Book Description
"Russell Lee's sense of the possibilities of photography was almost as generous, open, and democratic as photography itself. His appetite as a spectator was as wide as the prairie, and his sympathy for his fellows appeared seamless."
—John Szarkowski, from the foreword
Russell Lee is widely acclaimed as one of the most outstanding documentary photographers of the twentieth century. His images of American life during the Great Depression, created for the Farm Security Administration between 1936 and 1942, hold a preeminent place in one of history's best-known and most useful photographic collections. This famous body of work demonstrates Lee's extraordinary ability to reveal the humanity of his subjects and to become a part of the communities he photographed. It also displays Lee's superior technical ability—his legendary skill in using a flash enabled Lee to create some of the finest candids in the history of photography.
Russell Lee Photographs is the first book to show the full range and quality of Lee's entire oeuvre beyond the FSA work, as well as the first major publication of his photographs since F. Jack Hurley's 1978 book,
Russell Lee: Photographer (long out of print). The book contains over 140 images, 101 of which have never appeared in book publication. The photographs are grouped into suites of images that represent all of Lee's important, non-FSA subjects: early work from New York City and Woodstock; the Spanish-speaking people of Texas; the mentally and physically disabled; political campaigns, including the Kennedy-Johnson campaign of 1960; commercial work for chemical and other companies; a portfolio of images of Italy; and quintessential scenes of small-town life.
Setting Lee's images in context are a foreword by John Szarkowski, one of America's leading photography curators and critics, and an introduction by Lee's friend and fellow photography educator J. B. Colson, who offers fascinating personal insights into Lee's life and career.
Considering Russell Lee's stature in American photography, it is surprising that much of his post-FSA work is unknown to the public and has been seldom seen even in the photography community. By making these images readily available for the first time, this book gives long-overdue recognition to the full range and excellence of Lee's work. Russell Lee Photographs is the essential book on this major American photographer.
Customer Reviews:
Images for heart and mind.......2007-06-25
A wonderful large format and beautifully produced book of 140 photos by Russell Lee made more worthy because 101 of them have not been published together in book form. Lee is rightly famous for his FSA work though none of that output is included here. Instead there are photos from the Texas political scene from 1935 to 1965, Italy in 1960 where he did a portfolio of work commissioned by the Texas Quarterly, Saudi Arabia in 1955. The majority of the photos are of the US with plenty showing small town life.
I'm not convinced that the absence of FSA work was a wise editorial choice, clearly this aspect of his career has been well documented in other books but perhaps in this one there could have been a chapter devoted to Lee's extensive 1940 work in Pie Town, New Mexico. The photos of this small town seem to be the high point of his career, also he was experimenting with color at this time (seventeen shots are shown in Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43) and I hope some publisher would consider a book just on Lee's Pie Town photos.
'Russell Lee Photographs' compares very favorably with Jack Hurley's 1978 'Russell Lee Photographer' (ISBN 0871001500) though the reproduction, with 250+dpi gives a much better showing than the 200dpi used in the Hurley book, which has 121 photos and a more comprehensive biography of Lee.
Both books celebrated the work of a dedicated humanist photographer whose creativity will equally stimulate your heart and mind.
***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.
Perhaps the best of the best.......2007-06-11
Russell Lee was one of the group of photographers that were assembled by the government during the Great
Depression to document and publicize the poverty that had hit the heart of the nation, and the ways - through
various federal programs - those that were hurting the worst could be helped. Today, that group, which included Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Eudora Welty and many others who worked for the Farm Security Administration and other agencies, has been recognized as perhaps the greatest collection of documentary photographers ever gathered. Russell Lee was one of many, some of whom became much more famous, but who was recognized by them as perhaps the best. This collection strengthens that
reputation as the best of the best. He wasn't fancy, and took what he saw - he did not pose subjects for his
camera, but shot the truth. This book covers not only the Depression years, but continues with photographs in other countries, politics and of course, his chosen home state of Texas. This book is getting a lot of attention - well deserved. Center For American History and University of Texas, Hardcover, with over 140 b/w photographs, some never previously published.
Book Description
Censored by the U.S. Army, Dorothea Lange's unseen photographs are the extraordinary photographic record of the Japanese American internment saga.
