Photography

Encompassing a wide range of subjects, the ten masterful essays gathered here may at first appear unrelated to one another. In truth, Giorgio Agamben's latest book is a mosaic of his most pressing concerns. Take a step backward after reading it from cover to cover, and a world of secret affinities between the chapters slowly comes into focus. Take another step back, and it becomes another indispensable piece of the finely nuanced philosophy that Agamben has been patiently constructing over four decades of sustained research.

If nudity is unconcealment, or the absence of all veils, then Nudities is a series of apertures onto truth. A guiding thread of this collection—weaving together the prophet's work of redemption, the glorious bodies of the resurrected, the celebration of the Sabbath, and the specters that stroll the streets of Venice—is inoperativity, or the cessation of work. The term should not be understood as laziness or inertia, but rather as the paradigm of human action in the politics to come. Itself the result of inoperativity, Nudities shuttles between philosophy and poetry, philological erudition and unexpected digression, metaphysical treatise and critique of modern life. And whether the subject at hand is personal identity or the biometric apparatus, the slanderer or the land surveyor, Kafka or Kleist, every page bears the singular imprint of one of the most astute philosophers of our time.

A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital.

We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a "good picture"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly—and happily—outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles.

In a series of short, engaging essays, Kim Beil uncovers the origins of fifty photographic trends and investigates their original appeal, their decline, and sometimes their reuse by later generations of photographers. Drawing on a wealth of visual material, from vintage how-to manuals to magazine articles for working photographers, this full-color book illustrates the evolution of trends with hundreds of pictures made by amateurs, artists, and commercial photographers alike. Whether for selfies or sepia tones, the rules for good pictures are always shifting, reflecting new ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the visual world.

As exploited and colonized people, California farmworkers have attracted such massive, overwhelming photographic scrutiny that today their story cannot be told, studied, or understood without engaging the photographic dimension. Although the work of Dorothea Lange and other photographers from the 1930s often comes to mind, virtually every photographer of consequence at some time, for some reason, photographed in the fields of the Golden State. This includes such unlikely twentieth-century artists as fashion photographer Richard Avedon and commercial photographer Max Yavno, along with the nineteenth-century masters Carleton E. Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Their work, however, does not unfold along neat, predictable lines. While it has both obscured the place of field hands in modern agriculture and made a case against the farm labor system as an instrument of poverty and oppression, the best of these photographs goes far beyond advertising and exposé, cutting through layers of ignorance and indifference and raising difficult moral questions that force us to reflect on the extent to which, as a society, we require the subservience of an entire class of people. This volume presents 282 of these important photographs.

Part document and part visual poem, Far from Zion is the response of a young American Jew to the historical experience of Ashkenazic Jewry in the last century. In the spirit of a contemplative but unsentimental reckoning, the photographs consider the fragmentation and historical contingency of Jewish experience, the discontinuity and fragility of Jewish identity, and the uncertain meaning of diaspora as a Jewish inheritance. The result is a sequence of pictures that moves between marked and unmarked historical locations in Europe and the United States, portraits of contemporary Jews, and the events of Jewish life. An original essay, "Diasporic Investigations," elaborates the photographs' concerns.

In contrast to traditional documentary works aligned with confirmative and expository attitudes toward social testimony, this project looks to the indeterminacies of the photographic image to illuminate social experience that is itself indeterminate and elusive. By turns empathic and circumspect, quiet and pointed, the project addresses the complex actuality of diaspora in our own time.

Beyond its contribution to contemporary photography, the work also responds to Jewish photography (both by and about Jews) specifically. In contrast to the historical work of Roman Vishniac, for example, the book rejects nostalgic reclamation of vanished worlds; in contrast to the contemporary work of Frédéric Brenner, the book refrains from modish theatricality, and instead confronts the legacy of the passing Jewish century through interrogatory observation. Locating documentary photography at the intersection of history, geography, literature, and philosophy, the book promotes a dialogue between these fields through pictures.

