Fotografia

This visually stunning retrospective gathers highlights of d'Arazien's unparalleled photogenic accomplishments. Arthur d'Arazien's particular talent was to photograph American industry. He recorded with artistry, precision, and passion the powerful, emotional impact of giant machines, immense structures, and complex artifacts. His photographs are the result of meticulous planning and implementation on a grand scale. He was an experimenter and an innovator, pioneering such techniques as multiple exposures on a single sheet of film; lights in motion in the dark; and the use of reflectors, flash...

A pictorial view of the Separatist community of Zoar

The community of Zoar has been a tourist attraction since it was founded in 1817, due in part to its uncommon experiment in Christian communal living, its German heritage, and its location on the Ohio & Erie Canal.

There is an unusually rich photographic record of the community and its people as well as many descriptions and comments by writers who wished to share their impressions of the Old World town.

Today a restored village with a ten-museum complex operated by the Ohio Historical Society, Zoar...

"Every city has its own textures, its own special relationship to land and water, its own light, its own night. Cleveland's history-haunted, labor-encrusted, smoke-grimed nights is a place as varied in texture as any in America. It echoes in the interior darkness of the camera lens during lonely, leisurely hours as Levy wanders the city. Levy's photos seek realities that can spark some recognition at a subconscious level, a combination of eye and time and device that suddenly, sometimes, generates a new type of seeing."--Douglas Max Utter, Foreword

In 1999...

During the nineteenth century--a time of great technical and cultural change--fashion was a cultivating force in the development of American society, influenced by one's social status, geographic location, and economic standing. My Likeness Taken is a collection of daguerreotype portraits of men, women, and children taken between 1840 and 1860. Selected from the top collections in the United States, each image is analyzed to clarify datable clothing and fashion components. With subjects from among the best-dressed members of society, these portraits--reproduced in full color--reflect the...

When photographer Gary Harwood first stepped onto the K. W. Zellers family farm in Hartville, Ohio, to take pictures of the Mexican migrant workers there, he did not expect to find such a strong, tightly knit community. Over the next five years he used his camera to study the lives and work of these migrants in their northeastern Ohio home. His artful photography captures the migrants' portraits and movingly conveys their great pride in work and family, their struggles and joys. Accompanying these vibrant photographs are revealing first-person narratives written by David Hassler. The voices...

A photographic showcase of the heyday of the steel industry

Published in cooperation with Western Reserve Historical Society

In the first half of the twentieth century, the steel industry was the major heavy industry in the U.S. and the bellwether of regional economic might. Today, the remnants of the steel industry are rapidly disappearing. The once giant mills that employed thousands are slowly decaying or have been torn down.

This decay and decline has attracted numerous photographers, and a number of books have been published highlighting...

"Because of their relative stability, streets offer an incomparable framework for looking at the urban past and comparing it to the present," writes Millett in his introduction to Twin Cities Then and Now, which consists of seventy-two historic street scenes matched with new photographs taken from the same locations. Accompanying each scene is an informative essay that examines the often astonishing changes wrought by time and circumstance.

The historic photographs, some published here for the first time, include views taken from as long ago as the 1880s and as recently as the late...

When photographer Jerome Liebling arrived in Minnesota from his native New York City in 1949, he was a young man of twenty-five launching what would be nationally recognized as a distinguished career in fine art photography.

Here, in 118 photographs, is portrayed Liebling's Minnesota. During two decades marked by social, political, and cultural change, Liebling traveled the state and found his largest subject--the depiction and interpretation of commonplace human experience.

The images range from the grain elevators and skid row of Minneapolis to the slaughterhouses of...

"A place is not a thing," writes Paul Gruchow in the foreword to Voices for the Land, "it is a relationship. A location becomes a place only in the context of time, of history." In this extraordinary tribute to the importance of the ordinary places in our lives, fifty-two Minnesotans write about the special, sometimes secret, places that give their lives meaning. For some it is their home or cabin or lake. For others, it's a family farm or neighborhood park, a backyard garden or north woods trail: all places where we find a personal and spiritual connection to the land.

Voices for...

Fat men's races and fall-out shelters, murder victims and loose women, cheerleaders and immigrants, celebrities and children in distress were just some of the urban curiosities splashed across the pages of city newspapers during the Speed Graphic era (1930s-1950s). Championed by acclaimed news photographers like Arthur Fellig (a.k.a. Weegee), the Speed Graphic camera produced a new visual style that was as blunt, powerful, and immediate as a left hook.

Driven by the desire to fill newspaper pages with sensational images, press photographers shot everything, day and night:...

