With this deluxe, two-volume slipcased set, photography lovers around the world will at last have a thorough retrospective of the work of Berenice Abbott. Portraitist, Atget editor, chronicler of Paris and New York and a giant of twentieth-century photography, Abbott has long gone without a publication encompassing all of the principal strands of her practice. Included herein is her early work as a portrait photographer in Paris during the 1920s, when she learned photography as Man Ray's darkroom assistant and catalogued the city's artistic life with portraits of James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Sylvia Beach, Bryher and Eugene Atget. (During this time, she adopted the French spelling of her first name, "Berenice," at the suggestion of Djuna Barnes.) Her New York photographs of the 1930s are testament to the architectural and social transformations within the city and throughout the United States in that decade. In this period Abbott also began her editorial work on Atget, producing the 1930 book Atget, Photographe de Paris-and her labors on his behalf would continue until the sale of her archive to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1968. Lesser-known bodies of Abbott's work, such as a road trip from Florida to Maine on Route 1 in the summer of 1954, are also well represented. A final series comprises her scientific images from the 1950s-photographs of physical phenomena for the Physical Science Study Committee of Educational Services at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Effectively a catalogue raisonné, this is the definitive publication on the life work of one of the masters of the photographic medium. Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1898. After graduating from Ohio State University she moved to New York to study journalism, but eventually decided to focus on sculpture and painting. In 1921 she moved to Paris, returning to the United States in 1929 to embark on a project photographing New York. These photographs first appeared in the seminal exhibition Changing New York at the Museum of the City in 1937. An equally monumental book of Changing New York was published in 1939. Abbott also published a Guide to Better Photography (1941), and in the late 1950s began to take photographs illustrating the laws of physics. Berenice Abbott died in Monson, Maine in 1991.

Berenice Abbott

Arts & Photography

O'Neal, Hank

Individual Artists

Steidl Photography International

Funny, sexy, exotic and a bit scandalous, this book brings together all of London-based photographer Juergen Teller's images for Vivienne Westwood's Spring/Summer 2008 campaign. In typical fashion, Teller photographed the collection by creating a highly theatrical mis-en-scène which involved the collaboration of not only the models but the legendary designer herself. Borrowing the theme, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search For God from George Bernard Shaw's controversial 1932 novel of the same name--which is engagingly excerpted here--this collection has a strangely riveting quality that is enhanced in Teller's suggestive photographs by such props as plantains, tribal masks, tropical birds, machine guns, spears and various exotic animal hides.

Juergen Teller: Vivienne Westwood

Shaw, George

Photography & Video

Locked away in enormous bank vaults and largely removed from public scrutiny for more than a decade, the collection of the little-known Man Ray Trust is comprised of more than 4,000 works by the great photographer and artist. Man Ray: Trees &amp; Flowers--Insects &amp; Animals is an archival project that draws extensively on this collection. The title of the series was found scrawled across the back of a photograph, and it conveys the indexical nature of this most unusual archive. For Man Ray, the photographs functioned as a research index to the themes and motifs that he employed in better-known works, with subjects including castles and ruined buildings, street scenes, various found objects and records of his travels and observations in Europe and the United States. In other words, they represent an intermediary step in Man Ray's creative process, the relic of a moment preserved by the artist for later use and interpretation. At the core of this book is a series of landscape photographs dating from the 1920s through the 1950s, many of which bear the distinct influence of Eugène Atget. The 320 photographs and drawings selected for this publication are among the rarest of Man Ray's works and will offer up new revelations to even his most devoted admirers. Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, 1890. He spent most of his working life in Paris, where he was a significant contributor to both Dadaism and Surrealism (though his ties to both movements were informal). He died in 1976. In 1999, ArtNews magazine named Man Ray one of the 25 most influential artists of the twentieth century.

Man Ray: Trees & Flowers-Insects & Animals

History & Criticism

In 1956, Inge Morath (1923-2002) traveled to the Middle East for Holiday magazine. She wore the traditional chador and traveled alone most of the time. "It was difficult to photograph there as a woman," she later recorded. In this body of work, Morath's subjects range from politics and religion to work and commerce, from the shah's palace to the nomad's tent to Zoroaster's sacred shrine. She photographed Iran with the keen vision of an anthropologist, examining religious rituals, costuming, work, sport, music, art and theater in order to document "the continuity--or lack of it--between past and present," as she later put it. Morath's work in Iran presaged her later work in Spain, China and Russia, creating an extensive document of the clash between modernity and tradition in the postwar Middle East. Retrospectively, Inge Morath: Iran recalls a land and a culture that have been profoundly transformed since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It is a window into the past that provides a singular and timely perspective on Iran in the present.

