Photography

Whether it's diamond-encrusted grills, oversized “truck” style chains, bust-down Rolex and Patek Philippe watches or a Tiffany necklace, jewelry is a cornerstone of hip-hop culture. Glittering, blinged-out jewels are the shining statement of a collective identity: unapologetic, charismatic, and street savvy.

Spanning the history of hip-hop jewelry, from the 1980s to today, Ice Cold: A Hip-Hop Jewelry History is a stunning compilation of storytelling and visuals. Hundreds of extraordinary images of every major hip-hop artist on record celebrate how “Ice” has become a proclamation of identity and self-expression.

Starting with Run-DMC’s gold Adidas pendants and Eric B. & Rakim’s ostentatious dookie rope chains and Mercedes medallions, the jewelry then transforms from street style into a booming design culture. The hip-hop tradition of “show up and show out” reaches new heights with artists like Pharrell Williams, Jay-Z, Gucci Mane, and Cardi B, whose over-the-top pieces integrate unique pop culture references, unconventional materials, and enduring collaborations with artists like Takashi Murakami.

Author Vikki Tobak reveals – in great detail – the work of pioneering jewelers such as Tito Caicedo of Manny’s, Eddie Plein, and Jacob the Jeweler as well as newer artisans such as Avianne & Co., Ben Baller/IF & Co., Greg Yuna, Johnny Dang, Eliantte, and many more.

Ice Cold is a treasure trove of dazzling, inspirational style, featuring the work of leading photographers, including Wolfgang Tillmans, Janette Beckman, Jamel Shabazz, Timothy White, Gillian Laub, David LaChapelle, Danny Clinch, Chris Buck, Mike Miller, Phil Knott, Raven B. Varona, Al Pereira, Albert Watson and many more.

A foreword by hip-hop superstar Slick Rick and essays by A$AP Ferg, LL COOL J, Kevin “Coach K’ Lee and Pierre “P” Thomas of Quality Control Music take us on personal journeys into their jewelry universe.

Ice Cold goes beyond the ostentatious bling to reveal a transformative story that is loud and proud.

For more than half a century, Annie Leibovitz has been taking culture-defining photographs. Her portraits of politicians, performers, athletes, businesspeople, and royalty make up a gallery of our time, imprinted on our collective consciousness by both the singularity of their subjects and Leibovitz’s inimitable style.

The catalogue to an installation at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France, Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970–1983 returns to Leibovitz’s origins. It begins with a moment of artistic revelation: the spontaneous shot that made Leibovitz think she could transition from painting to photography as her area of study at the San Francisco Art Institute. The meticulously and personally curated collection, including contact sheets and Polaroids, provides a vivid document both of Leibovitz’s development as a young artist and of a pivotal era.

Leibovitz’s reportage-like photo stories for Rolling Stone, which she began working for when she was still a student, record such heady political, cultural, and counter-cultural developments as the Vietnam War protests, the launch of Apollo 17, the presidential campaign of 1972, Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, and the Rolling Stones on tour in 1975. Then, as now, Leibovitz won the trust of the prominent and famous, and the book’s pages are animated by many familiar faces, among them Muhammad Ali, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ken Kesey, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Didion, and Debbie Harry, as well as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, captured in their now iconic embrace just hours before Lennon was assassinated.

Throughout the book, the portraits and reportage are linked to images of cars, driving, and even a series on California highway patrolmen. In many ways, it’s a celebration of life on the road—the frenetic rhythms, the chance encounters, the meditative opportunities. And with its rich archival aspects, it is also a tribute to an earlier time and a young photographer enmeshed in a culture that was itself in transition.

Angela Merkel: an era ends—and with it a project unique in the world. Between 1991 and 2021 this remarkable politician was photographed year after year, with a short hiatus, by Herlinde Koelbl. Each time they came together, a headshot and a three-quarter-length shot were taken before a plain white background; images that document with authenticity the astonishing ascent of a 37-year-old political outsider to one of the most powerful politicians in the free world. This long-term photo study strikingly shows how the traces of power changed Merkel, who at the start of this extraordinary photographic ritual was still almost 15 years away from becoming the first woman chancellor of Germany.

What did she have to learn, how did she have to change in order to persist, indeed to survive politically? How did politics impact her private life? The renowned photo artist succeeded in capturing Merkel’s human side through other means apart from her camera lens. Usually extremely reserved, the politician answered Koelbl’s questions with such surprising openness and intimacy that, according to the Guardian, the two women share “one of the most unusual relationships in modern politics.” Herlinde Koelbl presents a documentary portrait in words and images, of a kind that does not exist for any other global leader. It travels through time, spanning the Angela Merkel epoch—from the first year to the last. It is the portrait of an extreme physical and psychological transformation, and the written record of a unique rapport.

Greatest of All Time: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali is not just a book; it is a testament to the extraordinary life of one of the world’s most famous athletes. GOAT delves into the intricate layers of Ali’s existence, tracing Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.’s journey from his humble beginnings navigating segregation and financial hardship in Louisville, Kentucky, to his evolution into the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali.

Essays by those closest to him reveal stories behind monumental fights like those with Sonny Liston, the Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman, and Thrilla in Manila against Joe Frazier. The book also explores Ali’s signature fighting style, which, when paired with his rapper-style wit, positioned him as a charismatic figure inside and outside the ring.

Beyond boxing, GOAT weaves together Ali’s historic moments with his resilience against discrimination and his determination to confront racial inequities. His triumph at the 1960 Rome Olympics was marred by hostility, underscoring the racial tensions he faced; Ali boldly challenged these prevailing biases. The boxer’s embrace of Islam became a cornerstone of his moral standards, guiding his principles against racism, inequality, and undue violence, with the latter informing his staunch opposition to the Vietnam War.

Interspersed between these accounts are thousands of historical documents and images of Ali, including the boxer’s documentarian-turned-confidant Howard Bingham’s intimate snapshots, Neil Leifer and Flip Schulke’s iconic pictures, and Hank Kaplan’s archival contributions. Stills from Leon Gast's film ‘When We Were Kings’, which told the story of Ali’s pivotal 1974 fight, are also included in the volume.

GOAT is a heartfelt homage to a boxing legend, exploring Muhammad Ali’s indomitable spirit and celebrating his enduring impact on civil rights, sports, and culture.

Arranged alphabetically, this biographical encyclopedia features every major photographer of the 20th century alongside her or his most significant monographs.

From the earliest representatives of classical Modernism right up to the present day, Photographers A–Z celebrates those photographers who have distinguished themselves with important publications or exhibitions, and who have made a significant contribution to the culture of the photographic image. The entries include photographers from North America and Europe as well as from Japan, Latin America, Africa, and China.

Richly illustrated with facsimiles from books and magazines, the collection also features photographers working in “applied” areas, whose work is regarded as photographic art. Star turns include Julius Shulman, Terry Richardson, Cindy Sherman, and David LaChapelle.

Photographer, writer, publisher, and curator Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was a visionary far ahead of his time. Around the turn of the 20th century, he founded the Photo-Secession, a progressive movement concerned with advancing the creative possibilities of photography, and by 1903 began publishing Camera Work, an avant-garde magazine devoted to voicing the ideas, both in images and words, of the Photo-Secession. Camera Work was the first photo journal whose focus was visual, rather than technical, and its illustrations were of the highest quality hand-pulled photogravure printed on Japanese tissue. This book brings together all photographs from the journal’s 50 issues.

Artist, diarist, collector, and writer Peter Beard (1938-2020) fashioned his life into a work of art; the illustrated diaries he kept from a young age evolved into a serious career as an artist and earned him a central position in the international art world. He collaborated with Francis Bacon and Salvador Dalí, he made diaries with Andy Warhol, worked on books with scientists like Dr. Norman Borlaug, Dr. Richard Laws, and Alistair Graham, and toured with Truman Capote, Terry Southern, and the Rolling Stones—all of whom are brought to life, literally and figuratively, in his work. He delved into the world of fashion for its beautiful women, taking Vogue stars like Veruschka to Africa and bringing new ones back to the U.S. with him.

After spending time in Kenya and striking up a friendship with the author Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) in the early 1960s, Beard bought 50 acres next to her farm with the stipulation that he would film and write about the land and its flora and fauna. He witnessed the dawn of Kenya’s population explosion, which challenged finite resources and stressed animal populations—including the starving elephants of Tsavo dying by the tens of thousands in a wasteland of eaten trees. So he documented what he saw—with diaries, photographs, and collages. He went against the wind in publishing unique and sometimes shocking books of these works, including The End of the Game. The corpses were laid bare; the facts carefully recorded, sometimes in type and often by hand. Beard used his photographs as a canvas onto which he superimposed multi-layered contact sheets, ephemera, found objects, newspaper clippings that are elaborately embellished with meticulous handwriting, old-master inspired drawings, and often swaths of animal blood used as paint.

Some call it the American obsession, but men everywhere recognize the hypnotic allure of a large and shapely breast. In The Big Book of Breasts, Dian Hanson explores the origins of mammary madness through three decades of natural big-breasted nudes. Starting with the World War II Bosom-Mania that spawned Russ Meyer, Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw and Frederick’s of Hollywood, Dian guides you over, around, and in between the dangerous curves of infamous models including Michelle Angelo, Candy Barr, Virginia Bell, Joan Brinkman, Lorraine Burnett, Lisa De Leeuw, Uschi Digard, Candye Kane, Jennie Lee, Sylvia McFarland, Margaret Middleton, Paula Page, June Palmer, Roberta Pedon, Rosina Revelle, Candy Samples, Tempest Storm, Linda West, June Wilkinson, Julie Wills, and dozens more, including Guinness World Record holder Norma Stitz, possessor of the World`s Largest Natural Breasts.

The 396 pages of this book contain the most beautiful and provocative photos ever created of these iconic women, plus nine original interviews, including the first with Tempest Storm and Uschi Digard in over a decade, and the last with Candy Barr before her untimely death in 2005. In a world where silicone is now the norm, these spectacular real women stand as testament that nature knows best.

Samuel Johnson famously said that: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” London’s remarkable history, architecture, landmarks, streets, style, cool, swagger, and stalwart residents are pictured in compelling photographs sourced from a wide array of archives around the world. London is a vast sprawling metropolis, constantly evolving and growing, yet throughout its complex past and shifting present, the humor, unique character, and bulldog spirit of the people have stayed constant. From Victorian London to the Swinging ’60s; from the foggy cobbled streets to the architectural masterpieces of the millennium; from royal weddings to raves, from the charm of the East End to the wonders of Westminster; from the power to glory: this book salutes all those Londoners, their city, and its history.

“Nothing compares to the Alps” wrote the great French historian Jules Michelet in 1868. At the very heart of Europe, the gigantic Alpine mountain range includes some of the most grandiose natural sites in the world, such as Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, the Matterhorn, and their glaciers. Tourism began in the late 1800s and grew tremendously over the next centuries, especially with the rise of winter sports. This book offers a charming tour of a bygone era, when the first mountain trains and cog railways were carrying men in lederhosen and women in long dresses to the foot of the glacier, when local guides accompanied tourists riding on mules; a time when the first alpinists were considered mad, and skiers were a curiosity.

Through photochromes, photographs, and color postcards of the 19th and 20th centuries, through travel posters and tourist brochures, we cross passes such as the Mont-Cenis, Simplon, Brenner, and St. Gotthard; climb Mont Blanc, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, and the Dolomites; marvel at crystal-clear lakes in Switzerland, Italy, Bavaria, and Slovenia; explore Tyrol, the Via Mala, and the Engadin; and spend the winter season at grand hotels in Gstaad, Grindelwald, Davos, St. Moritz, and Cortina. This is a journey dotted with literary quotes by travel writers that evokes these happy days of pristine snow and untouched slopes.

Follow photographer Frédéric Chaubin as he embarks on a unique, century-spanning journey through Europe. Featuring images of more than 200 buildings in 21 countries, Stone Age presents the history and architecture of the most dramatic medieval castles of the continent in an unprecedented collection.

Building on the success of his foray into Soviet design with CCCP, Chaubin once again documents the afterlife of highly rational structures that seem out of place in a modern-day world. Precursors of Brutalism, these castles value function over form and epitomize the raw materials and shapes that would go on to define so much of architectural history.

Shot on film with a Linhof view camera, the collection is the outcome of five years of travel and investigation. Complete with a practical map and explanatory essay, its castles tell the story of 400 years, unfolding through the feudal Middle Ages into the 15th century.

A photographic study of decay as much as endurance, Stone Age traces the history of some of these singular structures that continue to enchant their audiences today and that occupy a distinct, mystical place in our collective imagination.

Early astronomers, drawn to Mars's fiery glow in the night sky, named the planet after their god of war. In the centuries since, Mars has captivated humankind as a source of endless speculation and a beacon of hope for its potential habitability. Through six decades of NASA’s pioneering research missions, the mysteries of the red planet have been gradually uncovered, revealing a world not so unlike our own that likely once supported life.

