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The New Woman Behind the Camera

by | Dec 1, 2020 | 2020 Gift Guide, For the Feminist, For the Shutterbug

The New Woman Behind the Camera
Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene,Kate Nesin
$49.49

During the 1920s the New Woman was easy to recognize but hard to define. Hair bobbed and fashionably dressed, this iconic figure of modernity was everywhere, splashed across magazine pages or projected on the silver screen. A global phenomenon, she embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art—including photography.

This groundbreaking, richly illustrated book looks at those “new women” who embraced the camera as a mode of expression and made a profound impact on the medium from the 1920s to the 1950s. Thematic chapters explore how women emerged as a driving force in modern photography, bringing their own perspective to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography and photojournalism.

Featuring work by 120 photographers, this volume expands the history of photography by critically examining an international array of canonical and less well-known women photographers, from Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange and Lola Álvarez Bravo to Germaine Krull, Tsuneko Sasamoto and Homai Vyarawalla. Against the odds, these women produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.

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Girl Pictures

by | Dec 1, 2020 | 2020 Gift Guide, For the Feminist, For the Shutterbug

Girl Pictures
Justine Kurland
$50.00

The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth—cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland reclaimed this space in her now-iconic series of images of teenage girls, taken between 1997 and 2002 on the road in the American wilderness. “I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals,” says Kurland. She portrays the girls as fearless and free, tender and fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other’s hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes—paying no mind to the camera (or the viewer). Their world is at once lawless and utopian, a frontier Eden in the wild spaces just outside of suburban infrastructure and ideas. Twenty years on, the series still resonates, published here in its entirety and including newly discovered, unpublished images.

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Yukari Chikura: Zaido

by | Nov 6, 2020 | 2020 Gift Guide, For the Shutterbug

Yukari Chikura: Zaido
Yukari Chikura
$83.00

Following a series of tragedies, including her father’s sudden death, her own critical accident and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Chikura recalls how her father came to her in a dream with the words: “Go to the village hidden deep in the snow where I lived a long time ago.” With camera in hand she set off on a pilgrimage to northeast Japan.

There, Chikura discovered Zaido, where inhabitants from different villages gather on the second day of each new year and conduct a ritual dance to induce good fortune. The performers dedicate their dance to the gods and undergo severe purifications.

Combining snowscapes that border on abstraction with images of the intricate masks and costumes of Zaido, Chikura depicts the cultural diversity of the participants and their common bond in creating collective memory and ensuring the survival of this ritual.

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Arthur Elgort: Ballet

by | Nov 6, 2020 | 2020 Gift Guide, For the Shutterbug

Arthur Elgort: Ballet
Arthur Elgort
$50.00

Following his career-spanning monograph The Big Picture, Arthur Elgort pays homage to his first love and eternal muse in this new collection of photographs. Through Elgort’s lens we encounter ballet not onstage but behind the scenes where the hard work is done. On this journey through the hallways and rehearsal spaces of some of the world’s most distinguished ballet schools, including the New York City Ballet and the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, we see previously unpublished images of legends such as Balanchine, Baryshnikov and Lopatkina. The perfection of the prima ballerina disappears in these quiet photographs where the viewer is able to witness the individual dancers’ natural glamor as they work to perfect their craft.
“From the first day I worked with Arthur,” writes the hairstylist Christiaan Houtenbos, “I realized his prism is dance. He took its languid, exuberant perfection as his inspiration when he found himself a young Turk in fashion photography. It has to this day served as his anchor.” Elgort’s snapshot style allows the pain and pleasure of one of the world’s most beloved forms of expressive dance to be seen with beauty.
Arthur Elgort, born in 1940 in New York City, has photographed the world’s most beautiful and talented people for over 40 years. He has published seven books to date, including Personal Fashion (1983), The Swan Prince (1987), Models Manual (1993) and Camera Ready (1997). In addition to Ballet, Edition 7L has published Camera Crazy (2004) and The Big Picture (2014).

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William Eggleston: Election Eve

by | Nov 5, 2020 | 2020 Gift Guide, For the Political Junkie, For the Shutterbug

William Eggleston: Election Eve
William Eggleston
$80

In 1977 William Eggleston released Election Eve, his first and most elaborate artist’s book, containing 100 original prints in two leatherbound volumes, housed in a linen box. It was published by Caldecot Chubb in New York in an edition of only five, and has since become Eggleston’s rarest collectible book. This new Steidl edition recreates the full original sequence of photos in a single volume, making it available to the wider public for the first time.

Election Eve contains images made in October 1976 during Eggleston’s pilgrimage from Memphis to the small town of Plains, Georgia, the home of Jimmy Carter who in November 1976 was elected 39th President of the United States. Eggleston began photographing even before he left Memphis and depicted the surrounding countryside and villages of Sumter Country, before he reached Plains. His photos of lonesome roads, train tracks, cars, gas stations and houses are mostly empty of people and form an intuitive, unsettling portrait of Plains, starkly different from the idealized image of it subsequently promoted by the media. The book includes a preface by Hollywood screenwriter (The Mummy, 1999), director (Gotham, 1988) and author Lloyd Fonvielle.

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Humans

by | Nov 3, 2020 | 2020 Gift Guide, For the Shutterbug, For the Traveler

Humans
Brandon Stanton
$35.00

Brandon Stanton created Humans of New York in 2010. What began as a photographic census of life in New York City, soon evolved into a storytelling phenomenon. A global audience of millions began following HONY daily. Over the next several years, Stanton broadened his lens to include people from across the world.

Traveling to more than forty countries, he conducted interviews across continents, borders, and language barriers. Humans is the definitive catalogue of these travels. The faces and locations will vary from page to page, but the stories will feel deeply familiar. Told with candor and intimacy, Humans will resonate with readers across the globe―providing a portrait of our shared experience.

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