This indelible work of visual and social history confirms Dorothea Lange's stature as one of the twentieth century's greatest American photographers. Presenting 119 images originally censored by the U.S. Army—the majority of which have never been published—Impounded evokes the horror of a community uprooted in the early 1940s and the stark reality of the internment camps. With poignancy and sage insight, nationally known historians Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro illuminate the saga of Japanese American internment: from life before Executive Order 9066 to the abrupt roundups and the marginal existence in the bleak, sandswept camps. In the tradition of Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World, Impounded, with the immediacy of its photographs, tells the story of the thousands of lives unalterably shattered by racial hatred brought on by the passions of war. 104 photographs.
Customer Reviews:
Great photography and history.......2007-01-12
Outstanding description and photographs documenting the terrible injustice done to American citizens and residents solely because of their Japanese ancestry throughout the Second World War. The indecencies suffered by these people can barely be described adequately, but this book attempts to further illustrate the horrors that can be inflicted on an ethnic group if racism is allowed to influence government policy, as it did in this country during that war.
Text, yes. Photographs, no.......2007-01-10
These important photographs taking during WW2 in the Japanese internment camps scattered around the American west are almost unreadble. The are reproduced very small, and without the requisite skill to make deteriorated images look half decent on the printed page.
The text is informative, especially about Dorothea Lange's trials in gaining access to the camps in California.
Impounded: Important Photography of the Internment and American History.......2007-01-08
Dorothea Lange's photographs document an important American event that is still unknown to a large number of Americans. The fact that the government impounded the photographs speaks for itself.
Heartbreaking images of a shameful past........2006-11-06
Although the text is informative in telling the history of Japanese internment during World War II, the images speak for themselves, page after page in stark black and white, the young and innocent, the old and careworn, carrying rope-bound suitcases and cardboard boxes, standing in long lines, waiting to be processed by indifferent jailors, an entire race herded into the camps that will be home for the war years, disenfranchising them of investment in community and the pride of being Americans. As history has proven over and over, fear is a monster that cannot be contained once the public is infected, the vulnerable a source of suspicion, marked by the color of their skin and the shape of their eyes.
Whole families gather in these telling photographs, leaving treasured belongings behind, grandparents to infants, all swept up in an infamous display of mistrust in a country suddenly driven to panic by a surprise attack, demanding a quick response from their government. Lange has a particular talent for capturing the very human face of the internment camps, children with ID tags attached to their coats, chain link fences topped with barbed wire circling the arid landscape, family laundry hanging from a window, the barren rows of housing units assailed by constant dust storms, women working on camouflage nets for the War Department.
Famous for her Depression era photos of migrant farm workers, this series of photographs, while ordered by the US Government, were censored for the duration of the war. The most striking feature of the collection is the very American look of these people, standing proud while saluting the flag, teenagers trying to act cool in spite of their surroundings, family gatherings that are familiar Americana. It is also important to mention that, in spite of the extreme measures undertaken, "no Japanese-American was ever found guilty of espionage". Lange's work is enhanced by the two essays that precede the collection of photographs, Linda Gordon's biographical essay on Lange's life and work and Gary Okihiro's "An American Story", outlining Japanese immigration to America and the history of Japanese internment, with personal anecdotes by detainees. This is a moving portrait of a country's response to threat, reminding us to value the precious tenets of freedom. Luan Gaines/2006.
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- Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11
- Watching the World Change
- Public libraries and college collections strong in the social sciences will find this a hard-hitting survey.
- Excellent book
- How Photography Made the Day
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Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11
David Friend
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Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive
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Aftermath: Unseen 9/11 Photos by a New York City Cop
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The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation
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Love You, Mean It: A True Story of Love, Loss and Friendship
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Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs
ASIN: 0374299331
Release Date: 2006-08-22 |
Book Description
The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was the most universally observed news event in human history. That the event was so visual is owing to the people who, facing disaster, took photographs of it: imperiled office workers, horrified tourists, professional photographers risking their lives. Conceived by Osama bin Laden as the toppling of an image of America right before the world’s eyes, the tragedy swiftly came to be defined by photography, as families posted snapshots of their loved ones, police sought terrorists’ faces on security-camera videotapes, and officials recorded the devastation and identified the dead.