See the earliest close-up images of Mars taken by the Mariner 4 spacecraft in 1965—the first ever captured of another planet—along with historical illustrations from an era when curiosity outpaced scientific progress. Science and art collide as NASA’s later orbiter missions capture aerial views of ancient riverbeds, polar ice caps, dust storms, vast canyons, and towering volcanoes in an endlessly varied landscape. As they traverse Mars’s rugged surface, NASA’s rovers have operated as mechanical extensions of humankind for the past 25 years, drilling holes, searching for traces of water, and marveling at mountain ranges and panoramic sunsets.

Through hundreds of cutting-edge photographs from NASA's extensive archives, we join their scientists in the ongoing quest to better understand Mars. Essays by NASA’s former Chief Scientist James L. Green and JPL Chief Engineer Rob Manning provide an in-depth look at the history of Martian exploration and the challenges of preparing for these groundbreaking missions. Captions by planetary scientist Emily Lakdawalla skillfully illuminate each image's content and technical context, and a foreword by renowned poet Nikki Giovanni and an introduction by curator Margaret A. Weitekamp reflect on Mars’s significance in our cultural imagination.

From a distant enigma to a tangible frontier whose every grain of sand we can now observe, this volume celebrates the extraordinary progress NASA has made, bringing us closer than ever to understanding our neighboring world.

In every crisis situation, children are the greatest victims. Physically weak, they are often the first to succumb to hunger, disease, and dehydration. Innocent to the workings and failings of the world, they are unable to understand why there is danger, why there are people who want to hurt them, or why they must leave, perhaps quite suddenly, and abandon their schools, their friends, and their home.

In this companion series to Exodus, Sebastião Salgado presents 90 portraits of the youngest exiles, migrants, and refugees. His subjects are from different countries, victims to different crises, but they are all on the move, and all under the age of 15. Through his extensive refugee project, what struck Salgado about these boys and girls was not only the implicit innocence in their suffering but also their radiant reserves of energy and enthusiasm, even in the most miserable of circumstances. From roadside refuges in Angola and Burundi to city slums in Brazil and sprawling camps in Lebanon and Iraq, the children remained children: they were quick to laugh as much as to cry, they played soccer, splashed in dirty water, got up to mischief with friends, and were typically ecstatic at the prospect of being photographed.

For Salgado, the exuberance presented a curious paradox. How can a smiling child represent circumstances of deprivation and despair? What he noticed, though, was that when he asked the children to line up, and took their portraits one by one, the group giddiness would fade. Face to face with his camera, each child would become much more serious. They would look at him not as part of a noisy crowd, but as an individual. Their poses would become earnest. They looked into the lens with a sudden intensity, as if abruptly taking stock of themselves and their situation. And in the expression of their eyes, or the nervous fidget of small hands, or the way frayed clothes hung off painfully thin frames, Salgado found he had a refugee portfolio that deserved a forum of its own.

The photographs do not try to make a statement about their subjects’ feelings, or to spell out the particulars of their health, educational, and housing deficits. Rather, the collection allows 90 children to look out at the viewer with all the candor of youth and all the uncertainty of their future. Beautiful, proud, pensive, and sad, they stand before the camera for a moment in their lives, but ask questions that haunt for years to come. Will they remain in exile? Will they always know an enemy? Will they grow up to forgive or seek revenge? Will they grow up at all?

The Big Book of Breasts was an immediate best seller when it debuted in 2006. Its 396 pages introduced readers to the top naturally bountiful nude models of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, amazingly mammiferous beauties including Virginia Bell, Roberta Pedon, Mary Waters, Keli Stewart and many more. The one and only complaint was that there was no biographical information on these curvaceous cuties, no lists of their magazines and films to give readers a more intimate connection. We listened, and The Bigger Book of Breasts answers! Not only are there more pages with all new photos of your favorite big breast models of the ’50s through ’70s, there are also personal profiles for each and every one. Which model married comedian Richard Pryor? Who inspired Russ Meyer’s first film? Where are those free Mary Waters loops? And yes, Roberta Pedon is alive and well! Further updating the “Bigger” theme, we added the 12 most incredible, natural, and provocative breast models of today, gathered from across the world by Berlin-based photographer, Bernd Daktari Lorenz. Nadine Jansen, Luna Amor, Miosotis Claribel and the incredible Hitomi Tanaka prove breasts are bigger than ever, and bigger is beautiful, for both breasts and books. Wrap it up with stunning photos of our original cover girl Kelly Madison and The Bigger Book of Breasts is a bigger treat for all.

Since her first photographs in the late ’70s, Bettina Rheims has defied the predictable. From her series on Pigalle strippers (1980) to her cycle on the life of Jesus in I.N.R.I. (1998), from Chanel commercials to Gender Studies (2011), her work has shaken up traditional codes of representation and pushed restlessly at the breaking point between two great human preoccupations: beauty and imperfection.

This Rheims retrospective showcases more than 300 photographs from 35 years of daring, often defiant photography. Personally selected and assembled by Rheims, the collection brings together renowned series such as Chambre close, Héroïnes, and Rose, c’est Paris. Spanning commercial work and artistic series, the retrospective impresses with each turn of the page, as much for the strength of each image as for the thrilling variety of Rheims’s subjects and aesthetics. With equal attention to anonymous subjects cast in the street as to global celebrities including Kate Moss, Madonna, Monica Bellucci, Claudia Schiffer, and Naomi Campbell, the book showcases Rheims’s particular interest in female fragility and strength, and of the magic encounter between model and artist which disrupts codes of so-called eroticism to build up a new image system for womanhood.

This tome is the most comprehensive visual history of surfing to date, marking a major cultural event as much as a publication. Following three and a half years of meticulous research, it brings together hundreds of images to chart the evolution of surfing as a sport, a lifestyle, and a philosophy.

The book is arranged into five chronological chapters, tracing surfing culture from the first recorded European contact in 1778 by Captain James Cook to the global and multi-platform phenomenon of today. Utilizing institutions, collections, and photographic archives from around the world, and with accompanying essays by the world’s top surf journalists, it celebrates the sport on and off the water, as a community of 20 million practitioners and countless more devotees, and as a leading influence on fashion, film, art, and music.

An unrivaled tribute to the breadth, complexity, and richness of surfing, this book is a must-have for any serious player on the surfing scene and anybody who aspires to the surfing lifestyle. As one surfing scribe has declared, “There has never been a book like this, and there will never be another one again.”

“An amazing book…all the iconic photographs that people took of The Champ.” —Barack ObamaGREATEST OF ALL TIME: A TRIBUTE TO MUHAMMAD ALI is a book with the power, courage, depth, creativity, and dazzling energy of its extraordinary subject. Slimmed down from the heavyweight Collector’s Edition, this bantamweight edition is smaller in size, but pulls no punches on its expertise, passion, and insight on The Champ. With thousands of images, including photography, art, and memorabilia and two gatefold sequences, the book pays vivid tribute to The Greatest both in and outside of the ring. Original essays and five decades’ worth of interviews and writing explore the courage, convictions, and extraordinary image-building that made Ali one of the most recognizable and inspirational individuals on the planet, an icon not only as an extraordinary athlete, but also as an impassioned advocate of social justice, interfaith understanding, and peace.

In the 1980s, fashion wanted to make a statement and found in legendary British fashion photographer David Bailey its perfect chronicler. After Bailey shaped the style of the Swinging Sixties, fashion in the eighties posed a new challenge: brighter colours, higher glamour, statuesque models, extreme makeup, spandex, lycra, jumpsuits, power dressing, big hair, and as Grace Coddington puts it in her introduction, “jackets with padded shoulders over the shortest mini-skirts and dangerously high-heeled shoes.”

Eighties compiles Bailey’s era-defining fashion photography from the pages of Vogue Italia, Vogue Paris, Tatler, and countless others. Featuring couture, catwalk, and ready-to-wear collections by the epoch’s seminal designers, including Azzedine Alaïa, Comme des Garçons, Guy Laroche, Missoni, Stephen Jones, Valentino, and Yves Saint Laurent, the book stands as a testament to a decade that dismantled hierarchies of taste to reintroduce fun and sex into fashion, reminding us that we need not think of either as dirty words. Here, the jewellery sparkles, the silks shimmer, and the suits sprawl. The most beautiful are captured at their most playful, invincible, and provocatively sexy. We see fabled 1980s icons and beauties: Catherine Bailey, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Catherine Deneuve, Princess Diana, Jerry Hall, Marie Helvin, Grace Jones, Kelly LeBrock, Christy Turlington, Tina Turner, and many more.

The cultural resonances of the 1980s present on our screens, runways, and concert stages make today ideal for recontextualising its enduring legacy of maximalism and excess. Eighties offers a unique opportunity to do so with David Bailey as a guide, and interpreter, who’s never afraid to wink at his audience. As Bailey says in his foreword, “The eighties turned out to be magic.” Here, that magic comes alive.

“What is it about a dull yellow metal that drives men to abandon their homes, sell their belongings and cross a continent in order to risk life, limbs and sanity for a dream?” – Sebastião Salgado

When Sebastião Salgado was finally authorized to visit Serra Pelada in September 1986, having been blocked for six years by Brazil’s military authorities, he was ill-prepared to take in the extraordinary spectacle that awaited him on this remote hilltop on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Before him opened a vast hole, some 200 meters wide and deep, teeming with tens of thousands of barely-clothed men. Half of them carried sacks weighing up to 40 kilograms up wooden ladders, the others leaping down muddy slopes back into the cavernous maw. Their bodies and faces were the color of ochre, stained by the iron ore in the earth they had excavated.

After gold was discovered in one of its streams in 1979, Serra Pelada evoked the long-promised El Dorado as the world’s largest open-air gold mine, employing some 50,000 diggers in appalling conditions. Today, Brazil’s wildest gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regrets—and Sebastião Salgado’s photographs.

Color dominated the glossy pages of magazines when Salgado shot these images. Black and white was a risky path, but the Serra Pelada portfolio would mark a return to the grace of monochrome photography, following a tradition whose masters, from Edward Weston and Brassaï to Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, had defined the early and mid-20th century. When Salgado’s images reached The New York Times Magazine, something extraordinary happened: there was complete silence. “In my entire career at The New York Times,” recalled photo editor Peter Howe, “I never saw editors react to any set of pictures as they did to Serra Pelada.”

Today, with photography absorbed by the art world and digital manipulation, Salgado’s portfolio holds a biblical quality and projects an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. The mine at Serra Pelada has been long closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.

This book gathers Salgado’s complete Serra Pelada portfolio in museum-quality reproductions, accompanied by a foreword by the photographer and an essay by Alan Riding.INSTITUTO TERRAFounded in 1998 at Aimorés in the state of Minas Gerais, Instituto Terra is the culmination of Lélia Wanick Salgado and Sebastião Salgado’s lifelong activism and work as cultural documentarians. Through a scientific program of planting and raising saplings, the organization has performed a miraculous reforestation of the once infertile region and furthered the Salgados’ mission of reversing the damage done to our planet. TASCHEN is proud to reach carbon zero status through our continued partnership.Also available in a signed and limited Collector’s Edition

Album art is indelibly linked to our collective musical memories; when you think of your favorite albums, you picture the covers. Many photographers, illustrators, and art directors have become celebrities from their album artworks—the best examples of which will go down in history as permanent fixtures in popular culture. Paying tribute to this art form, Rock Covers brings you a compilation of more than 750 remarkable album covers, from legendary to rare record releases. Artists as varied as Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd, The Cure, Iron Maiden, and Sonic Youth are gathered together in celebration of the cover art that defined their albums and their cult status. Each cover is accompanied by a fact sheet listing the art director, photographer or illustrator, year, label, and more, while nearly 250 records that marked particular turning points for a band, an artist, or the music genre, are highlighted with short descriptions. This far-reaching catalog of visualized rock is contextualized with insider interviews with five professionals who shaped the history of rock, and by top-10 record lists from ten leading rock collectors.

With investigations into everything from black holes to exoplanets, the Hubble Telescope has changed not only the face of astronomy but also our very sense of being in the universe. On the 30th anniversary of its launch into low-earth orbit, this updated edition of Expanding Universe presents 30 brand new images, unveiling more hidden gems from the Hubble’s archives.

Ultra-high resolution and taken with almost no background light, these pictures have answered some of the most compelling questions of time and space while also revealing new mysteries, like the strange “dark energy” that sees the universe expanding at an ever-accelerating rate.

The collection is accompanied by an essay from photography critic Owen Edwards and an interview with Zoltan Levay, who explains how the pictures are composed. Veteran Hubble astronauts Charles F. Bolden, Jr. and John Mace Grunsfeld also offer their insights on Hubble’s legacy and future space exploration.

The history of photography began nearly 200 years ago, but only relatively recently has it been fully recognized as a medium in its own right. Cologne’s Museum Ludwig was the first museum of contemporary art to devote a substantial section to international photography. The L. Fritz Gruber collection, from which this book is drawn, is one of the most important in Germany and one of the most representative anywhere in the world, constituting the core of the museum’s holdings.

This book provides a fascinating insight into the collection’s rich diversity; from conceptual art to abstraction to reportage, all of the major movements and genres are represented via a vast selection of the 20th century’s most remarkable photographs. From Ansel Adams to Piet Zwart, over 850 works are presented in alphabetical order by photographer, with descriptive texts and photographers’ biographical details, providing a comprehensive and indispensable overview of 20th-century photography.

