Primary, while working on a story for Life magazine on the nature of American politics, Capa encountered John F. Kennedy. The two men immediately gained mutual respect for each other, and, after Kennedy secured his party's nomination at the Democratic National Convention, Capa decided to cover his campaign for Life. When Kennedy was elected, Capa was inspired to create a book on the first 100 days of his presidency. Capa enlisted nine fellow Magnum photographers in his effort, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliot Erwitt, and Burt Glinn. That book, titled Let Us Begin: The First 100 Days of the Kennedy Administration, was published on the 110th day, and is often cited as the first example of "instant history." Drawn from the collection of New York's International Center of Photography, the photographer's archives, and the Time-Life Picture Collection, the exhibition JFK for President includes both vintage and new prints, including rarely seen color images. Cornell Capa was born in Budapest in 1918 and has lived in New York since 1937. He was a photographer on the staff of Life magazine from 1946 until May 1954, when his brother, Robert Capa, was killed by a landmine in Indochina. Cornell then joined Magnum Photos, the agency that his brother co-founded. During his Magnum years, Capa traveled to the Soviet Union and covered the Israeli Six-Day War, but his most extensive projects focused on politicians from Adlai Stevenson to Barry Goldwater. In 1974 he founded the International Center of Photography in New York, and served as its director for 20 years. Since his retirement in 1994, he has worked on numerous books and exhibitions, and he remains one of the photographic community's most respected elder statesmen.

Cornell Capa: Jfk For President

WHELAN, Richard

The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard defy convention: they have been called visionary, surrealistic, and meditative. Whatever the label, these evocative images of friends and family and the natural world around his home illustrate a delicate psychology of human interaction. Meatyard was trained as an optician, a profession that he maintained all his life in Lexington, Kentucky; he bought a camera in 1950 for the sole purpose of photographing his first-born son. But shortly thereafter, he joined the Lexington Camera Club and developed a friendship with his photography teacher Van Deren Coke, as well as a circle of local writers and photographers, including Guy Davenport, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Williams, and Minor White. Family and friends freely participated in Meatyard's staged and mysterious images, which often involve masks and abandoned spaces, and obliquely reference social, political, and cultural issues. A key subject in Meatyard's work is the natural environment, which is featured in his Light on Water series, in which long exposures seem to create calligraphic texts, and his No-Focus series, in which he deliberately photographed stems and twigs out of focus. In one of his last series titled Motion-Sound, the pictures were made by moving the camera gently, creating multiple exposures of the woodland scenes that suggest abstract sound patterns. The book accompanies an exhibition organized by ICP Assistant Curator Cynthia Young with acclaimed writer and Meatyard friend, Guy Davenport, who also wrote the text. Also included are the exhibition history, chronology, and bibliography.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

DAVENPORT, Guy

From 1845 to 1862, the Boston partnership of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes maintained the most celebrated photography studio in the United States. Taking as their subjects both the greatest personalities of the day and the natural spectacles of the American landscape, such as Niagara Falls, Southworth &amp; Hawes elevated the new medium of daguerreotype photography to the level of art. Transcending the mere recording of factual detail, their daguerreotypes reflect a quintessentially American aesthetic and embody an emerging national culture and spirit. Young America will be the most significant publication to date on Southworth &amp; Hawes, featuring full-scale color reproductions of all plates in the exhibition as well as 2,000 additional black-and-white illustrations.

Young America: The Daguerreotypes Of Southworth & Hawes

Reaves, Wendy Wick

Wallis, Brian

Romer, Grant

Pierce, Sally

Photography & Video

Modernist Photography re-examines the classic period of twentieth-century photography using new critical approaches to consider five recurrent visual themes during the years 1915 to 1945. These themes cut across such stylistic movements as Pictorialism, Surrealism and the New Vision, and include the transformation of objects, experimental images of the body, visions of the city, the industrialization of the countryside and experimental directions in poster design and typography. This thematic approach fosters new perspectives on such key photographers as Bernice Abbott, Brassaï, Walker Evans, Raoul Hausmann, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Man Ray and emphasizes the interactions between European and American practitioners. The catalogue will include chapters on each of the five themes by ICP Curators Christopher Phillips and Vanessa Rocco. It is based on a selection of 70 works from the Daniel Cowin Collection. The collection of about 1,600 images dates from 1860 to 1960 and includes a range of processes and formats--postcards, stereographs, carte-de-vistes, tintypes, albumen prints and gelatin silver prints.