This book brings together 57 of the best black-and-white photographs of Marion Patterson, who describes her work as “photographs of the intimate landscape, simple and contemplative like a zen garden.” The images focus on the natural surroundings of the central California coast and Sierra—rocks, waterfalls, creeks, trees, seashells, sand, driftwood, and kelp washed ashore by the tides—as well as images from the Southwest and the deserts of California. The book provides a quiet meditation on the beauty of our natural environment in a manner that reflects the author’s lifelong ties to the West Coast school of photography, deeply influenced by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.

Although Patterson’s work is in some sense a virtual homage to those two giant figures, what sets it distinctly apart is her ability to use some of their stylistic and technical methods to express her own individual and deeply felt responses to the natural landscape. Where so many have understood the West Coast school as a graphic or technical exercise, Patterson has grasped the expressive language that originated in photographic modernism and has used that language to the most sincere and guileless ends.

Patterson has also contributed a short introductory essay on her photographic inspiration and techniques, and endnotes that comment on a number of the plates.

Using the expansive vernacular of black and white night photography to modify the antiquarian sensibility ordinarily brought to the study of Mexico's colonial architectures, Colonial Noir brings together the unsettling tenor of Mexico's colonial legacies with the ambiguous landscape of noir. Set against the backdrop of Baroque and Neoclassical architecture, the images in this collection draw on the aesthetics of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism to create the collection's existential tone—where the innuendo of chiaroscuro becomes an analog to the tenuous relationship between Mexico's celebrated cultural plurality and its nefarious colonial history.

Composed over a period of five years, the images in this collection reflect elements of Reid Samuel Yalom's background in modernist architectural photography and bear the subtle influence of Mexican works by Edward Weston and Paul Strand. The images also pay homage to the work of George Brassai and collections of Guillermo Kahlo and Henry Ravell that celebrate the architectural landscape of colonial Mexico. The book includes an essay by Frederick Luis Aldama, which uses ephemera of personal experience and elements of Latin American literary culture to provide an interpretive window into Yalom's work, and it includes an introduction by Santhosh Daniel, which places Yalom's work in the context of the history of photographic work on Mexico. The book also includes a foreword by the photographer Mark Citret.

Widely acknowledged as the leading architectural photographer of Northern California, the late Morley Baer had an enduring passion for photographing barns, which he began doing in the 1950s. This book makes available fine-arts quality prints of sixty-eight extraordinary black-and-white photographs of California barns, those often ghostly but comforting shapes in a grassy pasture we glimpse as we fly down the freeway at seventy miles an hour.

The photographs also serve as a documentary record of a once common and now vanishing element of the landscape of California and the West. What is it about an old barn that wrenches a heartfelt pang from us today? Why do we photograph them, visualize them in their prime, and voice strenuous objections when new developments threaten to wipe them away? For many of us, abandoned farm structures are the focus of romantic reverie, an evocation of our agrarian roots, inviting us back to what we imagine must have been simpler, less complicated lives. A vision of life on the farm conjures a sense of wholesomeness and hard work, tillers of the soil taming the wild land as the American way of life moved West.

Enjoyment of the superb photographs will be deepened by Bright Eastman’s colorful discussion of the history and various roles and styles of barns, as well as by the description by Patrick Jablonski—Morley Baer’s last assistant—of how Baer took pictures, developed his negatives, and printed them.

This biographical dictionary of some 3,000 photographers (and workers in related trades), active in a vast area of North America before 1866, is based on extensive research and enhanced by some 240 illustrations, most of which are published here for the first time.

The territory covered extends from central Canada through Mexico and includes the United States from the Mississippi River west to, but not including, the Rocky Mountain states. Together, this volume and its predecessor, Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840-1865, comprise an exhaustive survey of early photographers in North America and Central America, excluding the eastern United States and eastern Canada.

This work is distinguished by the large number of entries, by the appealing narratives that cover both professional and private lives of the subjects, and by the painstaking documentation. It will be an essential reference work for historians, libraries, and museums, as well as for collectors of and dealers in early American photography.