Decades’ worth of images have been distilled down to 512 pages of photographs in this ultimate retrospective collection of Nobuyoshi Araki's work, selected by the artist himself.

First published as a Limited Edition and now back in a new format to celebrate TASCHEN’s 40th anniversary, the curation delves deep into Araki’s best-known imagery: Tokyo street scenes; faces and foods; colorful, sensual flowers; female genitalia; and the Japanese art of kinbaku, or bondage. As girls lay bound but defiant and glistening petals assume suggestive shapes, Araki plays constantly with patterns of subjugation and emancipation, death and desire and with the slippage between serene image and shock.

Describing his bondage photographs as “a collaboration between the subject and the photographer”, Araki seeks to come closer to his female subjects through photography, emphasizing the role of spoken conversation between himself and the model. In his native Japan, he has attained cult status for many women who feel liberated by his readiness to photograph the expression of their desire.

Virtually unparalleled in scope and spanning more than five decades, the photography of visionary Helmut Newton (1920–2004) reached millions through publication in magazines like Vogue and Elle. His oeuvre transcended genres, bringing elegance, style, and voyeurism to fashion, portrait, and glamour photography through a body of work that remains as inimitable as it is unrivaled. Having mastered the art of fashion photography early in his career, Newton’s shoots invariably went beyond standard practice, blurring the lines between reality and illusion. Newton’s clear aesthetic pervades all areas of his work, particularly fashion, portraiture, and nude photography. Women take center stage – with subjects such as Catherine Deneuve, Liz Taylor, and Charlotte Rampling. Moving beyond traditional narrative approaches, Newton’s fashion photography is imbued not only with luxurious elegance and subtle seduction, but also cultural references and a surprising sense of humor.

During the 1990s, Newton shot for the German, American, Italian, French, and Russian editions of Vogue, primarily in and around Monte Carlo where he was living from 1981 onwards. Transforming locations like his own garage into starkly contrasting or particularly minimalist theatrical stages, Newton would often portray the eccentric lives of the beautiful and rich, full of eroticism and elegance, in unconventional scenarios. He made use of and simultaneously questioned visual clichés, at times tinged with self-irony or mockery, but always full of empathy.

Helmut Newton. Legacy showcases highlights from one of the most published bodies of work in photography, including numerous rediscovered images. A prolific image maker and genuine visionary, this book celebrates Newton’s lasting influence on modern photography and visual art to this day.

Whether you’re thinking of getting a tattoo or just want to see to what lengths others have gone in decorating their bodies, this is the book to check out.

1000 Tattoos explores the history of the art worldwide via designs and photos—from 19th-century engravings to tribal body art, from circus ladies of the ’20s to classic biker designs.

From the first known photograph taken in Los Angeles to its most recent sweeping vistas, this photographic tribute to the City of Angels provides a fascinating journey through the city’s cultural, political, industrial, and sociological history. It traces the city’s development from the 1880s real estate boom, through the early days of Hollywood and the urban sprawl of the late 20th century, right up to the present day. With over 500 images, L.A. is shown emerging from a desert wasteland to become a vast palm-studded urban metropolis.

Events that made world news—including two Olympics, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, and the Rodney King riots—reveal a city of many dimensions. The entertainment capital of the world, Hollywood, and its celebrities are showcased along with many other notable residents, personalities, architects, artists, and musicians. The city’s pop cultural movements, its music, surfing, health food fads, gangs, and hot rods are included, as are its notorious crimes and criminals. This book depicts Los Angeles in all its glory and grit, via hundreds of freshly discovered images including those of Julius Shulman, Garry Winogrand, William Claxton and many other superb photographers, culled from major historical archives, museums, private collectors, and universities. These are given context and resonance through essays by renowned California historian Kevin Starr and Los Angeles literature expert David L. Ulin.

“The deeper the white man went into Africa, the faster the life flowed out of it, off the plains and out of the bush...vanishing in acres of trophies and hides and carcasses.” — Peter Beard

A landmark publication on Africa, The End of the Game combines Peter Beard’s salient text and remarkable photographs to document the overpopulation and starvation of tens of thousands of elephants, rhinos, and hippos in Kenya’s Tsavo lowlands and Uganda parklands in the 1960s and ’70s.

Researched and compiled over two decades, and updated several times since with new material, this is Beard’s essential book—a powerful and poignant testimony to the damage done by human intervention in Africa. His own images and writings are supplemented by historical photographs of, and quotations from, the enterprisers, explorers, missionaries, and big-game hunters whose quest for adventure and “progress” were to change the face of a continent: Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick Courteney Selous, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Philip Percival, J. A. Hunter, Ernest Hemingway, and J. H. Patterson.

This new edition includes an interview with conservationist Dr. Esmond Bradley Martin, as well as essays from previous editions by renowned writer Paul Theroux and ecologist Dr. Richard M. Laws, and contributions to the afterword by agronomist Dr. Norman Borlaug. Touching on such themes as distance from nature, density and stress, and loss of common sense, this seminal portrait is as resonant today, amid growing environmental crises, as it was a half century ago.

Paris is the City of Light in all its facets. In the 1920s La Ville des lumières gleams especially bright and becomes a magnet for creative people from around the world. This is the decade of Coco Chanel and Josephine Baker, Art Deco and Surrealism, café culture and cabaret. The most famous artists of the epoch, later called Classic Modernism, are in close contact and have lively exchanges with one another – including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, René Clair, Sonia Delaunay, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. The creative life and all its excesses flourish – bohème is the word for this way of living. Composers like Igor Stravinsky, writers like James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway and exiles from Eastern Europe like Constantin Brancuşi or Marc Chagall enrich the illustrious scene on Montparnasse. The pulsing bars and dance halls of Montmartre are captured by photographers André Kertesz and Brassaï. The French economy is booming and luxury department stores like La Samaritaine open their doors. Coco Chanel creates her own perfume and designs the little black dress.

More than 30 outstanding works of architecture, painting, sculpture, film, photography, design and fashion are presented, including Giacometti’s Surrealist Suspended Ball and the film Un chien andalou by Dalí and Buñuel. To this day, the burgeoning creativity, diversity and savoir vivre make Paris a place of longing for night owls, bons vivants and aficionados of the fine arts.

On a winter’s night in 1949 in New York City, young marketing student and budding photographer Walter Chandoha spotted a stray kitten in the snow, bundled it into his coat, and brought it home. Little did he know he had just met the muse that would determine the course of his life. Chandoha turned his lens on his new feline friend—which he named Loco—and was so inspired by the results that he started photographing kittens from a local shelter. These images marked the start of an extraordinary career that would span seven decades.

Long before the Internet and #catsofinstagram, Chandoha was enrapturing the public with his fuzzy subjects. From advertisements to greetings cards, jigsaw puzzles to pet-food packaging, his images combined a genuine affection for the creatures, a strong work ethic, and flawless technique. Chandoha’s trademark glamorous lighting, which made each cat’s fur stand out in sharp relief, would define the visual vocabulary of animal portraiture for generations and inspire such masters as Andy Warhol, who took cues from Chandoha’s charming portraits in his illustrated cat book.

Cats leaps into the archives of this genre-defining artist, spanning color studio and environmental portraits, black-and-white street photography, images from vintage cat shows, tender pictures that combine his children with cats and more. This is a fitting tribute not just to these beguiling creatures but also to a remarkable photographer who passed away in 2019 at the age of 98; and whose compassion can be felt in each and every frame.

In 2007 TASCHEN released The New Erotic Photography, followed in 2012 by The New Erotic Photography 2. Each book featured hundreds of fresh and provocative images from the world’s most intriguing erotic talents. Now the best of both books is available in The New Erotic Photography, featuring 62 photographers from 10 countries, exploring the global variations of erotic photography, as well as the evolution of photographic media over the last decade. We see film give way to digital, while those who persist with film are as likely to use Polaroids and primitive cameras like the Lomo and Holga as traditional SLRs.

The featured photographers include new names Gregory Bojorquez, Jo Schwab, Tomohide Ikeya, Frédéric Fontenoy, Andrew Pashis, and Jan Hronsky, as well as established artists Guido Argentini, Bruno Bisang, Eric Kroll, and the late Bob Carlos Clarke. Several outstanding women are also featured in this edition, including erotic film star Kimberly Kane, digital pioneer Natacha Merritt, heavy metal skateboarder Magdalena Wosinska, self-portraitist Jody Frost, and cover artist April-Lea Hutchinson. It all adds up to an awful lot of nudes for a tantalizingly low price.

The world appears to be divided into cat and dog lovers, but fortunately Walter Chandoha, the 20th century’s greatest pet photographer found himself happily in the middle. He loved these intriguing creatures equally for their unique beauty and individualism, and as subjects to photograph in a career spanning over 70 years. While working on his critically acclaimed TASCHEN book Cats, Chandoha handpicked his favorite dog photos for a potential follow-up title, putting into carefully marked boxes hundreds of contact sheets, prints, and color transparencies, many unseen for at least 50 years, and some totally unseen.

Chandoha sadly passed away in 2019 at the age of 98, but his legacy lives on in this dashing sequel dedicated to man’s best friend. “Walter Chandoha’s photographs of dogs are compelling not just because dogs have an inherent charm, but because the person behind the camera was a master of his craft,” writes the photography critic Jean Dykstra in the book’s introduction.

We see terriers, collies, beagles, bloodhounds, poodles, small dogs, big dogs, show dogs, working dogs, and many more, featuring over 60 breeds photographed in both black-and-white and glorious Kodachrome.

Spanning a 50-year period, the book is divided into six sections, and each chapter reveals Chandoha’s exceptional combination of technique, versatility, and soul. The opening chapter “In the Studio” focuses on formal portraiture; next it’s “Strike a Pose” where our canine companions ham it up for the camera; in “Out and About” they get to roam and play, often photographed with Chandoha’s own children; next it’s “Best in Show” with Chandoha using his reportage skills to capture vintage dog shows from the Mad Men era; in “Tails from the City,” the dogs are hitting the streets of mid-century New York; and in the closing chapter “Country Dogs,” it’s back to nature, the fields, and the beaches. Dogs is an unleashed photographic tribute to these lovable and loyal creatures.

The first-ever exhibition curated by Peter Lindbergh himself, shortly before his untimely death, Untold Stories at the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast served as a blank canvas for the photographer’s unrestrained vision and creativity. Given total artistic freedom, Lindbergh curated an uncompromising collection that sheds an unexpected light on his colossal oeuvre. This book offers an extensive, firsthand look at the highly personal collection.

Renowned the world over, Lindbergh’s images have left an indelible mark on contemporary culture and photo history. Here, the photographer experiments with his own oeuvre and narrates new stories while staying true to his lexicon. In both emblematic and never-before-seen images, he challenges his own icons and presents intimate moments shared with personalities who had been close to him for years, including Nicole Kidman, Uma Thurman, Robin Wright, Jessica Chastain, Naomi Campbell, Charlotte Rampling and many more.

This volume presents more than 100 photographs—many of them unpublished or short-lived, often having been commissioned by monthly fashion magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Interview, Rolling Stone, W Magazine, or The Wall Street Journal. An extensive conversation between Lindbergh and Kunstpalast director Felix Krämer, as well as an homage by close friend Wim Wenders, offer fresh insights into the making of the collection. The result is an intimate personal statement by Lindbergh about his work.

It was on a Malibu beach in 1988 that Peter Lindbergh shot the White Shirts series, images now known the world over. Simple yet seminal, the photographs introduced us to Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Rachel Williams, Karen Alexander, Tatjana Patitz, and Estelle Lefébure. This marked the beginning of an era that redefined beauty, and Lindbergh would go on to alter the landscape of fashion photography for the decades that followed.

This edition gathers more than 300 images from forty years of Lindbergh’s career. It traces the German photographer’s cinematic inflections and humanist approach, which produced images at once seductive and introspective.

In 1980 Rei Kawakubo asked Lindbergh to shoot a Commes des Garçons campaign, one of his earlier forays into commercial photography. Kawakubo gave him carte blanche. The following years brought forth collaborations with the most venerated names in fashion and resulted in a relationship of mutual reverence; Lindbergh’s respect for some of the greatest designers of our time is palpable in his portraits. Among those photographed are Azzedine Alaïa, Giorgio Armani, Alber Elbaz, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Thierry Mugler, Yves Saint Laurent, Jil Sander, and Yohji Yamamoto.

Widely considered a pioneer in his field, Lindbergh shirked the industry standards of beauty and instead celebrated the essence and individuality of his subjects. He was pivotal to the rise of models such as Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Mariacarla Boscono, Lara Stone, Claudia Schiffer, Amber Valletta, Nadja Auermann, and Kristen McMenamy.

Lindbergh’s reach also extended across Hollywood and beyond: Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling, Richard Gere, Isabelle Huppert, Nicole Kidman, Madonna, Brad Pitt, Catherine Deneuve, and Jeanne Moreau all appear in his works. From the picture chosen by Anna Wintour as the cover of her first Vogue issue to the legendary shot of Tina Turner on the Eiffel Tower, it is never the clothes, celebrity, or glamour that takes center stage in a Lindbergh photograph. Each picture conveys the humanity of its subject with a serene melancholy that is uniquely and unmistakably Lindbergh.

