p h o t o    l i b r a r y

"Images of Women" by Peter Lindbergh

From the world's foremost photographer of women comes this splendid celebration of female form and mystique--a massive collection that spans 300 pages and covers every aspect of Peter Lindbergh's impressive body of work. Nearly every beautiful woman of the past two decades has posed for Peter Lindbergh, from supermodels to movie stars. This splendid monograph reprsents the definitive collection of Lindbergh's considerable oeuvre: classic fashion photographs, arresting candids, portraits of female celebrities--including Madonna, Isabella Rossellini, Sharon Stone, Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, Darryl Hannah--and of course his signature shots of the world's supermodels.

Incredibly powerful images of femininity. See a snap of it here

"Raised by wolves" by Jim Goldberg

A large-format book about runaway and thrown-away kids, Jim Goldberg's Raised by Wolves sets new standards for documentary photography. Developing approaches employed in his landmark 1985 book Rich and Poor, Goldberg spent months on Los Angeles and San Francisco streets photographing and interviewing his adolescent subjects. Interviews with social workers, police and, most of all, with the adolescent subjects themselves lend dimension to this harrowing picture of American street life and the adversarial institutional culture surrounding it. At the book's heart lie two brilliant but doomed adolescents, Tweeky Dave and Echo; their sad romance lends enormous emotional impact to the book.

"John Goodman's 'The Times Square Gym' is the best book about boxing that I've ever seen. It is very reminiscent of the great Brodovitch's book 'Ballet' in the way it captures the atmosphere of the boxer's world. You can almost hear the thud of the gloves hitting each other and smell the smoke and perspiration. All in all this is a wonderful accomplishment."

Robert Mapplethorpe's reputation was based on a body of black and white prints, including portraits and sexual imagery. From the start of his career he was working with colour, making collages and then polaroids and colour photographs, few of which have been seen. "Altars" presents this colour work, together with his final work which consisted of unique prints, elaborately framed and mounted on multiple coloured panels. This is a companion volume to "Mapplethorpe".

The book, which overflows with photographs and includes only the briefest amount of text, is arranged thematically to effectively highlight the wide scope of images even within a narrow field.
This book is in part a product of the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the agency's work. Most of the photographs are from the 1990s, a decade that presented photographers with an unprecedented period of undeclared wars, ethnic cleansings, and other horrible conflicts in such obscure places as the Balkans, Chechnya, and Somalia. Normal life may seem impossible in such regions, but the photographers continually capture attempts at normalcy. For instance, in one photograph a young woman in white lies bleeding in the street, her dog dead beside her--both victims of random shelling in downtown Sarajevo. Another photograph shows a black youth enjoying a trampoline in Soweto, while in the next one a boy lies dead after an "anti-violence" demonstration--also in Soweto. Not since the Family of Man exhibition of the 1950s has there been such a chance to examine the world through the lenses of the great photographers of this century. Marlene Chamberlain
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From his earliest years as a photographer Cartier-Bresson roamed the world in his quest to record the people, places, and scenery that fascinated him most. This new book brings together for the first time a collection of Cartier-Bresson's Mexican photograps, taken on two separate visits in 1934 and 1964. 53 duotone photos.

Henri Cartier-Bresson's amazing feat as a photographer is the ability to follow his heart and the keen vision of his mind and eye in each photograph. His subjects are only part of the image in the viewfinder, whose composition he sometimes arranges with geometric precision. Many of his best photographs also have startlingly broad political and sociological connotations, which gives the ordinary subjects extraordinary dignity, even grandeur. Europeans is filled with these images, which are often visually complex as well: a 1952 picture depicts a poor immigrant tilling hard ground while in the distance the prosperity-propelled factories of industry belch smoke into already smoggy skies. This is not just a picture of a poor man, or industrial power, or the contrast between the two. It's an open question about the meaning of life, with an anonymous no one--just another human being--at its center. Another wonderful image in this collection is a 1954 shot of a handsome soldier ogling two pretty women. It shows that even at the bleakest moments in their social history, Muscovites were not immune to pheromonal persuasion.

Very good.

"The Americans" by Robert Frank

Armed with a camera and a fresh cache of film and bankrolled by a Guggenheim Foundation grant, Robert Frank crisscrossed the United States during 1955 and 1956. The photographs he brought back form a portrait of the country at the time and hint at its future. He saw the hope of the future in the faces of a couple at city hall in Reno, Nevada, and the despair of the present in a grimy roofscape. He saw the roiling racial tension, glamour, and beauty, and, perhaps because Frank himself was on the road, he was particularly attuned to Americans' love for cars.

The Man in the Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand

Each image is filled with detail, rich gestures and complex motifs. The best have a certain mystery and evocative power.

Work are still in progress here, since I enjoy other dozens of photo books. Just need the time to build this hopefully useful web page...

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