PAUL STRAND, CIRCA 1916
By Maria Morris Hambourg
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Abrams, 192 pages, $65
The photographs Paul Strand took in New York and Connecticut around 1916 are, in their subjects and treatments, some of the most daring of the medium. Alfred Stieglitz devoted the final number of his publication Camera Work to 11 of them as a call to a new vision, and several have become Modernist icons. Even so, Strand’s work from the period had never been examined apart from the rest of his output until an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this year. The beautifully produced catalog is essential viewing–and reading–for anyone interested in the beginning of photography’s golden age.
JACQUES HENRI LARTIGUE, PHOTOGRAPHER
Introduction by Vicki Goldberg
Bulfinch, 288 pages, $95
Jacques Henri Lartigue received his first camera in 1900 at age 6. The pictures he took documented family and friends with an exuberance that proved hard to resist as the world of the belle epoque further receded.
This is the first book to treat Lartigue’s work in depth since Richard Avedon “rediscovered” it at the start of the 1970s. Many unfamiliar pictures extending into the century as far as the late 1920s are included, several reproduced on gatefolds to maximum effect. Lartigue’s work reminds us, like no other photographs before or since, that lightness, grace and wit, as much as any darker qualities, were once a part of growing up.
MAN RAY: Photography and Its Double
Edited by Emmanuelle de l’Ecotaisand Alain Sayag
Ginko Press, 260 pages, $65
Two fine Man Ray exhibitions occurred during 1998. The one at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles was full of masterpieces. The one at the Grand Palais in Paris, which occasioned this volume, had an unfamiliar selection from the 5,000 prints that came to the Centre Georges Pompidou as part of the artist’s archive. Here, six scholars write on aspects of the work; there’s an interview with Lucien Treillard, Man Ray’s personal assistant; and, best of all, the selection and juxtaposition of pictures sheds light on the photographer’s working methods.
WALKER EVANS: Signs
With an essay by Andrei Codrescu
J.Paul Getty Museum, 69 pages, $19.95
As Charles Ives liked marches, so did Walker Evans like advertisements, or, more particularly, signs. They were to him a kind of folk art–naive, brash and, sometimes, exhilaratingly original. This little book brings together 49 photographs of signs taken throughout Evans’ career in New York, Havana, the Old South and Chicago. Words are a big deal in contemporary photographic images. Here, pictures made as many as 70 years ago indicate that Evans had seen nearly all the ways words function in images without becoming, as they often do today, easy sociological commentary.
IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM: On the Body
By Richard Lorenz
Bulfinch, 168 pages, $50
The shelves groan under so many books of recent fashion and cheesecake photographs masquerading as studies on gender that it’s a blessing to reacquaint oneself with a pioneer of the medium whose work candidly explored the male and female body while additionally fulfilling the imperatives of art. Imogen Cunningham was one such pioneer, having photographed nudes as early as 1910 and produced a remarkable series on pregnant women in the ’40s and ’50s. Richard Lorenz has written extensively on her work, and his text is as evenhanded as his selection of images is brilliant.
W. EUGENE SMITH: Photographs, 1934-1975
Edited by Gilles Mora and John T. Hill
Abrams, 352 pages, $75
This is the volume for which admirers of W. Eugene Smith’s brand of “concerned” photography have waited. It offers more than 350 familiar and unfamiliar images, reproducing his most famous essays for Life magazine complete, in layouts that echo the originals. Independent projects, too, are generously represented, along with essays by five scholars who discuss Smith’s attitudes, processes and influence. The undue reverence that once was given him is largely, gratefully, absent. In sum, the book provides the most sustained look at Smith’s work in the 20 years since his death.
ANDREAS GURSKY
Introduction by Marie Luise Syring
Schirmer/Mosel, 130 pages, $85
Andreas Gursky is a 43-year-old native of Leipzig who lives and works in Dusseldorf. Since 1984 he has created vast prints of landscapes and interiors shot from a great distance. Each teems with a phenomenal amount of incident, often organized by a geometry that exists in the subject, though the subject itself–office workers, parking lots, swimmers, high-rises–is of less interest than how effectively it registers in highly saturated color. Produced to complement a 1998 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, this volume covers Gursky’s entire output, indicating he is one of the more exciting color photographers to emerge since William Eggleston.
HUTTERITE: A World of Grace
Photographs by Kristin Capp, essay by Seiglinde Geisel, text by Rod Slemmons
Edition Stemmle, 143 pages, $75
Kristin Capp has created a poetic document of an Anabaptist community in a small town of the Pacific Northwest. Because the members–farmers all–resist modernity in religion, dress and social life, they easily could have appeared picturesque, a condition Capp resisted. In the main, she tells her story in black-and-white portraits and figure groups, emphasizing the community’s work and flashes of character in its faces. Viewers will feel the people know the photographer as well as she knows them, for Capp’s presence frequently seems to disappear from a project that cannot have been simple but seldom looks intrusive.
THE DIGITAL EVOLUTION
By A.D. Coleman
Nazraeli Press, 191 pages, $24.95 paper
In recent decades the straight, undoctored approach that dominated photography for most of the century began to yield to various sorts of electronic manipulation. Much of it was carried out by artists trained in areas other than photography, so critics of the photographic medium had their eyes trained elsewhere. A.D. Coleman was a notable exception, and this collection of more than 30 years of essays, lectures and interviews is one of the more intelligent guides to the issues and practices of our brave new world of imagemaking. Paperbound, it’s also a bargain.