From the outset of his career, Lindbergh was well-known in the contemporary art world, where his photographs were exhibited in galleries long before they appeared in magazines. This edition features an updated introduction adapted from an interview in 2016, allowing a glimpse behind Lindbergh’s lens, where the photographer recounts his early collaborations, the tenuous relationship between commercial and fine art, and the power of storytelling.

The history of nude photography is the history of people’s fascination with the topic. Indeed, the photographic depiction of the human body is the only subject that has enthralled photographers, theoreticians, and consumers over such a long period—more than 150 years. No other motif is as prevalent as this one during all the phases of development comprising the history of photography, no other is present, whatever the technique, and is a subject of discussion within the context of nearly all aesthetic movements. Nor has any other pictorial topic produced such a variety of specialities as the nude: from the ethnological interpretation of the body to the glamour shot, from nudist photography to the pin-up of today. No other photographic field of application has inspired as much desire as it has awakened official wrath.1000 Nudes offers a cross section of the history of nude photography, ranging from the earliest nude daguerreotypes and ethnographic nude photographs to experimental nude photography. The period of time spanned by this work is from 1839 to roughly 1939, from the medium’s infancy to the end of the classic modernist period. Content-wise, the book pays tribute to the full range of pictorial approaches, from the manually elaborated artistic nudes of the turn of the century, enveloped in layers of theory, to the “obscene” postcard motifs which had not the slightest artistic pretension and were intended to exert a maximum effect on the buyer’s wallet. All the pictures shown are taken from the late Uwe Scheid’s collection, one of the world’s largest and most important collections of erotic photography.

When Benedikt Taschen asked the most important portrait photographer working today, Annie Leibovitz, to collect her pictures in a SUMO-sized book, she was intrigued by the challenge. The project took several years to develop and when it was finally published in 2014, it weighed in at 26 kg (57 pounds).

This incredible collection is now available in an accessible XXL book format.

Leibovitz drew on more than 40 years of work, starting with the photojournalism she did for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s through the conceptual portraits she made for Vanity Fair and Vogue. She selected iconic images—such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono entwined in a last embrace—as well as portraits that had rarely, if ever, been seen before.

The Annie Leibovitz SUMO covered political and cultural history, from Queen Elizabeth II and Richard Nixon to Laurie Anderson and Lady Gaga.

“What I had thought of initially as a simple process of imagining what looked good big, what photographs would work in a large format, became something else,” Leibovitz says. “The book is very personal, but the narrative is told through popular culture. It’s not arranged chronologically and it’s not a retrospective. It’s more like a roller coaster.”

Fans of Leibovitz and her many celebrated subjects can now enjoy that same roller coaster ride for themselves with this unlimited edition.

Sebastião Salgado’s haunting black-and-white photographs from the GENESIS project record landscapes and people unchanged in the devastating onslaught of modern society and development. Salgado calls GENESIS “my love letter to the planet.”

First, The Big Book of Breasts, then The Big Penis Book, The Big Book of Legs, and the weighty Big Butt Book. What could follow but an in-depth exploration of the female pudendum, that coveted orifice man spends nine months trying to escape, and a lifetime attempting to reenter? The Big Book of Pussy, not to be confused with a book of big pussy, closes out this popular series with an offering sure to be as controversial as it is popular. As in previous volumes, editor Dian Hanson delves into the historical significance of this humble os, to show how the yoni has been coveted, feared, reviled, and worshipped by civilizations worldwide, from New Guinea to old Ireland. The text is supported by playful photographs of women exposing their vulvas, from 1900 to the present day. Because depiction of this body part has long been wrapped in unwarranted shame, The Big Book of Pussy reframes the subject, featuring models who expose their most private part enthusiastically, happily, with smiles spread wide as… well, you get the picture. And with 400+ photos the point is made emphatically, in images both naturally furry and stylishly groomed. Included are interviews with the auteur known as Pussyman, the ex-cop who turned masturbation into millions with a toy called the Fleshlight, Vanessa del Rio, squirter Flower Tucci, vaginal performance artist Mouse, and the singular Buck Angel. Contemporary photographers Terry Richardson, Richard Kern, Ralph Gibson, Jan Saudek, Guido Argentini, Ed Fox and others share their favorite pussy photos, so that by page 368 even the shiest reader will be calling, “Here, kitty, kitty!”

Sebastião Salgado is one the most respected photojournalists working today, his reputation forged by decades of dedication and powerful black-and-white images of dispossessed and distressed people, taken in places where most wouldn’t dare to go. Although he has photographed throughout South America and around the globe, his work most heavily concentrates on Africa, where he has shot more than 40 reportage works over a period of 30 years. From the Dinka tribes in Sudan and the Himba in Namibia to gorillas and volcanoes in the lakes region to displaced peoples throughout the continent, Salgado shows us all facets of African life today. Whether he’s documenting refugees or vast landscapes, Salgado knows exactly how to grab the essence of a moment so that when one sees his images one is involuntarily drawn into them. His images artfully teach us the disastrous effects of war, poverty, disease, and hostile climatic conditions.

This book brings together Salgado’s photos of Africa in three parts. The first concentrates on the southern part of the continent (Mozambique, Malawi, Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia), the second on the Great Lakes region (Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya), and the third on the Sub-Saharan region (Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Mauritania, Senegal, Ethiopia). Texts are provided by renowned Mozambique novelist Mia Couto, who describes how today’s Africa reflects the effects of colonization as well as the consequences of economic, social, and environmental crises.

This stunning book is not only a sweeping document of Africa but an homage to the continent’s history, people, and natural phenomena.

While the female nude has long played a conspicuous role in western iconography, the male nude has not always enjoyed such attention, or acceptance. This ode to the male physique celebrates the evolving, at one time illicit, art form from anonymous 19th century erotica through to contemporary work from David Hockney and Duane Michaels.

Through the classic, the playful, and the provocative, it explores the compositions, postures, and role-playing of this often under-explored genre. Esteemed masters such as Herbert List, George Platt Lynes or Robert Mapplethorpe are all there, alongside Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, famed for his homoerotic images of nude youths in classical postures in Sicily. Further highlights include illustrations from Physique Pictorial, the leading organ of the mid-50s gay scene and a pioneer in gay publishing.

Sebastião Salgado traveled the Brazilian Amazon and photographed the unparalleled beauty of this extraordinary region for six years: the forest, the rivers, the mountains, the people who live there—an irreplaceable treasure of humanity.

In the book’s foreword Salgado writes: “For me, it is the last frontier, a mysterious universe of its own, where the immense power of nature can be felt as nowhere else on earth. Here is a forest stretching to infinity that contains one-tenth of all living plant and animal species, the world’s largest single natural laboratory.”

Salgado visited a dozen indigenous tribes that exist in small communities scattered across the largest tropical rainforest in the world. He documented the daily life of the Yanomami, the Asháninka, the Yawanawá, the Suruwahá, the Zo’é, the Kuikuro, the Waurá, the Kamayurá, the Korubo, the Marubo, the Awá, and the Macuxi—their warm family bonds, their hunting and fishing, the manner in which they prepare and share meals, their marvelous talent for painting their faces and bodies, the significance of their shamans, and their dances and rituals.

Sebastião Salgado has dedicated this book to the indigenous peoples of Brazil’s Amazon region: “My wish, with all my heart, with all my energy, with all the passion I possess, is that in 50 years’ time this book will not resemble a record of a lost world. Amazônia must live on.”

INSTITUTO TERRA
Founded in 1998 at Aimorés in the state of Minas Gerais, Instituto Terra is the culmination of Lélia Wanick Salgado and Sebastião Salgado’s lifelong activism and work as cultural documentarians. Through a scientific program of planting and raising saplings, the organization has performed a miraculous reforestation of the once infertile region and furthered the Salgados’ mission of reversing the damage done to our planet. TASCHEN is proud to reach carbon zero status through our continued partnership.

Also available in a Collector's Edition and four Art Editions, each with a signed silver gelatin print, all with a book stand designed by Renzo Piano.

“Sirs” begins the missive from our imaginary correspondent. “It’s not that I don’t love your original Big Penis Book, but that, perhaps, I love it too much. I now become anxious leaving the house without it, and long business trips are simply torture. Couldn’t you make a smaller, less obtrusive edition, still packed with men whose generative members measure over 8 inches, that doesn’t form a suspiciously large bulge in my carry-on luggage? And while you’re at it, could you make it highly affordable, since my pockets are as shallow as this premise?”

Done! The Little Big Penis Book features over 150 massively endowed models from the 1940s through the ’90s, including photos by Bob Mizer of AMG, David Hurles of Old Reliable, Rip Colt of Colt Studio, Craig Calvin Anderson of Sierra Domino, Hal Roth of Filmco, Jim Jaeger of Third World Studios, Falcon Studios, Mike Arlen, Fred Bisonnes, Carlos Quiroz, and Charles Hovland in a compact and inexpensive format.

Photos come not just from the original overstuffed 384-page edition, but from subsequent Big Penis Calendars, meaning that 30% of the content is unique to this edition. Add a reduced text to make more room for the stunning black-and-white and color photos and how could anyone—big, small, or just right—ask for a better deal?

Album art is indelibly linked to our collective musical memories; when you think of your favorite albums, you picture the covers. Many photographers, illustrators, and art directors have become celebrities from their album artworks—the best examples of which will go down in history as permanent fixtures in popular culture.

Paying tribute to this art form, Rock Covers brings you a compilation of more than 750 remarkable album covers, from legendary to rare record releases. Artists as varied as Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd, The Cure, Iron Maiden, and Sonic Youth are gathered together in celebration of the cover art that defined their albums and their cult status. Each cover is accompanied by a fact sheet listing the art director, photographer or illustrator, year, label, and more, while nearly 250 records that marked particular turning points for a band, an artist, or the music genre, are highlighted with short descriptions.

This far-reaching catalog of visualized rock is contextualized with insider interviews with five professionals who shaped the history of rock, and by top-10 record lists from ten leading rock collectors.

At the turn of the 20th century, the American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952) started on his 30-year project to produce a monumental study of North American Indians. Using an approach that was both artistically and scientifically ambitious, he recorded, in words and pictures, the traces of the traditional Indian way of life that was already beginning to die out.

With tireless personal commitment Curtis visited 80 American Indian tribes from the Mexican border to the Bering Strait, gaining their confidence through his patience and sensitivity. His work was printed in 20 volumes between 1907 and 1930 as The North American Indian, but with only 272 copies, originals became extremely rare.

This book gathers Curtis’s entire American Indian portfolio into one publication, offering renewed access to and appreciation of his extraordinary achievement, which is as much a precious historical document as a triumph of the photographic form.

The invitation to create his own show Untold Stories at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf Kunstpalast served Lindbergh as a blank canvas for the his unrestrained vision and creativity. Given artistic freedom, he curated an uncompromising collection that sheds an unexpected light on his colossal oeuvre. This artist's book offers an extensive, firsthand look at the highly personal collection. When it came to printing his photos, Lindbergh chose a special uncoated paper – a thin sheet with a soft, open surface – as a deliberate aesthetic statement.

Renowned the world over, Lindbergh’s images have left an indelible mark on contemporary culture and photo history. Here, the photographer experiments with his own oeuvre and narrates new stories while staying true to his lexicon. In both emblematic and never-before-seen images, he challenges his own icons and presents intimate moments shared with personalities who had been close to him for years, including Nicole Kidman, Uma Thurman, Robin Wright, Jessica Chastain, Jeanne Moreau, Naomi Campbell, Charlotte Rampling and many more.

This XL volume presents more than 150 photographs—many of them unpublished or short-lived, often having been commissioned by monthly fashion magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Interview, Rolling Stone, W Magazine, or The Wall Street Journal. An extensive conversation between Lindbergh and Kunstpalast director Felix Krämer, as well as an homage by close friend Wim Wenders, offer fresh insights into the making of the collection. The result is an intimate personal statement by Lindbergh about his work.

Album art is indelibly linked to our collective musical memories; when you think of your favorite albums, you picture the covers. Many photographers, illustrators, and art directors have become celebrities from their album artworks—the best examples of which will go down in history as permanent fixtures in popular culture.

Paying tribute to this art form, Rock Covers brings you a compilation of more than 750 remarkable album covers, from legendary to rare record releases. Artists as varied as Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd, The Cure, Iron Maiden, and Sonic Youth are presented in celebration of the cover art that defined their albums and their cult status. Each cover is accompanied by a fact sheet listing the art director, photographer or illustrator, year, label, and more, while nearly 250 records that marked particular turning points for a band, an artist, or the music genre, are highlighted with short descriptions.

This far-reaching catalog of visualized rock is contextualized with insider interviews with professionals who shaped the history of rock, and by top-10 record lists from ten leading rock collectors.

Album art is indelibly linked to our collective musical memories; when you think of your favorite albums, you picture the covers. Many photographers, illustrators, and art directors have become celebrities from their album artworks—the best examples of which will go down in history as permanent fixtures in popular culture.

