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New China, New Art

Richard Vine

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Editorial Review:

In this collection profiling the work of eighty of the most influential artists in China today, art critic Richard Vine offers a comprehensive, critical and highly illustrated assessment of China s emerging role as a force in the contemporary art world.

Over the past decade the contemporary Chinese art scene has come to the forefront of the international art world. The surge of commercial and critical success can be traced to a number of social and cultural factors, including a loosening of restrictions on subject matter, a new freedom to experiment, and a desire to preserve and express Chinese identity on a global scale. Organized by medium, including painting, sculpture and installation, photography, performance art, and new media, each chapter in the book focuses on artists and their most important works. Thoughtful and illuminating appraisals of the artworks take into consideration the whirlwind changes in the country s social and political identities. The book also offers salient biographical information about each artist. The result is an exciting introduction to modern China: a dynamic new player in the international art scene.

Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection

Richard Whelan

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Robert Capa (1913-1954), one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century and a founding member of the Magnum photographic agency, had the mind of a passionate and committed journalist and the eye of an artist. His lifework, consisting of more than 70,000 negative frames, constitutes an unparalleled documentation of a crucial twenty-two-year period (1932-1954) encompassing some of the most catastrophic and dramatic events of the last century. This book represents the most definitive selection of Robert Capa's work ever published, a collection of 937 photographs selected by Capa's brother, Cornell Capa (himself a noted Life photographer), and his biographer, Richard Whelan, who meticulously re-examined all of Robert Capa's contact sheets to compile this master set of images. This book opens with a biographical introduction illustrated with rare photographs of Capa, and closes with a chronology of his life. The main body of the book presents this definitive collection of 937 of Robert Capa's most important pictures. The photographs, arranged in chronological order and accompanied by commentaries and identifying captions, constitute an in-depth survey of Robert Capa's finest work over the entire course of his career. The pictures reveal the dramatic shifts in location and subject matter that Capa experienced from day to day, representing the trajectory of his life - from war-torn Spain to Picasso on a sunny beach in France; from carousing with Ernest Hemingway in London to Capa's historic images of the Allied landing on Omaha Beach in Normandy in 1944. The book design groups together pictures that constitute a story - for example, the Popular Front rallies in Paris in 1936, or the U.S. Army's entry into Sicily in 1943 - in order to maintain the original coherence of the work. Embodying the spirit of his photographs, Robert Capa's life itself was adventurous, romantic, and tragic. Born in Hungary in 1913, he hoped to become a journalist but was forced to flee to Berlin at the age of seventeen because of his leftist political sympathies. When Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Capa fled to Paris, the city that would become his home on and off for most of his life. It was there that he met Andre Kertesz, who became a mentor to Capa and introduced him to the extraordinary potential of the 35mm Leica camera as a tool for reportage. Capa also met two other photographers during his early years in Paris: Henri Cartier-Bresson and David "Chim" Szymin, with whom he founded Magnum, the co-operative photo agency, in 1947 along with George Rodger and William Vandivert. For the rest of his life, Capa would devote much of his time to guiding the operations of the Magnum offices in Paris and New York. Throughout the 1930s and World War II, Capa was present at many of the twentieth century's defining events and moments. His first assignment came in 1932, when he was working as a darkroom assistant at Delphot, the important Berlin photo agency. The agency's director, recognizing Capa's talent, lent him a camera and sent him to Copenhagen to photograph exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky giving a speech to Danish students. From there, Robert Capa went on to photograph the Spanish Civil War, when he made his famous "Falling Soldier" picture showing a Republican soldier collapsing just after being shot. Capa reported on the increasing political tensions in Europe in the mid-1930s, including the Popular Front demonstrations in France, and on the presidential elections in Mexico in 1940 before being accredited by the U.S. Army as a war correspondent for Life. After documenting Londoners' stalwart survival of the Blitz, he went on to cover battles on many of the major fronts in North Africa, Sicily, mainland Italy, France, and Germany. In one of his most famous assignments, Capa landed with the first wave of American troops on Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Wading into the frigid water behind amphibious tanks, and dodging machine gun and rifle bullets, Capa shot 36 exposures before his hands were shaking so badly that he could not insert another roll into the camera. In an ironic twist of fate, a Life darkroom attendant damaged all but eleven of Capa's negatives. After the war, he did various stories for travel magazines and worked on writing projects with friends such as John Steinbeck and the noted journalist Theodore H. White. He also went to Israel several times to document the conflict and co-operation in the founding of the new nation. Capa's last assignment would be a trip to Vietnam to cover the French Indochina War: he was killed when he accidentally stepped on a Vietminh antipersonnel mine in the countryside on May 25, 1954. Though perpetually broke, Capa lived a glamorous life - through a combination of charm, luck, and talent (and an uncontrollable penchant for gambling), he frequented a wealthy circle of celebrities and cultural figures. He fell in love with Ingrid Bergman; was friends with Ernest Hemingway, the director John Huston, and other writers and directors; spent many an afternoon at the racetracks, and enjoyed all-night poker games. Seen together, however, the pictures in this book transcend the specific situations they portray to stand as timeless images of the human condition at its most terrible and inspiring; they are monuments to the strength of the human spirit.

