Best known for her work documenting the political upheaval in Central America during the 1970s and '80s, American photographer Susan Meiselas has been at the forefront of ethical debates around documentary photography for most of her career. Through close engagement with subjects such as war and exploitation, she has interrogated her own relationship to what she's photographing, the circulation and dissemination of these images, and the pivotal questions around social and cultural representation and memory. Her influential contribution to the way audiences approach and engage with photography is as vital and resonant today as it was forty years ago.
The perfect primer on acclaimed French artist Sophie Calle.
Sophie Calle is a French writer, photographer, installation artist and conceptual artist. Her work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is renowned for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives, which she has deployed in her acclaimed works Suite Venitienne, The Hotel and Address Book. She has had major exhibitions all over the world, including at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and has worked closely with the writer Paul Auster. The Guardian called her 'the Marcel Duchamp of dirty laundry', and she was among the names in Blake Gopnik's list 'The 10 Most Important Artists of Today', with Gopnik arguing, 'It is the unartiness of Calle's work - its refusal to fit any of the standard pigeonholes, or over anyone's sofa - that makes it deserve space in museums.'
Handsome and collectible, the books are produced to the highest standards. Each volume contains full-page reproductions printed in superb duotone, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography. Now back in print, the series was awarded the first annual prize for distinguished photographic books by the International Center of Photography.
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1938, Koudelka left the country in 1968 and was awarded asylum in England. He had already produced two first-class reportages, one on the Prague Spring and its aftermath and the other on gypsy communities in Romania. This book confirms and illustrates Koudelka's powerful gift for exposing conditions in the European social, political, and physical landscape.
An illuminating introduction to little-known photographer Issei Suda, who captured the soul of Japan old and new.
The work of Issei Suda (1940-2019) is distinct in contemporary avant-garde Japanese photography for its celebration of the beauty of the everyday. His black and white pictures reflect on apparent banality of urban life, capturing 'the little surprises usually ignored in our world': the shadow of a figure, the shapes of the street, the expressions on stranger's faces.
Following the discovery of her archive in a thrift auction house in 2007, Vivian Maier's posthumous trajectory from relative obscurity to one of the great American photographers of the twentieth century is the story of a singular talent. From the mid-1950s throughout her adult life, she worked as a nanny in New York City and Chicago. During this time, she created a huge body of photographs and films recording everyday street life, often including self-portraits and moments of fleeting reflection within the cityscape, and earning her comparisons to Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus. This new addition to the Photofile series is a succinct and essential overview of Maier's work, and a fascinating window into American life.
An introduction to the work of the celebrated fashion photographer.
An experimenter and innovator, Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) produced an extensive body of work including portraits and nudes, celebrity portraiture and advertising campaigns - but it is his fashion photography for which he is best known. Having fled Paris during World War II, Blumenfeld forged a stellar path in New York, where he worked for Harper's Bazaar, American Vogue, Helena Rubinstein, L'Oreal and Elizabeth Arden.
Discover Blumenfeld's masterful work through sixty full-page reproductions in this title in the Photofile series. The curator Emmanuelle de l'Ecotais contributes an introduction.
The perfect primer on the surrealist writer and photographer Claude Cahun.
Claude Cahun (1894-1954), the chosen name of the artist Lucy Schwob, was best known in her lifetime as a writer but built up a remarkable body of photographic work that only came to prominence after her death.
Politically active and involved with a wide circle of artists and intellectuals, including the surrealists, Cahun followed her own rules in both life and art. She is best known for her strikingly staged self-portraits, in which she used costumes, makeup, and technical effects to tackle themes of identity and self-representation. Her love of symmetry, mirroring, repurposing, and retouching was also reflected in her approach to other styles of photography, including portraiture, photomontage, and still-life tableaux.
Whether working alone or in collaboration with her life partner, Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), Claude Cahun was a pioneering figure in the aesthetics of modernity who never stopped crossing boundaries of gender and genre.
The perfect primer on American photographer Mary Ellen Mark, best known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture and advertising photography.
The work of Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) bears witness to her fascination with the human condition and her gift for connecting intimately with her subjects. Skilled at blending into unusual or insular environments, she travelled all over the world and forged a body of work that combined photojournalism with portraiture. From Indian circus performers to American teenagers living on the streets, from Hollywood film sets to inmates in a secure hospital, her photographs are striking for their humanity and empathy.
A compact survey of the photographer Frank Horvat, best known for his fashion photography published between the mid 1950s and the late 1980s.
Frank Horvat (1928-2020) changed the course of fashion photography forever. The Italian-born photographer made his debut as a photojournalist in France, where he continued to live and work for the rest of his life. It was here he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, who encouraged him to continue his marvellous photojournalism. By the mid-1950s Horvat was collaborating with the biggest fashion magazines in the world, such as Elle, Vogue and Jardin des Modes - revolutionizing fashion photography through a more realistic lens, photographing models on the streets, in the squares and alongside the locals of post-war Europe. Horvat's fresh and often imitated style, which brought reportage techniques and the 35mm film camera to the forefront of fashion photography, impressed designers and inspired fashion photographers for generations to come.
Frank Horvat's work can now be found in permanent collections in prestigious institutions around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
With a foreword by Virginie Chardin, this title in the renowned Photofile series exhibits Horvat's photographic opus through sixty full-page reproductions in a handsome and collectible pocket format.
A mini-monograph on Samuel Fosso, the renowned Cameroon-born Nigerian photographer.
Samuel Fosso (b. 1962) is one of Central Africa's leading contemporary artists, whose playful and perceptive work investigates Pan-African identity and history through the use of portraiture. Fosso's path to artistry was found through his initial work as a commercial portrait photographer, utilising his leftover film by capturing self-portraits against well-considered backdrops and incorporating pose, costume and props. Renowned for his 'autoportraits' - styling himself and others as characters from popular culture or politics - Samuel Fosso reflects the world around him through a distinct aesthetic that has at times defied Nigerian dictatorial decree.
Fosso's work is now held in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate, and he was the recipient of the Prince Claus Award of The Netherlands, in 2001.
A revised edition of this collection of Saul Leiter's distinctive work, featuring twelve new photographs.
Saul Leiter was one of those photographers who sought neither fame nor commercial success, despite his talent for image-making.
Born in Pittsburgh, he spent his entire adult life in New York City's East Village, in an intensely creative environment where ideas from Europe and America came together and intermingled. There he encountered Mark Rothko and the abstract expressionists and discovered street photography and the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. His mastery of color is displayed in unconventional cityscapes in which reflections, transparency, complex framing, and mirroring effects are married to a very personal printing style, creating a unique kind of urban view.
The perfect primer on American photographer, photojournalist, and filmmaker Ruth Orkin.
Ruth Orkin (1921-1985) always dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, and although that ambition was thwarted until later in her career, she quickly found other ways of engaging with the world of images. She was given her first camera at the age of ten, and by the age of seventeen, she was cycling across the United States from Los Angeles to New York, documenting her trip in albums of annotated photographs. In the early 1940s, she settled in New York, joining the Photo League and making her name with photo stories for major magazines such as Life, Look, and This Week.
In images that range from celebrity portraits to bird's-eye views from her apartment window, from children at play to the experiences of a lone American tourist in Italy, Orkin's photography retains a cinematic sense of the passage of time and allows the humanity and charisma of her subjects to shine through.