Paying tribute to this art form, Rock Covers brings you a compilation of more than 750 remarkable album covers, from legendary to rare record releases. Artists as varied as Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd, The Cure, Iron Maiden, and Sonic Youth are presented in celebration of the cover art that defined their albums and their cult status. Each cover is accompanied by a fact sheet listing the art director, photographer or illustrator, year, label, and more, while nearly 250 records that marked particular turning points for a band, an artist, or the music genre, are highlighted with short descriptions.

This far-reaching catalog of visualized rock is contextualized with insider interviews with professionals who shaped the history of rock, and by top-10 record lists from ten leading rock collectors.

This tome is the most comprehensive visual history of surfing to date, marking a major cultural event as much as a publication. Following three and a half years of meticulous research, it brings together hundreds of images to chart the evolution of surfing as a sport, a lifestyle, and a philosophy. The book is arranged into five chronological chapters, tracing surfing culture from the first recorded European contact in 1778 by Captain James Cook to the global and multi-platform phenomenon of today. Utilizing institutions, collections, and photographic archives from around the world, and with accompanying essays by the world’s top surf journalists, it celebrates the sport on and off the water, as a community of 20 million practitioners and countless more devotees, and as a leading influence on fashion, film, art, and music. An unrivaled tribute to the breadth, complexity, and richness of surfing, this book is a must-have for any serious player on the surfing scene and anybody who aspires to the surfing lifestyle. As one surfing scribe has declared, “There has never been a book like this, and there will never be another one again.”

From the mighty halls of ancient Alexandria to the coffered ceilings of the Morgan Library in New York, human beings have had a long, enraptured relationship with libraries. Like no other concept and like no other space, the collection of knowledge, learning, and imagination offers a sense of infinite possibility. It’s the unrivaled realm of discovery, where every faded manuscript or mighty clothbound tome might reveal a provocative new idea, a far-flung fantasy, an ancient belief, a religious conviction, or a whole new way of being in the world.

In this new photographic journey, Massimo Listri travels to some of the oldest and finest libraries to reveal their architectural, historical, and imaginative wonder. Through great wooden doors, up spiraling staircases, and along exquisite, shelf-lined corridors, he leads us through outstanding private, public, educational, and monastic libraries, dating as far back as 766. Between them, these medieval, classical, baroque, rococo, and 19th-century institutions hold some of the most precious records of human thought and deed, inscribed and printed in manuscripts, volumes, papyrus scrolls, and incunabula. In each, Listri’s poised images capture the library’s unique atmosphere, as much as their most prized holdings and design details.

Featured libraries include the papal collections of the Vatican Apostolic Library and the Trinity College Library, home to the Book of Kells and Book of Durrow. With meticulous descriptions accompanying each featured library, we learn not only of the libraries’ astonishing holdings—from which highlights are illustrated—but also of their often lively, turbulent, or controversial pasts. Like the Franciscan monastery in Lima, Peru, with its horde of archival Inquisition documents.

At once a bibliophile beauty pageant, an ode to knowledge, and an evocation of the particular magic of print, this compact edition of our best-selling XXL-title is above all a cultural-historical pilgrimage to the heart of our halls of learning, to the stories they tell, as much as those they gather in printed matter along polished shelves.

Peter Lindbergh photographed Dior’s most exceptional muses, Marion Cotillard and Charlize Theron among them, and signed campaigns for Lady Dior and J'Adore with his inimitable style. Throughout his career, the photographer was one of the house’s closest collaborators. This final book was an original cocreation that was close to the artist’s heart—and to ours.

Seventy years of Dior history projected against the effervescence of Times Square, New York: this was the concept behind Lindbergh’s project, extraordinary both in scope and dimension, for which Dior, in an unusual move, allowed an unprecedented number of priceless garments to be taken from its vaults in Paris and shipped across the Atlantic.

The result is electric. Amid the frenzy of Times Square, Alek Wek glows in the immaculate 1947 Bar suit, the storied ensemble that launched the House of Dior. In snatches of street scenes, models Saskia de Brauw, Karen Elson, and Amber Valletta flit through crowds and scaffolding, are reflected in building façades, and draped in haute couture, from pieces hand-sewn by Christian Dior to more recent designs by Maria Grazia Chiuri. Lindbergh’s trademark monochrome and color photographs masterfully highlight the intricacies, silhouettes, and textures of each garment.

Lindbergh himself is present in every aspect of this publication designed by his long-time collaborator and friend Juan Gatti. This volume features 165 never-before-published images from the shoot, including an introduction by Martin Harrison, and pays homage to Lindbergh’s profound relationship with the Parisian House by curating more than 100 of his photographs of Dior creations, from haute couture to ready-to-wear, men’s and women’s, originally published in some of the world’s most prestigious magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. A breathtaking tribute to two pillars of fashion and photography and their timeless collaborations.

In every crisis situation, children are the greatest victims. Physically weak, they are often the first to succumb to hunger, disease, and dehydration. Innocent to the workings and failings of the world, they are unable to understand why there is danger, why there are people who want to hurt them, or why they must leave, perhaps quite suddenly, and abandon their schools, their friends, and their home.

In this companion series to Exodus, Sebastião Salgado presents 90 portraits of the youngest exiles, migrants, and refugees. His subjects are from different countries, victims to different crises, but they are all on the move, and all under the age of 15. Through his extensive refugee project, what struck Salgado about these boys and girls was not only the implicit innocence in their suffering but also their radiant reserves of energy and enthusiasm, even in the most miserable of circumstances. From roadside refuges in Angola and Burundi to city slums in Brazil and sprawling camps in Lebanon and Iraq, the children remained children: they were quick to laugh as much as to cry, they played soccer, splashed in dirty water, got up to mischief with friends, and were typically ecstatic at the prospect of being photographed.

For Salgado, the exuberance presented a curious paradox. How can a smiling child represent circumstances of deprivation and despair? What he noticed, though, was that when he asked the children to line up, and took their portraits one by one, the group giddiness would fade. Face to face with his camera, each child would become much more serious. They would look at him not as part of a noisy crowd, but as an individual. Their poses would become earnest. They looked into the lens with a sudden intensity, as if abruptly taking stock of themselves and their situation. And in the expression of their eyes, or the nervous fidget of small hands, or the way frayed clothes hung off painfully thin frames, Salgado found he had a refugee portfolio that deserved a forum of its own.

The photographs do not try to make a statement about their subjects’ feelings, or to spell out the particulars of their health, educational, and housing deficits. Rather, the collection allows 90 children to look out at the viewer with all the candor of youth and all the uncertainty of their future. Beautiful, proud, pensive, and sad, they stand before the camera for a moment in their lives, but ask questions that haunt for years to come. Will they remain in exile? Will they always know an enemy? Will they grow up to forgive or seek revenge? Will they grow up at all?

The history of photography began nearly 200 years ago, but only relatively recently has it been fully recognized as a medium in its own right. Cologne’s Museum Ludwig was the first museum of contemporary art to devote a substantial section to international photography. The L. Fritz Gruber collection, from which this book is drawn, is one of the most important in Germany and one of the most representative anywhere in the world, constituting the core of the museum’s holdings.

This book provides a fascinating insight into the collection’s rich diversity; from conceptual art to abstraction to reportage, all of the major movements and genres are represented via a vast selection of the 20th century’s most remarkable photographs. From Ansel Adams to Piet Zwart, over 850 works are presented in alphabetical order by photographer, with descriptive texts and photographers’ biographical details, providing a comprehensive and indispensable overview of 20th-century photography.

“The way men are seen in photography, in fashion, and the way that men look at pictures of themselves has changed in recent years. It is a subject that has come into focus: The masculine image, a man's personal style, changing attitudes to the male face and body.”
— Mario Testino

From Rio to London, Cusco to Seville, Mario Testino is renowned for his free-spirited chronicles of dress and demeanor. In SIR the influential photographer presents over 300 photographs in his search to define the allure of men.

Featuring an essay by Pierre Borhan, an interview with Patrick Kinmonth, and many previously unpublished works from Testino’s archive of thousands, this book traces the evolution of male identity over the past three decades. Costume, tradition, gender play, portraiture, photojournalism, and fashion collide as Testino observes masculinity in all its modern manifestations: through the dandy and the gentleman, the macho and the fey, the world-famous face to the unknown passerby.

Every photograph represents a unique point of view, and a new visual connection between photographer and sitter. With Josh Hartnett for VMAN (2005), Testino evokes the fall of Helmut Berger in the abyss of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned. Studies of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Jude Law and Colin Firth are as candid as they are curious. David Beckham, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards feature for the courage they have taken in redefining male identity. Through a kaleidoscope of guises, these portraits define a period in which men’s changing role, style and appearance has never escaped Testino’s eye and impeccable intuition.

The turn of the 20th century was a golden era in France. It was an age of peace, prosperity, and progress after a series of bruising wars and turmoil within the French Republic, culminating in the Franco-Prussian War, which had ended in 1871. From the ruins of conflict, the Belle Époque brought joie de vivre flourish, a boom in art, design, industry, technology, gastronomy, education, travel, entertainment, and nightlife.

Through some 800 vintage photographs, postcards, posters, and photochromes from the extensive archives of Marc Walter and Photovintagefrance, France 1900 follows up on TASCHEN’s best-selling vintage photographic collections Italy 1900, The Grand Tour, and America 1900 to provide a precious record of France in all its turn-of-the-century glory. With the photochrome technique used in many of the images restoring the past to vivid color, we enjoy a bristling close, bittersweet, encounter with this hopeful age: the brave, stony splendor of the Mont Saint-Michel; the icy peaks of Chamonix; and the honey light of the Côte d’Azur.

With an introduction, six essays, and detailed commentary by Sabine Arqué exploring the stories behind the pictures, this is an unrivalled portrait of a nation on the cusp of the century and of its poignant exuberance before the paroxysm of the First World War. While paying tribute to the precious Belle Époque, crushed by the traumas of history, it also celebrates the unwavering allure of La Belle France, its beauty, culture, traditions, and legendary romance.

It was on a Malibu beach in 1988 that Peter Lindbergh shot the White Shirts series, images now known the world over. Simple yet seminal, the photographs introduced us to Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Rachel Williams, Karen Alexander, Tatjana Patitz, and Estelle Lefébure. This marked the beginning of an era that redefined beauty, and Lindbergh would go on to alter the landscape of fashion photography for the decades that followed.

This book gathers more than 300 images from forty years of Lindbergh’s career. It traces the German photographer’s cinematic inflections and humanist approach, which produced images at once seductive and introspective.

In 1980 Rei Kawakubo asked Lindbergh to shoot a Commes des Garçons campaign, one of his earlier forays into commercial photography. Kawakubo gave him carte blanche. The following years brought forth collaborations with the most venerated names in fashion and resulted in a relationship of mutual reverence; Lindbergh’s respect for some of the greatest designers of our time is palpable in his portraits. Among those photographed are Azzedine Alaïa, Giorgio Armani, Alber Elbaz, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Thierry Mugler, Yves Saint Laurent, Jil Sander, and Yohji Yamamoto.

Widely considered a pioneer in his field, Lindbergh shirked the industry standards of beauty and instead celebrated the essence and individuality of his subjects. He was pivotal to the rise of models such as Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Mariacarla Boscono, Lara Stone, Claudia Schiffer, Amber Valletta, Nadja Auermann, and Kristen McMenamy.

Lindbergh’s reach also extended across Hollywood and beyond: Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling, Richard Gere, Isabelle Huppert, Nicole Kidman, Madonna, Brad Pitt, Catherine Deneuve, and Jeanne Moreau all appear in his works. From the picture chosen by Anna Wintour as the cover of her first Vogue issue to the legendary shot of Tina Turner on the Eiffel Tower, it is never the clothes, celebrity, or glamour that takes center stage in a Lindbergh photograph. Each picture conveys the humanity of its subject with a serene melancholy that is uniquely and unmistakably Lindbergh.

From the outset of his career, Lindbergh was well-known in the contemporary art world, where his photographs were exhibited in galleries long before they appeared in magazines. This edition features an updated introduction adapted from an interview in 2016, allowing a glimpse behind Lindbergh’s lens, where the photographer recounts his early collaborations, the tenuous relationship between commercial and fine art, and the power of storytelling.

German photography pioneer Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932) photographed plants so beautifully, and with such originality, that his work transcends the medium itself. Over more than 30 years, he took thousands of photographs, revealing a formally rigorous talent whose precision and dedication bridge the 19th- and 20th-century worlds of image-making and bring a distinctly sculptural aspect to a firmly two-dimensional art form.

Beautifully but starkly composed against plain cardboard backgrounds, Blossfeldt’s images, relying on a northern light for their sense of volume, reveal nothing of the man but everything of themselves. They are still lifes, piercingly final statements on their subject, and have endured owing to their aesthetics and the ongoing fascination of students and photographers. Like their maker, they are quietly and lastingly effective.

In 1970 Barbra Streisand published a story in Life magazine titled “Who Am I Anyway?” It was the very question two leading photojournalists of the day—Steve Schapiro and Lawrence Schiller—were also asking as they photographed her during her first five years in Hollywood, working to get beneath the veneer and capture “the real Barbra.”