Detroit Then and Now (Then & Now)

Cheri Y. Gay

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Greatest book of photos on Detroit 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I got this book from my library through an ILL, and this book is GREAT! I am 17 and planning on relocating to Detroit, and wanted to see what the city looks like. This book is the only one with actual photos of Detroit in and around the city. Wonderful pictures from earlier times until now. The book was so good, I went out and bought it. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to see detroit or for anyone who wants to see one of the best cities in the world.

Editorial Review:

Famous the world over for automobile manufacture and the distinctive sounds of Motown music, Detroit, the Motor City, celebrates its 300th birthday in 2001. Detroit Then & Now is a fascinating look at this city's great history, taking historic photographs from the dawn of the camera age and comparing them with full-color photographs of the same scenes as they are during the Tricentennial. Despite an industrial heritage, the city has its culture including art museums, a historical museum and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, as well as a great zoological park, beaches, and marinas. With a reputation for sports and music, Detroit is as vibrant a city today as it ever has been. This book is a fascinating documentation of history and change in one of the United States' most important cities.

Baltimore Then and Now (Then & Now)

Alexander D. Mitchell IV

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

great coffee table book 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This is a neat idea for a book: putting "then" and "now" photographs side-by-side. Though the book is at times mildly depressing when you see how alive and grand city spots once were as compared to how they look now, this is not a fault of the author, but our upkeep of cities, of course. The author does an excellent job of capturing the exact same angle of the older photograph, so you can really compare streets and buildings and other landmarks.

We purchased this book as a gift for friends who are soon moving away from Baltimore, their recent home. It was well received.

I have seen other versions of this book, with other cities highlighted. The New York and Philadelphia books look equally engaging, among others.

I would recommend this product for history buffs, as a coffee table general interest book, or for Baltimoreans.

Editorial Review:

Baltimore, sometimes referred to as Charm City, has a long and fascinating history. In this book history changes before the reader's eyes. From its founding in the early 1700s and its incorporation in 1797, Baltimore has been a major port city, full of life and bustle. According to the National Anthem, "our flag was still there" during a battle of the War of 1812, and indeed, the star-spangled banner still flies over Fort McHenry, where the battle occurred. The life and bustle remains at waterside, but instead of clipper ships or steamboats carrying passengers and cargo, tourists now flock to such sights as the Inner Harbor, Fells Point, Fort McHenry, the National Aquarium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, and Federal Hill. All these places and more are featured in this book.

