Fotografia

Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with La Jetee (1962) -- a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995). His still camerawork is not as well known, but Marker has been taking photographs as long as he has been making films. Staring Back presents 200 black-and-white photographs from Marker's personal archives, taken from 1952 to 2006. Some of the photographs are related to his classic films (which include Le...

In an 1828 letter to his partner, Nicephore Niepce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed...

Since the production of the first negative by William Henry Fox Talbot in Wiltshire's Lacock Abbey in 1835, English photography has played a central role in revolutionizing the production of images, yet it has largely evaded critical attention. The Making of English Photography investigates this new enterprise--and specifically how professional photographers shaped a strange aesthetic for their practice.

The Making of English Photography examines the development of English photography as an industrial, commercial, and (most problematically) artistic enterprise....

David Perlmutter examines concerns over the interplay of pictures in the press, elite decision-making and public opinion on foreign policy. His focus is on certain celebrated, indelible images that, it is said, sum up famous events, provoke moral outrage, mobilize public opinion, and spur government action: the icons of outrage. Discourse elites thrust greatness upon such images as well as frame their meaning and interpretation. The public only plays a marginal role in making icons; ordinary readers and viewers are, however, often resistant or indifferent to elite interpretation and...

David Perlmutter examines concerns over the interplay of pictures in the press, elite decision-making and public opinion on foreign policy. His focus is on certain celebrated, indelible images that, it is said, sum up famous events, provoke moral outrage, mobilize public opinion, and spur government action: the icons of outrage. Discourse elites thrust greatness upon such images as well as frame their meaning and interpretation. The public only plays a marginal role in making icons; ordinary readers and viewers are, however, often resistant or indifferent to elite interpretation and...

The developments in narrative experimentation that marked the modernist period in Europe and the United States provide an interesting crossroads with the development of visual representation during the same time. In this collection of fourteen original essays, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the ways in which the photograph became a vital emblem of the transformative processes of modernism, offering a new aesthetic and psychological model for the new zeitgeist. The interdisciplinary methodology of "Literary Modernism and Photography" melds literary, cultural, and...

Internationally acclaimed for his portraits of powerful and accomplished people and women of great beauty, Richard Avedon was one of the twentieth century's greatest photographers--but perhaps not the most obvious choice to create a portrait of ordinary people of the American West. Yet in 1979, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, daringly commissioned him to do just that.

The resulting 1985 exhibition and book, In the American West, was a milestone in American photography and Avedon's most important body of work. His unflinching portraits of oilfield and...

Winner, Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, Domestic Photo, 2006

Juvenile crime rates have dropped dramatically since the early 1990s, yet more young people are in juvenile detention today than at any other time in America's history. Most are nonviolent offenders. Many have mental health or substance abuse problems. All have been failed by some combination of their families, schools, churches, and communities. But instead of addressing these young people's needs for treatment, rehabilitation, and basic nurturing, we lock them away in an overburdened juvenile justice system...

The Texas coast attracts everyone--children playing in the surf and building sand castles; high school and college students partying at spring break; adults easing workaday stresses by beachcombing, birding, fishing, or just watching the waves roll in one after another. In the coast's elemental landscape of low dunes, sandy beaches, salt water, and sea breezes, life itself seems simpler. There's time to watch the seagulls fighting over a fish, bodysurf in the waves, pick up shells on the beach, and reconnect with the healing rhythms of nature.

This beautiful book combines Laurence...

Once isolated from the modern world in the heights of the Andean mountains, the indigenous communities of Ecuador now send migrants to New York City as readily as they celebrate festivals whose roots reach back to the pre-Columbian past. Fascinated by this blending of old and new and eager to make a record of traditional customs and rituals before they disappear entirely, photographer-journalist Judy Blankenship spent several years in Canar, Ecuador, photographing the local people in their daily lives and conducting photography workshops to enable them to preserve their own visions of...

Small and self-contained, yet with ties to the larger world, Weeping Mary is a community in rural East Texas. The poetic mystery of its name, which local legend attributes to an African American woman called Mary who wept inconsolably over the loss of her land to a deceitful white man, drew photographer O. Rufus Lovett in 1994. Feeling a kinship with the people and the rhythms of a small Southern town like the one in which he grew up, Lovett began photographing the residents of Weeping Mary. In the decade since his first visit, he has created an impressive body of work that distills the...