Brimming with photographs, stories, and behind-the-scenes shots from Schapiro and Schiller, and previously available as a limited edition, this is a must-have collection for any Streisand fan. All the best movies of Streisand’s first Hollywood decade are here: Funny Girl, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, The Way We Were, The Owl and the Pussycat, Up the Sandbox, Funny Lady, and A Star Is Born. So too are her loves, directors, confidants, and costars: Elliott Gould, William Wyler, Sydney Pollack, Vincente Minnelli, Cis Corman, Omar Sharif, Kris Kristofferson, and, of course, Robert Redford.

Through it all a picture emerges not of a singer who could act, but of an actress who could sing, write, direct, dance, and do just about anything she put her mind to.

This volume is a comprehensive visual history of surfing, marking a major cultural event as much as a publication. Following three and a half years of meticulous research, it brings together hundreds of images to chart the evolution of surfing as a sport, a lifestyle, and a philosophy.

The book is arranged into five chronological chapters, tracing surfing culture from the first recorded European contact in 1778 by Captain James Cook to the global and multi-platform phenomenon of today. Utilizing institutions, collections, and photographic archives from around the world, and with accompanying essays by the world’s top surf journalists, it celebrates the sport on and off the water, as a community of 20 million practitioners and countless more devotees, and as a leading influence on fashion, film, art, and music.

An unrivaled tribute to the breadth, complexity, and richness of surfing, this book is a must-have for any serious player on the surfing scene and anybody who aspires to the surfing lifestyle. As one surfing scribe has declared, “There has never been a book like this, and there will never be another one again.”

Sebastião Salgado’s haunting black-and-white photographs from the GENESIS project record landscapes and people unchanged in the devastating onslaught of modern society and development. Salgado calls GENESIS “my love letter to the planet.”

The history of photography began nearly 200 years ago, but only relatively recently has it been fully recognized as a medium in its own right. Cologne’s Museum Ludwig was the first museum of contemporary art to devote a substantial section to international photography. The L. Fritz Gruber collection, from which this book is drawn, is one of the most important in Germany and one of the most representative anywhere in the world, constituting the core of the museum’s holdings.

This book provides a fascinating insight into the collection’s rich diversity; from conceptual art to abstraction to reportage, all of the major movements and genres are represented via a vast selection of the 20th century’s most remarkable photographs. From Ansel Adams to Piet Zwart, over 850 works are presented in alphabetical order by photographer, with descriptive texts and photographers’ biographical details, providing a comprehensive and indispensable overview of 20th-century photography.

For six years Sebastião Salgado traveled the Brazilian Amazon and photographed the unparalleled beauty of this extraordinary region: the rainforest, the rivers, the mountains, the people who live there—this irreplaceable treasure of humanity in which the immense power of nature is felt like nowhere else on earth.

On October 1, 1958, the world’s first civilian space agency opened for business as an emergency response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik a year earlier. Within a decade, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, universally known as NASA, had evolved from modest research teams experimenting with small converted rockets into one of the greatest technological and managerial enterprises ever known, capable of sending people to the Moon aboard gigantic rockets and of dispatching robot explorers to Venus, Mars, and worlds far beyond. In spite of occasional, tragic setbacks in NASA’s history, the Apollo lunar landing project remains a byword for American ingenuity; the winged space shuttles spearheaded the International Space Station and a dazzling array of astronomical satellites and robotic landers, and Earth observation programs have transformed our understanding of the cosmos and our home world’s fragile place within it.

Throughout NASA’s 60-year history, images have played a central role. Who today is not familiar with the Hubble Space Telescope’s mesmerizing views of the universe or the pin-sharp panoramas of Mars from NASA’s surface rovers? And who could forget the photographs of the first men walking on the Moon?

This compact edition is derived from our XL edition, which was researched in collaboration with NASA, and gathers hundreds of historic photographs and rare concept renderings, scanned and remastered using the latest technology. Texts by science and technology journalist Piers Bizony, former NASA chief historian Roger Launius, and best-selling Apollo historian Andrew Chaikin round out this comprehensive exploration of NASA, from its earliest days to its current development of new space systems for the future.

The NASA Archives is more than just a fascinating pictorial history of the U.S. space program. It is also a profound meditation on why we choose to explore space and how we will carry on this grandest of all adventures in the years to come.

Mario Testino is recognized as the ultimate fashion photographer of his generation but his pictures of Kate Moss transcend fashion. The result of three decades of extraordinary friendship, and phenomenal glamour, this iconic collaboration is an intimate insight into the lives and minds of two of the world’s definitive style leaders.

This book follows the journey of this exceptional fashion partnership, from early days backstage at the shows to behind-the-scenes glimpses of the groundbreaking editorials they continue to produce for the world’s most respected magazines. Of the 100-plus images, many photographs have been chosen from Testino’s private archive. They are accompanied by a foreword by Testino and an exclusive essay by Kate Moss.

If you were to stand in one spot at an iconic location for 30 hours and simply observe, never closing your eyes, you still wouldn’t be able to take in all the detail and emotion found in a Stephen Wilkes panoramic photograph. Not only does Wilkes shoot over 1,500 exposures from a fixed angle, he also distills this visual information afterward in his studio, painstakingly composing selected frames into a single image.

Day to Night presents 60 epic panoramas created between 2009 and 2022, shot everywhere from Africa’s Serengeti to the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, from the Grand Canyon to Coney Island, from Trafalgar Square to Times Square. Each composition is a labor of love as well as patience. Wilkes waited more than two years to gain permission to photograph Pope Francis celebrating Easter mass in the Vatican, ultimately producing a vivid tableau in which the pontiff appears 10 times.

The book also features extraordinary details—works of art in their own right that highlight the stories contained within each image. A bride makes her way through Central Park; in Tanzania, zebras gather around a near-invisible watering hole during a drought; in Rio de Janeiro, surfers come and go while a man holds a sign reading “No more than two questions per customer.” “It is exactly these small stories, these details, that draw people into the photographs,” says Wilkes. Once discovered, these mini narratives lend each composition a personal, candid feel.

This collection takes us on a seamless trip from dawn to dark across the world’s most iconic locations, unveiling the unique ebb and flow of man-made and natural landmarks like never before.

In I Love You, Mario Testino presents a celebration of weddings. A beginning in life —that is also a culmination and a public promise – captured by a unique photographic point of view which shows beauty not only in emotion and tradition, but in the complete intimacy of shared joy.

Featuring essays by the illustrious fashion designer Carolina Herrera and party expert Riccardo Lanza, the book traces Testino’s memories of many iconic moments and many unknown ones, captured in the privacy of close friendship and family. Unparalleled access unveils the secret, the tender, the wild and the festive of such celebrations, some of which can be considered the most talked-about unions of the past four decades.

I Love You is a homage to weddings and to everything they comprise. A love declaration and a glimpse into the heart of brides getting ready, special rites among friends, the zest of extraordinary parties. Every image showing the unique fantasies of a life to start anew.

"LONG LIVE LOVE!"
— Mario Testino

Also available in an Art Edition with the signed and numbered print Chiara Slewett, Rio de Janeiro, 2005

With his Hollywood good looks, boundless enthusiasm, and mesmeric media presence, John F. Kennedy was destined to capture the imaginations of the more than 70 million Americans who watched the nation’s first televised presidential debate. Just days after beating out Richard Nixon by the narrowest margin in history, Kennedy himself said, “It was the TV more than anything else that turned the tide.”

But one man begged to differ: writer Norman Mailer, who bragged that his pro-Kennedy treatise, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” had “won the election for Kennedy.” The article, published in Esquire magazine just weeks before polls opened, redefined political reporting with Mailer's frank, first-person voice identifying Kennedy as the “existential hero” who could awaken the nation from its postwar slumber and conformist Eisenhower years. Both Kennedy and New Journalism had arrived.

Now, TASCHEN reimagines and interprets this no-holds-barred portrait of Kennedy on his path to the White House, publishing Mailer’s essay in book form alongside 300 photographs that bring the campaign and the candidate’s family to life. These images were captured by some of the great photojournalists of the day—including Cornell Capa, Henri Dauman, Jacques Lowe, Lawrence Schiller, Paul Schutzer, Stanley Tretick, Hank Walker, and Garry Winogrand—providing a fascinating look at the man who declared the ’60s “a time for greatness.”

After the bust out success of The Big Book of Breasts TASCHEN presents the perfect companion, The Big Penis Book.

When it comes to pleasure, size doesn’t matter; as we all know it’s quality, not quantity, that counts. But let’s admit it: a big penis is undeniably compelling. Big shoulders, big lapels, and big hair may come and go, but the big penis never goes out of fashion. With those possessing more than 8 inches (20 cm) making up less than 2% of the world’s population, this rare accessory will always fascinate.

In The Big Penis Book we explore the centuries-old fascination with the large phallus, a fascination common to men and women alike. This hefty book is profusely illustrated with over 400 historic photos of spectacular male endowments, including rare photos of the legendary John Holmes. The majority of the photographs are from the 1970s, when the sexual revolution first freed photographers to depict the male entirely nude.

Photographers include Bob Mizer of Athletic Model Guild, David Hurles of Old Reliable, Colt, Falcon, Sierra Domino, Third World, and Champion Studios, with each of these iconic photographers interviewed or profiled, along with information about each of their models. And if this isn’t enough, the book closes with a special surprise comparable to the Guinness Book of Records’ Norma Stitz featured in The Big Book of Breasts! Can you guess what body part Dian is dissecting next?

Sportive gentlemen, lascivious ladies: Since the earliest days of photography, people have been getting up to all manner of rannygazoo in front of the lens. This collection presents the finest highlights from the collection of New Yorker Mark Rotenberg, who began collecting antique smut after finding a stash of vintage erotic pictures in a Brooklyn dumpster and now owns a 95,000 strong collection of archive pornography dating from between 1860 and 1960.

Flick through these pages and witness the fitness of our forebears as they romp, cavort, and frolic with unabashed energy and glee. From early monochromes of daringly dropped drawers and seductively waxed handlebar mustaches, to Kodachromes of cheery, twin-peaked pin-up beauties in the 1950s, this fine collection spans the sublimely sensual and the ridiculous.

In Maldicidade, the city never sleeps. By dawn or dusk, in New York, Havana, Salvador da Bahia, or Tokyo, it is an environment fraught with yearning, aching with solitude, and fretful with fortunes never made. This searing urban portrait from visual artist Miguel Rio Branco draws upon his itinerant early years as the son of diplomats to reveal the common threads of struggle and loneliness in metropolises around the world.

The images are impeccably captured, but the pictures are not always pretty. Rio Branco is not interested in documenting historic city landmarks, an impressive skyline, or the aspirational dreams that soar up towards it. Instead, he focuses his camera on the city’s refuse and margins—on that which it has thrown away and on those it has cast aside and disappointed. In stark frames or soft impressions, it is street sleepers, beggars, prostitutes, stray dogs, smashed cars, and shattered glass that characterize his urban impressions.

While subtle details reveal the specificity of place, it is the commonality of urban experience at the heart of Rio Branco’s project. Light on local context or explanatory narrative, the images are instead meticulously arranged into one redolent sequence of a universal city. Working as if in the cutting studio, Rio Branco excels in the rhythm and succession of pictures, crafting evocative patterns of motif (decrepit buildings, lone figures, smashed-up cars); color (rich reds, dusty pinks, stark whites and blues); and form (an anguished street sleeper beside an ecstatic statue of a saint). Throughout, occasional pictures of women are proffered as sensual, hopeful reprieve, interspersing the grit and the grime in commanding portraits or up-close, supple nudes.

At once incisive in its message and lyrical in its arrangement, Maldicidade focuses attention on the city’s ineludible magnetism, as much as on its alienation and inhumanity. Biting, bare-faced, and achingly beautiful, it is a collection in which all city dwellers will find something of themselves, or something they long to escape.

In celebration of the world’s favorite animal, we bring you over 400 photographs of or about dogs. With pictures from the 19th century to today, the collection includes works by Man Ray, Eric Fischl, Wolfgang Tillmans, Donna Ruskin, Fatima NeJame, Vincent Versace, and of course Elliott Erwitt and William Wegman. Together, their pictures, unique in style but united in canine affection, are testimony if ever there was one that dogs are not only best friends, but also pure photographic inspiration.

Forget #dogsofinstagram, this is real canine art, showing how the camera has been key witness to dogs in all their diversity, character, and friendship, from pensive pooch portraits to four-pawed action shots. As intellectually as it is visually stimulating, the book includes captivating essays tracing the presence of dogs in the history of photography and their relationship with humans across the decades.

Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952) dedicated his entire life to a project all his own, to use a camera to preserve the cultural heritage of the indigenous peoples of North America. For three decades, he traveled in every region of the continent, through every kind of terrain and weather, via land or water, in the 50°C heat of the Mojave Desert or the -20°C chill of the Arctic; moving on foot, by horse, wagon, donkey, boat or train, or later by automobile. More than 40,000 photos were produced during those years.

During his lifetime, the finest of these photographs entitled The North American Indian, were presented in twenty elaborate, large-scale portfolios with which Curtis raised a monument to commemorate the disappearing culture of North America’s indigenous peoples and to bring it fully back to life. In addition, the book holds a selection of photographs from the text volumes.