Haunted Realm 2009 Wall Calendar

Sir Simon Marsden

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The best true collection of ghost stories ever published 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful.

i first picked this book up when i was 10 years old. I'm 16 now and i still can't put it down. This is, without a doubt, the most chilling collection of stories i have ever come across. The contents of this book are psycologically affecting as well imagination provoking. I truly cannot say enough great things about this book. If you havn't read it-PLEASE do yourself a favor, and get ahold of The Haunted Realm.

Editorial Review:

This Calendar is available for immediate shipping!

The Haunted Realm Wall Calendar: From the very beginning of recorded time all the great civilizations of our world have believed in the supernatural in some form or other. Simon Marsdens startlingly atmospheric black and white infrared photographs reveal this hidden world and his ghostly and beguiling images transport the reader to a different realm; a haunted realm. Accompanying the photographs is text which describes the apparitions that have been reported at each site, and the strange and often macabre real-life events which are said to lie behind them.

Hollywood Glamor Portraits

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Images From A Bygone Era 3 out of 5 stars.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Where to start? This is almost a wordless book filled with 145 glamour shots from the "Golden Age" of Hollywood. I would say that the book is a work of "art" and contains the work of many masters of still photography of the era. Some of the photos are truly stunning an deserve to be shown in the top Museums in world. The book uses high quality, acid-free paper and strong binding that enhances the book as a collectable. It would make a nice piece to anyone's collection of art books and you will page through it every so often. The reason that I did not give the book a higher rating is because it is quite short, it's a paperback and does contain many average works (in my opinion).

My personal favs were: Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow and Louise Brooks.

thank you for your time, David

Editorial Review:

145 photos capture the stars from 1926 to 1949 — Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Marlene Dietrich, Robert Montgomery, Marlon Brando, Veronica Lake — 94 stars in all. Portraits do not duplicate those found in Kobal’s Movie Star Portraits. Introduction. Captions.

Avedon at Work: In the American West (HRHRC Imprint Series)

Laura Wilson

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Editorial Review:

"Laura Wilson shadowed the Shadower, and showed us as much as can be shown of how his work wasdone."

—Larry McMurtry, from the Foreword

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 slaughterhouse workers, miners, waitresses, drifters, mental patients, teenagers, and others captured the unknown and often-ignored people who work at hard, uncelebrated jobs. Making no apologies for shattering stereotypes of the West and Westerners, Avedon said, "I'm looking for a new definition of a photographic portrait. I'm looking for people who are surprising—heartbreaking—or beautiful in a terrifying way. Beauty that might scare you to death until you acknowledge it as part of yourself."

Photographer Laura Wilson worked with Avedon during the six years he was making In the American West. In Avedon at Work, she presents a unique photographic record of his creation of this masterwork—the first time a major photographer has been documented in great depth over an extended period of time. She combines images she made during the photographic sessions with entries from her journal to show Avedon's working methods, his choice of subjects, his creative process, and even his experiments and failures. Also included are a number of Avedon's finished portraits, as well as his own comments and letters from some of the subjects.

Avedon at Work adds a new dimension to our understanding of one of the twentieth century's most significant series of portraits. For everyone interested in the creative process it confirms that, in Laura Wilson's words, "much as all these photographs may appear to be moments that just occurred, they are finally, in varying degrees, works of the imagination."

ALBUM OF THE DAMNED: SNAPSHOTS FROM THE THIRD REICH

Paul Garson

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The photographs in this startling collection were taken by German soldiers and civilians during the Third Reich; a few were taken by professionals embedded with the troops. But for the most part, they are the work of amateurs taking snapshots for family and friends.Through these black and white images, we enter the living rooms, the back yards, the boulevards and the killing fields of Nazi Germany. Many of these photos were once in family albums. Some soldiers returned with them after the war and, years later, these photographs were offered for sale by relatives along with their own snapshots of the home front. Other pictures were captured by the Soviets and, after the fall of the USSR, became available on the open market.The author acquired these snapshots from some fifteen countries; he spent more than four years researching, working every day, reviewing more than 100,000 images and selecting nearly 400 for this book. 'Most images,' the author says, 'are accompanied by text that both complements historical research and offers a subjective analysis of each - all in an effort to comprehend, to somehow attempt to understand what is essentially unfathomable.'