Too many visitors to the Silver State never see Ann Ronald and Stephen Trimble's Nevada: teal sky and a sea of purple sage, mountain mahogany and a crimson mass of claret cup cactus, a dust-blown sunset of vermilion, orange, and gold. More colorful than a neon display on Las Vegas Boulevard, Nevada is one vast landscape of tint and shadow and aesthetic dimension.Earthtonesis the perfect gift book for residents and visitors of the Silver State. Trimble, the photographer, and Ronald, the storyteller, have collaborated on this spectacular volume to share their visions of an astonishing...

Noted writer and photographer Stephen Trimble mixes eloquent accounts of personal experiences with clear explication of natural history. His photographs capture some of the most spectacular but least-known scenery in the western states. The Great Basin Desert sweeps from the Sierra to the Rockies, from the Snake River Plain to the Mojave Desert. "Biogeography" would be one way to sum up Trimble's focus on the land: what lives where, and why. He introduces concepts of desert ecology and discusses living communities of animals and plants that band Great Basin mountains from the exhilarating...

A regional classic since its release in 1987, this revised WSU Press edition of Palouse Country includes over 100 fine duotone images, dozens of which have never before been seen. George Bedirian's enduring poetic scenes juxtapose the temporal with the timeless, the changing with the unchanged, in one of the nation's exceptional places.

The WSU community encompasses a wide variety of people, including past and current students, parents, professors, staff, and residents of surrounding neighborhoods. This remarkable photographic essay celebrates WSU's visual beauty in its buildings, sculptures, and local landmarks; the academic learning and research conducted in classrooms and labs; and its social connections in the pursuit of a vast array of outside interests.

It is humble. Unassuming. Everyday and ordinary to millions of Texans. Yet, the complex network of twisted tributaries that is the Trinity River thunders, ambles, even crawls over 550 miles of Texas landscape and has shaped the destinies of Native Americans, outlaws, outcasts, dreamers, desperadoes, millionaires, military men, and many others over thousands of years.
Luther Smith's series of more than fifty photographs taken over seven years of various stages and locations on the Trinity captures the river's many personalities: the meandering West Fork in Archer County, the...

The people of Oaxaca, Mexico, believe the souls of the dead, the antepasados, return every year for a twenty-four-hour visit. They are welcomed into their former homes with gaily decorated altars and offerings of food and gifts. Then they are escorted back to their resting places in the cemeteries. In recent years, Dia de los Muertos has become widely known not only throughout Mexico but also in the United States, drawing tourists in large numbers.

Since 1993, photographer Denis Defibaugh and author Ward Albro have visited the festivals, both in Oaxaca City and in the...

African Americans have for the most part been absent from Texas's photographic history. Scholarly texts on photography rarely mention black Texans, and few museums have catalogued or displayed their work. Portraits of Community redresses this situation by presenting more than two hundred powerful images of black Texans taken by a group of little-known black photographers and includes deatiled interviews with the men and women behind the cameras. Alan Govenar, a writer, folklorist, photographer, and filmmaker in Dallas, has created a memorable book.

As a young teamster on a pack-mule train, Wilfred Dudley Smithers saw the Rio Grande's Big Bend for the first time in 1916, and it captured his imagination forever. For decades thereafter he returned to Texas's last great frontier -- the great bend of the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border -- chronicling the region and its people in words and photographs. After half a century of photography, Smithers's superlative collection of nine thousand images ended up at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1976 more than one hundred of these were reproduced in Chronicles of the Big Bend, a...

Questions about the cultural interaction between whites and enslaved blacks in the antebellum South have long aroused controversy. Was there one dominant culture? Two separate cultures? One shared culture? Were interaction and interchange between the races possible? The essays collected here attempt to give answers and conclusions and to bring the picture of cultural life in the antebellum South into clearer focus.

With essays and commentaries by

Sylvia R. Frey

Elliott J. Gorn

Robert L. Hall

Charles Joyner

Lawrence T. McDonnell

Bill C. Malone

Leslie Howard Owens

Mechal...

For Birney Imes a decaying roadside tavern in rural Mississippi has proved to be a rich and enduring source of photographic images. Place and its aura have been Imes's special province, and when as a young man new to photography he first chanced upon Whispering Pines, he was beginning a personal and photographic relationship that would last twenty years. This is where he had his beginnings and, since the mid-1970s, where he has made frequent visits to explore this peculiar microcosm of backwoods America. "It was overwhelming, and it was irresistible," Imes writes. "The 'Eppie's Eats' sign out...