Photography

Marking the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg’s birth, this long over-due publication examines the central importance of photography to the artist.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was a quintessential artist of post-war New York and one of the most influential creators of twentieth-century America, best known as a painter and graphic artist who paved the way for Pop Art. Robert Rauschenberg’s New York takes a deep dive into the artist’s engagement with photographs, focusing on his relationship with New York City. Seminal early photographs set the stage for the entire volume, examining the artist’s early life and career and the New York arts scene of the 1950s and early 1960s. Later on, the career-defining photographs made by Rauschenberg in New York City between 1979 and 1981 are presented alongside a small selection of his paintings and prints that reproduce and repurpose the photographs in new ways. Here photographic imagery is seen in a new context, as source material for further artistic creativity and improvisation.

Ninth volume in the Double Exposure series draws upon photographs in the NMAAHC’s collection to explore the dynamic ways sports influence the social, political, and cultural life of African Americans.

This book, organized around key periods in the history of African American sports from the turn of the twentieth century to today, looks at the role of athletes and sports and their impact on American culture both on and off the field. While the major sports in which African Americans participate most frequently—football, basketball, baseball, and boxing—are prominently featured, the book also includes images of male and female athletes, amateur and professional, competing in gymnastics, track and field, skiing, golf, tennis, and other sports. Photographers include Ernest C. Withers, Roderick J. Lyons, Walter Iooss Jr., Maurice Sorrell, and Moneta Sleet Jr., among others.

Images of iconic moments in sports history—Jack Johnson vs. Jim Jeffries during the 1910 “Fight of the Century,” Jackie Robinson stealing home in 1952, and Colin Kaepernick taking a knee in 2016—are featured alongside photographs of more personal moments, including Larry Doby teaching his son how to hold a bat, Wilt Chamberlain in class at the University of Kansas, Wilma Rudolph standing outside her foundation, Muhammad Ali in conversation with Fannie Lou Hammer, and a young Venus Williams smiling after a practice session.

A two-volume box set edition of a first-rate history of photography as told through two hundred works from one of the most significant collections in the USA.

In Volume 1, Nineteenth Century, Acton tracks the history, artistic concepts, and technical advances of photography, including the pioneering work of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Alphonse Louis Poitevin (1819-1892), Frederic Flacheron (1813-1883), Roger Fenton (1819-1869), Desire Chanay (1828-1915), Felice Beato (1832-1909), Mathew B. Brady (1822-1896), Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815-1879), William Bell (1830-1910), Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1850-1913), and Jacob Riis (1849-1914). Specialty areas include Mathew Brady's famous photographs of the Civil War and the exploration of the American West by photographers including Eadweard Muybridge and Charles Savage.

In Volume 2, Twentieth Century, Acton traces the history, artistic concepts, and technical advances of photography, from the Photo-Secession movement, represented by Edward Steichen and Gertrude Käsebier through to the advances in color photography seen in images of Joel Meyerowitz and William Eggleston. The volume provides a striking pictorial history, featuring images of the Great Depression by Farm Security Agency photographers Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein, of World War II by Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith, and of the struggles of the Civil Rights movement in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s by Gordon Parks and Danny Lyon. The shifting styles and emphases of the 20th century are traced via the remarkable photographs of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams as straight photography superseded Pictorialist poetry in the 1930s, via the work of aesthetic photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind who were influenced by abstract painting, and through the work of street photographers like Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus who were observing and recording the rapid social and economic changes in American society./p>

The Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame is considered to be one of the finest university art museums in America. Its permanent collection of photography comprises 10,000-plus pieces

Pictures with Purpose, the seventh volume in the Double Exposure series, explores images from the NMAAHC’s collection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photography that includes daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cabinet cards, cyanotypes, stereographs, and other early photographic forms. The volume looks at how early photographs of and by African Americans were circulated and used, and considers their meaning, for the sitter, for the photographer, and for the owner of the photograph. Particularly significant is how African Americans used photography to shape their image within and beyond their communities.

Pictures with Purpose features images of unknown African Americans before and after Emancipation—including children, couples, images of young African American soldiers in Civil War-era military uniform, and African American nursemaids with their white charges. Also included are photographs of renowned African Americans such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Mary Church Terrell. Photographers include J.P. Ball, Cornelius M. Battey, Matthew Brady, Frances B. Johnston, and Augustus Washington.