Inge Morath: Iran

AZAR NAFISI

Monika Faber

John P. Jacob

At the end of the 1970s, serious artistic photography was still generally thought to be made only in black-and-white--despite major examples to the contrary, such as William Eggleston's ground-breaking 1976 show at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Joachim Brohm was among the first of a younger generation of Germans to discover in color photography new opportunities for self-expression. His Ohio photographs, made in 1983 and 1984 while he was living in the state as a student and Fulbright scholar, show cluttered yards and houses and focus on apparently trivial and banal scenes of everyday American life. As one commentator puts it, "Brohm's images seem strangely empty. Their centers seem to have fled; a surface has appeared in front of the camera's lens that surrounds the actual image." At the time, such mundane scenarios were considered unworthy of photographic documentation, but today this approach constitutes almost an entire genre of its own. This precocity of subject and the use of color photography make the Ohio series gathered here a significant milestone in the history of photography.

Joachim Brohm: Ohio

Weski, Thomas

Leo, Vince

Theresienstadt (currently known by its Czech name, Terezin), which lies about 40 miles north of Prague, became a model walled Jewish ghetto for the middle-aged and elderly in 1941. Because the camp housed numerous professors, artists and writers, there was always an emphasis on cultural activities like lectures and concerts. In fact, during the life of the ghetto, more than 2,400 talks were delivered on such diverse and oftentimes sophisticated topics as the Jews of Babylon, the theory of relativity, Alexander the Great and German humor. There was even a functioning library with 49,000 books that had been brought from private collections, as well as a police force, a fire brigade and several other civic services. Terezin brings together photographs of the town, bleak remnants of the camp and historical documents that photographer Daniel Blaufuks unearthed in his research.

Daniel Blaufuks: Terez'n

Margry, Karel

Prior to a controversial gallery renovation, Tacita Dean documents the brown and beige jute walls, carpeted floor and other decor of the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, which houses the famous seven-room installation Block Beuys, 1970-86 by Joseph Beuys. Opponents of the renovation cite the importance of entropy in Beuys' work.

Tacita Dean: Darmstädter Werkblock

Dean, Tacita

Acclaimed French photographer, filmmaker and journalist Raymond Depardon arrived in New York in the winter of 1980. He came to visit a friend who had just taken a job in the city, and to kill time he strolled around the streets with his Leica. As a self-imposed constraint, and to encourage serendipitous results, he decided to take pictures without ever using the camera's viewfinder. Working incognito throughout the nooks and crannies of New York City, Depardon amassed two or three rolls a day--but when the time came to assess the results, he was thoroughly disappointed. He never mentioned the experiment to anybody and has only now decided to unveil these "blind" pictures to his public. Reexamining the work some 27 years "after the photographs were taken, Depardon was surprised to discover that most of his subjects were aware that they were being photographed, and that consequently the images contain more artifice than he had expected. His subjects project an affect of indifference in their knowing glances towards the camera lens, thereby immortalizing the very spirit and charm of 1980s New York, a period for which there is increasing fondness and nostalgia today. With an essay by the great philosopher Paul Virilio, this monograph opens up an exciting and hitherto lost chapter in Depardon's storied career.

Raymond Depardon: Manhattan Out

VIRILIO, PAUL

Depardon, Raymond

Jean-Louis Dumas always carries two things: a small red notebook and an old Leica. He has taken photographs all his life--mostly black-and-white--cataloguing significant moments and trivial asides on his extensive travels with work, family and friends. Dumas works in that finest of photographic traditions, the sophisticated nonprofessional. However, as the Creative Director of Hermès for 30 years, his professional milieu and his friendships with masters of the medium like Edouard Boubat have instilled in his photography an elegant and discreet sensibility. This collection brings together a life's work and reflects a longtime love affair with photography. Jean-Louis Dumas, born in 1938, son of one of the four daughters of Emile Hermès, entered the reputed Maison Hermès in 1964. He started as a salesman and went on to become the Chairman and Creative Director in 1978, boosting annual sales ninefold to $460 million and opening more than 80 new shops before his retirement in 2006.

Jean-Louis Dumas: Photographer

Dumas-Brekke, Sandrine

Mark Laita: Created Equal

Sischy, Ingrid

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