Modernist Photography: The Daniel Cowin Collection (ICP/STEIDL)

Phillips, Christopher

Rocco, Vanessa

History & Criticism

Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography features approximately 250 works by 30 artists from across the African continent. The book presents a range of highly individual artistic responses to the unprecedented changes now taking place in the economic, social, and cultural spheres of African nations and provides new insight into the increasing role of the visual arts within the global cultural community. In addition to introducing audiences to the multiple imaginations and voices that constitute today's African artists, the book will explore the way that this body of photo-based art arises from the dialectic of traditional African aesthetic values and Western influences. Contemporary African photography has emerged during a period of significant historical and social change, including the post-World War II de-colonization movements, the quest for independent national identity, and the effects of globalization and modernity. Snap Judgments explores African photography in terms of content and style, organized into four main thematic groups that reflect the issues addressed by African artists today--landscape; urban formations; the body and identity; and history and representation -- around which Africa's experimental artists have articulated individual artistic styles and languages. The book was written and edited by Nigerian independent curator and art historian Okwui Enwezor, who is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost experts on contemporary African art. It includes an additional essay by art historian Colin Richard, an appendix on recent exhibitions of African photography, artist bios, and a general bibliography.

Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography

ENWEZOR, Okwui

Richard, Colin

These selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection make up an extraordinary group of images of African Americans in a variety of genres and poses, including formal studio portraits, casual snapshots, images of children, images of uniformed soldiers, wedding portraits and so-called "Southern-views" made for tourist consumption, all dating from 1860 to 1960. While some of the sitters are celebrities of their day, the majority are unnamed Americans posing for their portrait. They attest to photography's ability to both record personal history for private uses and to become a document--to document history in a wider context. The Daniel Cowin Collection, given to ICP in 1990 by its namesake, is made up of about 1600 photographs spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, and spanning that era's range of commercial processes and formats--from postcards to stereographs, cartes-de-visite, tintypes, albumen prints and gelatin silver prints. Together they provide an important window into African American life during the period. African American Vernacular Photography reproduces 70 of Cowin's most exceptional color plates with essays by Brian Wallis, Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator at the International Center of Photography, and Deborah Willis, MacArthur Fellow and author of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present and, with Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History.

African American Vernacular Photography: Selected From the Daniel Cowin Collection

In 1934, after reading John Dos Passos' 1919, Gerda Taro left her home in Stuttgart for Paris. There she met the now legendary photographer Robert Capa, with whom she traveled to Spain at the start of the Civil War. As his lover and photographic partner--and as his manager--she is often credited with launching his career. She was also the first woman photojournalist to enter the heat of battle. The couple worked together until Taro was killed while photographing a crucial clash near Madrid in July 1937, just six days shy of her twenty-sixth birthday. The International Center of Photography holds by far the world's largest collection of Taro's work, including approximately 200 prints as well as original negatives. This selective survey of the ICP's holdings is organized chronologically, and set in context with the inclusion of magazine layouts; it is the first major collection of Gerda Taro's photographs ever published.

Gerda Taro

At the heart of the great Magnum photographer Robert Capa's life's work are his photojournalistic images of war. This collection examines in detail six of the most important moments he covered as a young man: the falling soldier (a single image from the Spanish Civil War made in 1936), Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion (1938), the end of the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia (November 1938-January 1939), D-Day (1944), the U.S. paratroop invasion of Germany (March, 1945), and the liberation of Leipzig (April, 1945). In connection with the last of those stories, This Is War considers why Capa (1913-1954) did not photograph the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. One chapter is devoted to each piece of reportage, with extensive historical and biographical text from Richard Whelan, Capa's biographer, and a major essay from Whelan about Capa and the rise of the picture press in Europe and America. Each section is copiously illustrated with largely unseen original materials including vintage prints, contact sheets, caption sheets, letters and magazine layouts, and full of revelations not just about Capa, but about the changing ways his images were reaching ever larger audiences.

Robert Capa at Work: This is War: Photographs 1936-1945

This volume assesses a wonderful body of work that encompasses installations, films, artist's books and specimens from the artist's vast archives of ephemera. Like Marcel Broodthaers and Susan Hiller, Bloom has a creative attraction toward taxonomy and museology: the installation "Greed" (1988), for instance, is comprised of a chair, an empty frame and a photograph of a museum gallery with a seated guard. An example of one of her own collections is a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov's writings for which Bloom redesigned all of the book covers, referring both to herself and Nabokov as collectors (he obsessively collected editions of his own books) and in the process interposing herself as artist. In some cases, Bloom revisits previous installations to add new elements, resisting and upsetting the orderliness of a conventional artistic chronology. The Collections of Barbara Bloom includes essays by Dave Hickey and Susan Tallman and expands a project developed as part of Bloom's Wexner Art Center Residency Award in 1998. Born in Los Angeles in 1951, Barbara Bloom is a renowned conceptual artist whose intricately crafted installations and witty artist's books have been exhibited internationally. She attended Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, and studied with John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. She has had one-person shows at the Serpentine Gallery, London (1990), the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (1996), and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998). She lives in New York City.

The Collections of Barbara Bloom

Hickey, Dave

Tallman, Susan

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