Animals in Motion

Eadweard Muybridge

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Indispensible Reference for Artists 5 out of 5 stars.
28 of 28 people found this review helpful.

Muybridges momumental work photographing animals in all different gates and poses and tests of ability. Using sometimes up to 100 cameras for a single set up to gain what is now the definitive guide for animators in understanding the motion of animals. It all started with a $25,000 bet: Eadweard Muybridge and a friend argued whether all four of the horses hooves leave the ground completely at any point during a gallop. Being funded for the project, Muybridge proved to be the winner in saying that horses do in fact leave the ground for a momentary second in their strides. The book begins with an anlaysis of locomotion, going over the walk, the amble, the trot, the rack (or pace), the canter, the transverse-gallop, the rotary-gallop, and the richochet, along with the leap and buck and kick. There are roughly 4,000 photos in this collection which claims to be the largest collection of animals in motion. It features not only horses but lions, deers, oxen, elephants, birds and kangaroos. From this development, Muybridge not only discovered that horses gallop with no feet touching the ground, but his discovery led to motion pictures, in which his photos is a very crude version of cinema today. Later he designed a viewer called a Zoogyroscope (or Zoopraxiscope) which, similar to a Zoetrope, was a carousel with slits which you look through while it is spinning to give the illusion of motion (or persistence of vision). Today these pictures are looked at for a couple of reasons, mostly as nastolgia for one to have wonder and excitement of this simple cinema, but it also is a great reference for modern animators. In fact, for those looking at animation, I can tell you that if you ask for an application to Walt Disney Animation Studios, they will give you their requirements and texts, this will be on the list. Highly reccomended for the artist, graphic, fine arts or animation or anything else you can dream of.

Editorial Review:

Definitive selection of 3,919 photographs, plus author's observations on animals' movements. Incredible true-action shots cover 34 different animals and birds in 132 characteristic motions. Horses, goats, cats, gnus, eagles, gazelles, sloths, camels, many others shown walking, running, flying, leaping, more.

The Civil Contract of Photography

Ariella Azoulay

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Editorial Review:

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay provides a compelling rethinking of the political and ethical status of photography. In her extraordinary account of the "civil contract" of photography, she thoroughly revises our understanding of the power relations that sustain and make possible photographic meanings. Photography, she insists, must be thought of and understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history.

Azoulay argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals to the power that governs them, and, at the same time, a form of relations among equal individuals that constrains this power. Her book shows how anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph's addressee, is or can become a citizen in the citizenry of photography. The civil contract of photography enables him or her to share with others the claim made or addressed by the photograph.

But the crucial arguments of the book concern two groups whose vulnerability and flawed citizenship have been rendered invisible due to their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. What they share is an exposure to injuries of various kinds and the impossibility of photographic statements of their plight from ever becoming claims of emergency and calls for protection. Thus one of her leading questions is the following: Under what legal, political or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and to show disaster that befalls those flawed citizens in states of exception?

The book brilliantly examines key texts in the history of modern citizenship, such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, together with relevant works by Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Olympe de Gouges, and Jean-François Lyotard; it rigorously analyzes Israeli photographs of violent episodes in the Occupied Territories—work by Miki Kratsman, Michal Heiman, and Aïm Deüelle Lüski—and it interpretively engages photographs of women from those of Muybridge to recent images from Abu Ghraib prison. At the same time Azoulay provides new critical perspectives on well-known texts such as Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others and Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida.

The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how these events and their victims have been represented. Azoulay charts new intellectual and political pathways in this unprecedented exploration of the visual field of catastrophe, injustice, and suffering in our time.