Winner, Jury selection, American Institute of Graphic Arts, 2001
Communication Arts 2001 Design Annual, 2001
Featured title in Print A-Z, 2001

Haunting in their mystery and beauty, Keith Carter's horses fill the frame like spirits in a dream--but without ever ceasing to be real horses. Whether he's photographing thoroughbreds preparing for the elaborate maneuvers of dressage or a farm nag grazing in a field, Carter meets horses on their terms, not his. Looking into their enigmatic eyes in these photographs, you wonder, "What are these creatures thinking?" until you...

First settled by Stephen F. Austin's colonists in the early nineteenth century, Colorado County has deep roots in Texas history. Mainly rural and agrarian until late in the twentieth century, Colorado County was a cotton-growing region whose population was about evenly divided between blacks and whites. These life-long neighbors led separate and unequal lives, memories of which still linger today. To preserve those memories, Patsy Cravens began interviewing and photographing the older residents of Colorado County in the 1980s. In this book, she presents photographs and recollections of the...

La vida brinca--life jumps--and yet we strive to capture its passing moments by creating images. One of the simplest yet most evocative techniques for image-making is pinhole photography. Using a tiny aperture without a lens to shine light on a piece of film, pinhole cameras accumulate light until an image forms. Bill Wittliff calls the cameras he makes tragaluces, "light swallowers." By controlling only the size of the aperture, the distance to the film, and the length of the exposure, he makes images that forsake the documentary realism of traditional photography to...

How does an artist respond to the horrors of war and the genocide of his or her people? Can art play a role in the fight for justice? These are key questions for understanding the work of Guatemalan photographer Daniel Hernandez-Salazar. Since the 1980s, Hernandez-Salazar has created both documentary and aesthetic works that confront the state-sponsored terrorism and mass killings of Guatemala's long civil war (1962-1996). His photographic polyptych (4-panel image) "Clarification" became the icon for the Recovery of Historical Memory project of the Archbishopric of Guatemala, as well as a...

Russell Lee is widely acclaimed as one of the most outstanding documentary photographers of the twentieth century. His images of American life during the Great Depression, created for the Farm Security Administration between 1936 and 1942, hold a preeminent place in one of history's best-known and most useful photographic collections. This famous body of work demonstrates Lee's extraordinary ability to reveal the humanity of his subjects and to become a part of the communities he photographed. It also displays Lee's superior technical ability--his legendary skill in using a flash enabled...

Winner, Best History Book, Maine Photographic Workshops, 2001
Western Books Exhibition, The Rounce & Coffin Club

The history of photography in Mexico was a largely untold story until the 1994 publication of Olivier Debroise's Fuga Mexicana, un recorrido por la fotografia en Mexico. Based on ten years' research in public and private photographic archives in Mexico, the United States, Guatemala, and Europe, Fuga Mexicana provided the first comprehensive survey of Mexican photography from the advent of the daguerreotype in 1839 to the...

Photographer-naturalist Peter Koch first visited the new Big Bend National Park in February, 1945, on assignment to take promotional pictures for the National Park Service. He planned to spend a couple of weeks--and ended up staying for the rest of his life. Koch's magnificent photographs and documentary film-lectures Big Bend, Life in a Desert Wilderness and Desert Gold introduced the park to people across the United States, drawing thousands of visitors to the Big Bend. His photographs and films of the region remain among the best ever produced, and are an...

Alan Pogue began taking photographs during the Vietnam War, prompted by "an urge to record what shocked me as well as what was beautiful." His desire to bear witness to the full range of human experience matured into a career in documentary photography that has spanned four decades and many parts of the globe from his native Texas to the Middle East. Working in the tradition of socially committed photographers such as Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and the photographers of the Farm Security Administration, particularly Russell Lee and Dorothea Lange, Pogue has been a witness for justice, using...

Winner, Rounce & Coffin Club Western Books Exhibition, 2004
Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2003

It takes a long time to get to know the Big Bend. Just to look at all the mountains and canyons and desert horizons can take weeks of driving and hiking. And to get acquainted with the independent, self-contained, slightly quirky people who call this place home ...well, that can take a lifetime. James Evans understands that. Recalling his decision to make the Big Bend his artistic muse and photographic subject, he says, "I moved here in 1988...