In addition to photographers, the book includes photographic printers, retouchers, and colorists, and manufacturers and sellers of photographic apparatus and stock. Because creators of moving panoramas and optical amusements such as dioramas and magic lantern performances often fashioned their works after photographs, the people behind those exhibitions are also discussed.

This richly evocative study of photography has two major emphases, that the language of description (be it title, caption, or text) is deeply implicated in how a viewer looks at photographs, and that the use of a photograph determines its meaning.

This richly evocative study of photography has two major emphases, that the language of description (be it title, caption, or text) is deeply implicated in how a viewer looks at photographs, and that the use of a photograph determines its meaning.

Encompassing a wide range of subjects, the ten masterful essays gathered here may at first appear unrelated to one another. In truth, Giorgio Agamben's latest book is a mosaic of his most pressing concerns. Take a step backward after reading it from cover to cover, and a world of secret affinities between the chapters slowly comes into focus. Take another step back, and it becomes another indispensable piece of the finely nuanced philosophy that Agamben has been patiently constructing over four decades of sustained research.

If nudity is unconcealment, or the absence of all veils, then Nudities is a series of apertures onto truth. A guiding thread of this collection—weaving together the prophet's work of redemption, the glorious bodies of the resurrected, the celebration of the Sabbath, and the specters that stroll the streets of Venice—is inoperativity, or the cessation of work. The term should not be understood as laziness or inertia, but rather as the paradigm of human action in the politics to come. Itself the result of inoperativity, Nudities shuttles between philosophy and poetry, philological erudition and unexpected digression, metaphysical treatise and critique of modern life. And whether the subject at hand is personal identity or the biometric apparatus, the slanderer or the land surveyor, Kafka or Kleist, every page bears the singular imprint of one of the most astute philosophers of our time.

This is an expanded edition of the first comprehensive overview of the work of Jean Baudrillard, one of the most fascinating thinkers on the French intellectual scene. To the original selection of his writings from 1968 to 1985, this new edition adds examples of Baudrillard's work since that time.

Reviews of the First Edition

"This is a good book, and the author of its selected writings, Jean Baudrillard, deserves only a share of the compliment. It is difficult to introduce a difficult author, and Mark Poster has done a brilliant job. He has selected wisely from Baudrillard's writings. . . . More important, Poster has written what may be, pound for pound, the best introduction to a social theorist I have read. . . . Poster has somehow said everything the uninitiated needs to know before deciding to read Baudrillard."—Contemporary Sociology

"Following the lead of thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, Baudrillard engages in a task of pointing away from any traditional sociological themes. His writings demand that one turn away from convenient or customary interpretations of society and, in the process, one is forced to use his or her imagination in new ways."—Choice

"Poster's Introduction presents what is probably as clear and intelligent an exposition of Baudrillard's ideas as you'll find anywhere."—Philosophy and Literature

This is an expanded edition of the first comprehensive overview of the work of Jean Baudrillard, one of the most fascinating thinkers on the French intellectual scene. To the original selection of his writings from 1968 to 1985, this new edition adds examples of Baudrillard's work since that time.

Reviews of the First Edition

"This is a good book, and the author of its selected writings, Jean Baudrillard, deserves only a share of the compliment. It is difficult to introduce a difficult author, and Mark Poster has done a brilliant job. He has selected wisely from Baudrillard's writings. . . . More important, Poster has written what may be, pound for pound, the best introduction to a social theorist I have read. . . . Poster has somehow said everything the uninitiated needs to know before deciding to read Baudrillard."—Contemporary Sociology

"Following the lead of thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, Baudrillard engages in a task of pointing away from any traditional sociological themes. His writings demand that one turn away from convenient or customary interpretations of society and, in the process, one is forced to use his or her imagination in new ways."—Choice

"Poster's Introduction presents what is probably as clear and intelligent an exposition of Baudrillard's ideas as you'll find anywhere."—Philosophy and Literature