Without Edward S. Curtis we would hardly know a thing about the rites of the Hopi in America’s southwest, nor be able to picture the Qagyuhl winter dancers, or have any idea of the ceremonies on Nunivak Island. The basic humanistic message that shines from his pictures is highly relevant, namely peaceful coexistence in which you can overcome hatred and prejudice if you are always willing, on meeting a stranger, to seek some idea in common.

Remote Experiences is the visual account of the extraordinary journeys of photographer David De Vleeschauwer through the world’s most uncharted territories. In pursuit of the best of travel, he has been passionately exploring the world for more than two decades. Focused on 12 unexpected destinations, it wanders from north to south, with the ease of well-seasoned explorers. Its photographic reportage brings to life an eclectic collection of memories. He ventures to paradise-like, off-the-radar forgotten kingdoms with ancient Buddhist outposts in the foothills of the Himalayas and traces the footsteps of pilgrims and sheepherds in Italy. From the plains of Botswana to the outer realms of Antarctica aboard a superyacht icebreaker, this unique guide outlines its own geography of the world. Along the way, we meet individuals, landscapes and even vessels that become the serendipitous heroes of these wondrous adventures. De Vleeschauwer's shared experiences depict a world where the foreign becomes familiar, the isolated accessible. In our digital, overly consumptive age people want a true sense of place, which might be rugged, refined, or rural.

Complete with travel accounts and detailed descriptions of trips that range in price from an affordable 250 euros to an ambitious one million euros, Remote Experiences takes its readers on an unforgettable voyage to those overlooked or sometimes forgotten spaces “where time stands still”, encouraging us to do just that—until we take to the road again…

Avedon and Baldwin’s American Journey

Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s landmark 1964 book finally back in print

This meticulous reprint of Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal explores the complexities and contradictions still at the center of the American experience – especially timely in the age of Donald Trump. Deploying both image and text, Avedon and Baldwin examine the formation of identity, and the bonds that both underlie and undermine human connection. An accompanying 72-page booklet features a fresh essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Hilton Als, and many of Avedon’s unpublished outtakes, correspondence, preliminary layouts and ephemera.

In 1963-64, former high school friends Richard Avedon, at the time one of the world’s most famous photographers, and James Baldwin, best-selling novelist and essayist and a leading literary voice in the American civil rights movement, collaborated on Nothing Personal, a book about the state of life in America.

Avedon’s subjects range from civil rights icons, to intellectuals, politicians, pop singers, patients in a mental institution, and ordinary Americans, all carefully juxtaposed, cropped, and tightly sequenced. Here, the American Nazi Party contends with poet Allen Ginsberg, and a weary General Eisenhower gives way to the sway of Malcolm X. Depleted mental institution patients call out for human warmth, and are followed by the embrace of mother and child.

Baldwin’s four-part essay offers a critique of a society that is disconnected, unjust and divisive, and therefore in the midst of an existential crisis. In a highly personal and pertinent testimony, he writes about his own experience of harassment by a racist police officer in his native New York City. Yet Baldwin, like Avedon, ends his work with the inescapable need for – and power of – love.

Designed by legendary art director Marvin Israel, Nothing Personal is a triumph of minimalism. An oversized book in its own white slipcase, the striking placement of both photographs and text revolutionized the design and packaging of photography books. This is a faithful reprint of the original book, which has been out of print for decades, and was produced with the collaboration of The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Hilton Als, Avedon’s former colleague at The New Yorker, and a scholar of Baldwin’s work, traces the making of Nothing Personal and documents the friendship and creative relationship between Avedon and Baldwin. Als also movingly reflects on how Nothing Personal impacted his own life, as well as his friendship with Avedon.

When first published in 1964, Avedon and Baldwin’s vision of America was controversial, and both men endured harsh criticism for being liberal elites and “Hollywood moralists” who were not representing the true feelings of “real” Americans. Sound familiar?

To coincide with the book’s release, New York’s Pace Gallery will present a comprehensive exploration of Avedon’s photographs and documents from Nothing Personal.

Afghanistan has long been a country overwhelmed by tribal rivalries, colonial wars, and geo-political conflict. The Afghans have called their mountains “the land of rebellion,” a land that has not been successfully occupied since the times of Alexander the Great. These invaders — Persians, Arabs, Moguls, Sikhs, British, Russians — may have been thwarted, but wandering through the bazaars of Kabul will attest to their legacy. In the people of Afghanistan, the genes of countless races meet and intermingle.

Deep are the fissures in Afghan society; the schism between Sunni and Shia, the endemic violence across clans and tribes, and the blood feuds and rivalries within lineages. Yet born of such chaos and entrenched conflict are these most breathtaking of images.

In this definitive retrospective of his work in Afghanistan, Steve McCurry has curated over 140 gripping images to present a torn, proud people, from the desert of Kandahar to the streets of Kabul and remote rivers of Nuristan. For almost four decades, McCurry traveled to the country regularly, documenting its people with a rare and disarming humanity. His most striking portrait Afghan Girl (1984) has graced the covers of magazines around the world, in equal parts haunting and evoking remarkable grace and dignity. In common with so much of McCurry’s work, it has a timeless, painterly quality—entirely at odds with the troubled region in which it was taken.

McCurry has always been subjected to dangers that are an inevitable part of life “on the road” for photographers. He often ventured behind the lines, usually at great risk. His first trip to Afghanistan in 1979 involved him dressing in Afghan garb in order to be smuggled across the border from Pakistan. That journey into the treacherous, unpredictable landscape — territory controlled at various times by the Mujahideen, the Russians, and the Taliban — was one that McCurry would make numerous times. Many other photographers would follow in his footsteps, but none would return with such a flawless body of work.

At the turn of the 20th century, the American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952) started on his 30-year project to produce a monumental study of North American Indians. Using an approach that was both artistically and scientifically ambitious, he recorded, in words and pictures, the traces of the traditional Indian way of life that was already beginning to die out.

With tireless personal commitment Curtis visited 80 American Indian tribes from the Mexican border to the Bering Strait, gaining their confidence through his patience and sensitivity. His work was printed in 20 volumes between 1907 and 1930 as The North American Indian, but with only 272 copies, originals became extremely rare.

This book gathers Curtis’s entire American Indian portfolio into one publication, offering renewed access to and appreciation of his extraordinary achievement, which is as much a precious historical document as a triumph of the photographic form.

How can we pack so much big booty into such a tiny and inexpensive package? Sorry, but it’s a trade secret we can’t divulge, except to say that shoehorns and spandex were involved.

The original Big Butt Book featured a great cross section of delectable rears from the 1950s to the present day. Here, since life is such an ironic deal, we decided to pare the original content down to just the biggest and the best, in-your-face phatties to which the great Sir Mix-a-Lot alluded when penning, “My anaconda don’t want none, unless you’ve got buns, hun.”

Then we added in about 30 new photos, just to be generous. Now in these 150 plus photos you’ll see the big and the bountiful, then the bigger and more bountiful, in black and white and in color. The models may be largely anonymous, but their curves are legendary, and now that they’re collected in a discrete little package affordable by all in these financially trying times, why hold back? Your badonkadonk is calling.

This book presents the epic story of New York on nearly 600 pages of emotional, atmospheric photographs, from the mid-19th century to the present day. Supplementing this treasure trove of images are over a hundred quotations and references from seminal books, movies, shows, and songs. The city’s fluctuating fortunes are all represented, from the wild nights of the Jazz Age to the hedonistic disco era, from to the grim days of the Depression to the devastation of 9/11 and its aftermath, as its brokenhearted but unbowed citizens picked up the pieces.

New York’s remarkable rise, reinvention, and growth are not just the tale of a city, but the story of a nation, From the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island; from the slums of the Lower East Side to the magnificent art deco skyscrapers. The urban beach of Coney Island and the sleaze of Times Square; the vistas of Central Park and the crowds on Fifth Avenue. The streets, the sidewalks, the chaos, the energy, the ethnic diversity, the culture, the fashion, the architecture, the anger, and the complexity of the city are all laid out in this kaleidoscopic book. This is the greatest city in the world after all and great are its extremes, contradictions, and attitude.

More than just a remarkable tribute to the metropolis and its civic, social, and photographic heritage, New York: Portrait of a City pays homage to the indomitable spirit of those who call themselves New Yorkers: full of hope and strength, resolute in their determination to succeed among its glass and granite towers.

Features hundreds of iconic images, sourced from dozens of archives and private collections—many never before published—and the work of over 150 celebrated photographers, including Victor Prevost, Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Weegee, Margaret Bourke-White, Saul Leiter, Esther Bubley, Arnold Newman, William Claxton, Ralph Gibson, Ryan McGinley, Mitch Epstein, Steve Schapiro, Marvin Newman, Joel Meyerowitz, Andreas Feininger, Charles Cushman, Joseph Rodriguez, Garry Winogrand, Larry Fink, Jamel Shabazz, Allan Tannenbaum, Bruce Davidson, Helen Levitt, Eugene de Salignac, Ruth Orkin, Joel Sternfeld, Keizo Kitajima, and many more.

In 1952, after becoming one of the first-ever recipients of a Master of Science degree in Photography at Chicago’s Institute of Design, native New Yorker Marvin E. Newman returned to his hometown. Like many artists before, he set about chronicling the city. Unlike his predecessors, Newman chose color photography as the preeminent medium for capturing the people and energy of New York, and its emergence in the 1950s as the self-proclaimed “Greatest City in the World.”

Lauded by the likes of Eastman House, MoMA, and the International Center of Photography, Newman’s images remained, up until now, largely undiscovered beyond a prestigious collector and gallery circle. After featuring Newman in New York: Portrait of a City, TASCHEN now presents the artist’s first career monograph including some 170 pictures from the late 1940s through the early 1980s, previously available in a Collector’s Edition. Newman passed away in 2023 at the age of 95.

From Times Square to Wall Street, from Broadway to Little Italy, Newman’s vivid, original tableaux offer fresh perspectives on familiar New York landmarks but, above all, a unique sense for life in the city and for the drama and extremities that weld New York to so many hearts. Beyond New York, Newman applies the same flawless technique and humanist sensibility to other locations across the United States including Chicago, Kansas, a vintage 1950s circus; a legalized brothel in Reno, Nevada; Las Vegas; Alaska; and groovy 1960s California; as well as top shots from his sports photography portfolio featuring icons such as Cassius Clay and Pele´.

Newman, who is represented by the prestigious Howard Greenberg Gallery, was long overdue a monograph. With an essay by critic and scholar Lyle Rexer, this first chronological retrospective offers due recognition to an outstanding talent, providing memorable images that leave their mark on the eye and the soul.

The Polaroid Corporation’s photography collection is the greatest portfolio of Polaroid images in the world. Begun by Polaroid founder Edwin Land and photographer Ansel Adams, the collection now includes some 23,000 images by hundreds of photographers throughout the world, including pieces by the likes of David Hockney, Andy Warhol, and Jeanloup Sieff.

The Polaroid Book dives into these archives, paying tribute to a medium that continues to defy the digital age. Like an oversized Polaroid film pack, this collection curates works by luminaries and unknowns alike, celebrating the boundless possibilities that develop inside the white borders of the original instant photograph.

Features: more than 250 works from the Polaroid Collections an essay by Polaroid’s Barbara Hitchcock on the beginnings of instant photography and the collection’s history a chapter featuring the various types of Polaroid cameras

It started in 1978 with an ordinary coffee shop near Kyoto. Word spread that the waitresses wore no panties under their miniskirts. Similar establishments popped up across the country. Men waited in line outside to pay three times the usual coffee price just to be served by a panty-free young woman.

Within a few years, a new craze took hold: the no-panties “massage” parlor. Increasingly bizarre services followed, from fondling clients through holes in coffins to commuter-train fetishists. One particularly popular destination was a Tokyo club called “Lucky Hole” where clients stood on one side of a plywood partition, a hostess on the other. In between them was a hole big enough for a certain part of the male anatomy.

Taking the Lucky Hole as his title, Nobuyoshi Araki captures Japan's sex industry in full flower, documenting in more than 800 photos the pleasure-seekers and providers of Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood before the February 1985 New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act put a stop to many of the country's sex locales. Through mirrored walls, bed sheets, the bondage and the orgies, this is the last word on an age of bacchanalia, infused with moments of humor, precise poetry, and questioning interjections.

Sebastião Salgado traveled the Brazilian Amazon and photographed the unparalleled beauty of this extraordinary region for six years: the forest, the rivers, the mountains, the people who live there—an irreplaceable treasure of humanity.

In the book’s foreword Salgado writes: “For me, it is the last frontier, a mysterious universe of its own, where the immense power of nature can be felt as nowhere else on earth. Here is a forest stretching to infinity that contains one-tenth of all living plant and animal species, the world’s largest single natural laboratory.”

Salgado visited a dozen indigenous tribes that exist in small communities scattered across the largest tropical rainforest in the world. He documented the daily life of the Yanomami, the Asháninka, the Yawanawá, the Suruwahá, the Zo’é, the Kuikuro, the Waurá, the Kamayurá, the Korubo, the Marubo, the Awá, and the Macuxi—their warm family bonds, their hunting and fishing, the manner in which they prepare and share meals, their marvelous talent for painting their faces and bodies, the significance of their shamans, and their dances and rituals.

Sebastião Salgado has dedicated this book to the indigenous peoples of Brazil’s Amazon region: “My wish, with all my heart, with all my energy, with all the passion I possess, is that in 50 years’ time this book will not resemble a record of a lost world. Amazônia must live on.”

INSTITUTO TERRA
Founded in 1998 at Aimorés in the state of Minas Gerais, Instituto Terra is the culmination of Lélia Wanick Salgado and Sebastião Salgado’s lifelong activism and work as cultural documentarians. Through a scientific program of planting and raising saplings, the organization has performed a miraculous reforestation of the once infertile region and furthered the Salgados’ mission of reversing the damage done to our planet. TASCHEN is proud to reach carbon zero status through our continued partnership.

Also available in a Collector's Edition and four Art Editions, each with a signed silver gelatin print, all with a book stand designed by Renzo Piano.

From the mighty halls of ancient Alexandria to the coffered ceilings of the Morgan Library in New York, human beings have had a long, enraptured relationship with libraries. Like no other concept and like no other space, the collection of knowledge, learning, and imagination offers a sense of infinite possibility. It’s the unrivaled realm of discovery, where every faded manuscript or mighty clothbound tome might reveal a provocative new idea, a far-flung fantasy, an ancient belief, a religious conviction, or a whole new way of being in the world. In this new photographic journey, Massimo Listri travels to some of the oldest and finest libraries to reveal their architectural, historical, and imaginative wonder. Through great wooden doors, up spiraling staircases, and along exquisite, shelf-lined corridors, he leads us through outstanding private, public, educational, and monastic libraries, dating as far back as 766. Between them, these medieval, classical, baroque, rococo, and 19th-century institutions hold some of the most precious records of human thought and deed, inscribed and printed in manuscripts, volumes, papyrus scrolls, and incunabula. In each, Listri’s poised images capture the library’s unique atmosphere, as much as their most prized holdings and design details. Featured libraries include the papal collections of the Vatican Apostolic Library, Trinity College Library, home to the Book of Kells and Book of Durrow, and the holdings of the Laurentian Library in Florence, the private library of the powerful House of Medici, designed by Michelangelo. With meticulous descriptions accompanying each featured library, we learn not only of the libraries’ astonishing holdings—from which highlights are illustrated—but also of their often lively, turbulent, or controversial pasts. Like Altenburg Abbey in Austria, an outpost of imperial Catholicism repeatedly destroyed during the European wars of religion, or the Franciscan monastery in Lima, Peru, with its horde of archival Inquisition documents. At once a bibliophile beauty pageant, an ode to knowledge, and an evocation of the particular magic of print, Massimo Listri. The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries is above all a cultural-historical pilgrimage to the heart of our halls of learning, to the stories they tell, as much as those they gather in printed matter along polished shelves.

The kind of fame and success The Rolling Stones have achieved in their 60-year career is without parallel; their most famous riffs and catchiest lyrics are indelibly engraved in our collective memory. With their mesmerizing on- and off-stage presence, the Stones set the standard for how a rock band should sound, pose, pout, and behave. They were the first to instinctively understand that what you looked like was as important as the music, and that photography had a vital role in promoting that image.

“The clothes and the hair are always impeccable,” describes author Luc Sante. “They were playing themselves, but with such consistent finesse you knew they were instinctively aware of the camera and how good they will look in the photos.” Unsurprisingly many of the greatest photographers in the history of the medium wanted to take their picture.

Produced in close collaboration with the band, this updated edition charts the Stones’ remarkable history and outrageously cool lifestyle in over 450 pages of photographs and illustrations, gathered from archives all over the world. Unprecedented access to the Rolling Stones’ own archives in New York and London adds an equally extraordinary, more private side to their story. For Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Ronnie this is their official photographic record.

Features: Over 450 pages of incredible images from some of the world’s greatest photographers, including David Bailey, Annie Leibovitz, Cecil Beaton, Anton Corbijn, Herb Ritts, Albert Watson, Andy Warhol, David LaChapelle, Peter Beard, Helmut Newton, Bent Rej, Gered Mankowitz, and Norman Parkinson. Essays from award-winning writers David Dalton, Waldemar Januszczak, and Luc Sante Appendix including the Stones in the media, a Stones timeline, a discography, and photographers’ biographies

Rewind back to the midcentury, before the age of Instagram and Snapchat, where people were using 35mm cameras loaded with color film to document both monumental and mundane moments in their lives. They took pictures of their loved ones, their vacations, their celebrations. They memorialized the births of babies; a child in a cowboy outfit; a new color television set; sightseeing in National Parks; fishing trips; lazing on the beach; weddings; office parties; family reunions; holding hands, kissing and dancing. Imagining these lives and the possible stories that lie behind the images is what makes The Anonymous Project such a compelling journey into our past. The passing of time is enhanced by the book’s narrative that begins with scenes of early childhood and ends with seniors, with all the stages of life in between.

It all started with an innocent purchase on eBay. Filmmaker Lee Shulman bought a set of 35mm Kodachrome slides—anonymous family photos—and was so taken with what he calls “the emotional value of these slices of life” that he knew he had to have more. He launched The Anonymous Project in 2017 and has since acquired around 700,000 images either by donation or via vintage sellers. As noted photography critic Richard B. Woodward writes in the introduction: “It is significant—and fascinating—that in virtually every image here, photographer and subject seem to know one another. In this embracing album of humanity, no one exists in isolation. There are no strangers here.”

This curated collection of around 150 images taken between the 1940s and ’70s offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of these anonymous subjects. The locations, dates, and the subjects may be unknown—but these shots taken by skilled amateur photographers, and the fascinating stories they contain, are universally familiar.

“This book is really two books. It is a biography, and it is also a pictorial retrospective of an actress whose greatest love affair was conceivably with the camera,” wrote Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography, Marilyn.

TASCHEN has paired Mailer’s original text with Bert Stern’s photographs from the legendary Last Sitting—widely considered the most intimate photographs of Monroe ever taken—to create a fitting tribute to the woman who, at the time of her death in 1962, was the world’s most famous, a symbol of glamour and eroticism for an entire generation. But though she was feted and adored by her public, her private life was that of a little girl lost, desperate to find love and security. Mailer’s Marilyn is beautiful, tragic, and complex. As Mailer reflects upon her life—from her bleak childhood through to the mysterious circumstances of her death—she emerges as a symbol of the bizarre decade during which she reigned as Hollywood’s greatest female star.

This book, conceived by Lawrence Schiller, Mailer’s collaborator on five works, combines the author’s masterful text with Stern’s penetrating images of the 36-year-old Marilyn. Photographed for Vogue magazine over three days at the Bel-Air Hotel, Marilyn had never allowed such unfettered access, nor had she looked so breathtakingly beautiful. Six weeks later, mysteriously, she was dead. In this bold synthesis of literary classic and legendary portrait-sitting, Mailer and Stern lift the veils of confusion surrounding Monroe—the woman, the star, the sex symbol—and offer profound insight into an iconic figure whose true personality remains an enigma even today.

In his distinguished career as a Hollywood photographer, Bob Willoughby captured Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda, but remains unequivocal about his favorite subject: Audrey Kathleen Ruston, later Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston, best known as Audrey Hepburn. Willoughby was called in to shoot the new starlet one morning shortly after she arrived in Hollywood in 1953. It was a humdrum commission for the portraitist often credited with having perfected the photojournalistic movie still, but when he met the Belgian-born beauty, Willoughby was enraptured. “She took my hand like… well a princess, and dazzled me with that smile that God designed to melt mortal men’s hearts,” he recalled. As Hepburn’s career soared following her Oscar-winning US debut in Roman Holiday, Willoughby became a trusted friend, framing her working and home life. His historic, perfectionist, tender photographs seek out the many facets of Hepburn’s beauty and elegance, as she progresses from her debut to her career high of My Fair Lady in 1963. Willoughby’s studies, showing her on set, preparing for a scene, interacting with actors and directors, and returning to her private life, comprise one of photography’s great platonic love affairs and an unrivalled record of one of the 20th century’s touchstone beauties.

For five generations, National Geographic magazine has dazzled and educated people with its incredible photographs, illustrations, and gripping stories from the four corners of the earth. Combining travel, wildlife, science, history, culture, and conservation, the National Geographic Society’s trailblazing magazine has inspired millions of readers to explore and take an interest in the planet we inhabit. Now, in celebration of its 125th anniversary, National Geographic has given TASCHEN complete access to its archives to distill the journey of a lifetime into three prodigious volumes featuring photographs—many unpublished—almost as rich, deep, and colorful as the world itself.

Our transcontinental trip starts in the Americas and Antarctica (Volume 1); we then cross the Atlantic to Europe and Africa (Volume 2); and finally sail the Indian Ocean to Asia and Oceania (Volume 3). From evocative early black-and-white pictures to autochromes, from the golden age of Kodachromes to digital, National Geographic invented the aesthetic of the photo essay, while pushing the technical boundaries of the medium. Readers will discover how the magazine evolved from presenting a romantic view of the world—subjects posed and smiling—to edgier stories reflecting political turmoil, social issues, and environmental threats. Of course, the journey would not be complete without prime examples of the magazine’s revered groundbreaking underwater and wildlife photography, so we’ve included plenty of such treasures as well. This world class set is a cultural investment to be cherished, shared, and passed down to future generations.

Limited and numbered edition of 125,000 copies

Features:

1,404 pages of photos in three volumes

Includes photos by Steve McCurry, Frans Lanting, George Rodger, James Nachtwey, and dozens of National Geographic staffers who covered the world from Timbuktu to Tuvalu

Introductory essays by Douglas Brinkley

Photographer biographies

Each slipcase converts into its own bookstand because these treasures deserve to be put on display!

“Holds many surprises for the reader who has seen the Cuban reality . . . only through the distorting prism of propaganda.” —The New York Times Book Review, 1967

On December 31, 1958, Lee Lockwood, then a young photojournalist, went to Cuba to cover what looked to be the end of Batista’s regime. He arrived the day before Fidel Castro took power and spent a week canvassing the island before finding the victorious leader. Castro immediately took to Lockwood and over the next decade invited him back many times, granting him special access to his inner circle and free rein to explore the island without the usual restrictions imposed upon American journalists.

In 1965, Castro granted Lockwood a rare, in-depth interview but then missed appointment after appointment. Days turned into weeks turned into three interminable months, as Lockwood, like many journalists before and since, waited for Castro. But it was worth the anticipation, climaxing in a marathon seven-day interview that covered everything from racial issues in America to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It remains to this day one of the most penetrating portraits of the Cuban leader.

Originally published in 1967, Lockwood’s interviews and observations are republished by TASCHEN alongside hundreds of photographs covering both the weeks Lockwood spent traveling with Castro and the years he documented Cuba’s transformation throughout the ’60s. From military encampments in the Sierra Maestra mountains to Havana street life and political rallies, many of these color images have never been published before. A foreword and afterword by Latin America expert Saul Landau contextualize Lockwood’s work.

The Kama Sutra gives detailed instructions on how to spank it. Contemporary Italians touch it for luck before placing a bet. Americans are having it cosmetically enhanced at rates approaching breast enlargement surgery. The female butt, tush, culo, or derrière has always inspired awe, fantasy, and slavish devotion.

Curiously, its primary purpose is functional rather than aesthetic: butts balance our bodies while running, according to biologists. But ask any pygophiliac—as fundament fans are clinically termed—and you’ll get the same answer: female hindquarters exist to please the eye, the hands, and parts south. A pert posterior causes instant arousal, as Zora Neale Hurston observed in Their Eyes Were Watching God: "The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets." Or, as rapper Sir Mix-a-lot proclaimed, "My anaconda don’t want none, unless you’ve got buns, hun."

Having all but disappeared from western culture in the breast-obsessed second half of the 20th century, the fully formed fanny is currently enjoying a massive resurgence, attributed by some to American actress Jennifer Lopez, by others to the rise of booty-centric hip hop culture. Yet this rage for shapely butts is nothing new. The ancient Greeks worshipped at the temple of Aphrodite Kallipygos, Goddess of the Beautiful Buttocks, while a womanly rump has always been an object of worship in most of the southern hemisphere.

The Big Butt Book explores this perennial fascination with female booty—from small and taut to large and sumptuous—in the fourth installment of Dian Hanson’s critically acclaimed body parts series. Over 400 photos from 1900 to the present day, including works by Elmer Batters, Ellen von Unwerth, Jean-Paul Goude, Ralph Gibson, Richard Kern, Jan Saudek, Ed Fox, Terry Richardson and Sante D’Orazio, of butts ranging from petite Pam Anderson’s to sumptuous Serena Williams’, are contextualized by interviews with porn icon John (Buttman) Stagliano, filmmaker Tinto Brass, artist Robert Crumb, bootylicious butt queens Buffie The Body, Coco and Brazil’s Watermelon Woman, plus Eve Howard and her life-long spanking obsession.