In Watching the World Change, David Friend tells the stories behind fifty of the images that altered our sense of our world forever—from the happenstance shots taken by bystanders as the first tower was struck to the scene of three firemen raising the Stars and Stripes at the site. He tells unforgettable stories of photographers and rescuers, victims and survivors. He shows how advances
in television, digital photography, and the Internet produced an effect whereby more than two billion people saw the terrible events as they happened. He explores the controversy about whether images of 9/11 are redemptive or exploitative; and he shows how photographs help us to witness, to grieve, and finally to understand the unimaginable.
Customer Reviews:
Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11.......2007-01-19
A very well written book in an "intimate" style, it shares many heretofore unavailable "takes" of that day. While I was surprised at the small number of photographs the book actually contained when I received it, the true value of the book is in "filling in the blanks" about the images it does discuss. This becomes apparent as the book is read. It also becomes obvious that only a limited number of images could be "explained" as thoroughly as Mr. Friend does without the book becoming exceedingly bulky.
Some of the images in "Watching..." border on the farcical - such as a pregnant German woman. Hands on her stomach in an apparent takeoff of the modeling magazines, she languidly poses for the camera as the Twin Towers smoulder in the background. Must be a German thing, this ennui regarding mass murder.
Others, such as an image of one of the "jumpers," is accutely haunting, searing itself into one's consciousness like a branding iron. Reading Mr. Friend's explanation of the image, in which the probable identity and work location of that poor soul become apparent, the horror becomes even more immediate, as we feel we "kind of know him."
For those of us who love New York but (thank God!) weren't there to witness the perdition in the flesh, Mr. Friend's book probably gives the reader the closest possible approximation of what it feels like to have lost a loved one that day. He manages to "put a face" on many of the victims. They come to seem like friends.
I love and hate this book. It's a "magic telescope" which "brings it all back" so effectively that it almost seems to stretch time backwards to that horrid day. It is masterfully done. Americans must never forget what was done to Americans that day. Mr. Friend's book should make the "Day of Infamy" comprehensible, almost immediate, to future Americans. Well Done!
Watching the World Change.......2007-01-04
This book had incredible stories, I have read this book several times and continue to pick it up and read it again. The only thing that bothered me was the lack of photographs. Not enough photographs, especially ones more closely related to the stories. I have many books on this subject and felt there easliy could have been more photographs. It just frustrated me to find so few. Barring that, the stories were solidly told and that day will never be forgotten.
Public libraries and college collections strong in the social sciences will find this a hard-hitting survey........2006-12-14
Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11 tells stories behind the now-familiar shots taken by bystanders and professionals of 9/11 events, taking the reader back through the years to dialy events experienced by families and the nation. From how some of the most harrowing photos were taken of events to their lasting effects on photographer and viewers alike, WATCHING THE WORLD CHANGE questions how modern history comes to life with images, reveals the lasting traumas of events of 9/11, and draws important connections between observer, reporter, and daily life. Public libraries and college collections strong in the social sciences will find this a hard-hitting survey.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Excellent book.......2006-11-10
I really enjoyed knowing more about the photographers behind the photos. Some of the technical information was more than I needed, but it was very well written and I would recommend it.
How Photography Made the Day.......2006-10-18
The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was not only the biggest news event in decades, it was also the most photographed one. Some people by chance got pictures of Flight 11 crashing into the north tower, and after that the cameras never stopped. "Men and women by the hundreds, then thousands - bystanders with point-and-shoots, TV news teams, photojournalists by the score - felt compelled to snap history, fiery and cruel against the blue." So writes David Friend, who used to be the director of photography for _Life_ magazine, in _Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). You have heard plenty of 9/11 stories, but chances are you remember mostly the images. Friend makes the point that Americans who are old enough remember where they were when they _heard_ about JFK's shooting, but they remember where they were when they _saw_ the 9/11 terror attacks. The book is a lucid and fascinating recounting of how some of the most famous of the photographs came to be. It is not a coffee-table book full of photos; there are only forty or so reproduced here, but the recounting of the shots and the reflections on photography in the modern news era will make intense reading even for those who have seen the images over and over. And all of us have seen the images over and over; we cannot look away, which makes Friend's observations particularly pertinent.
The day was a perfect one for photography, a cloudless late-summer morning. When the first plane hit, cameras were already working at their previous jobs. There was an internet art exhibition that featured postcard panoramas of Manhattan every four seconds, the robot camera staring at the skyline and clicking away. One of its photos shows the tiny airplane approaching the north tower, the next smoke and dust issuing from the building, and the next a huge ball of fire. Thereafter, hundreds of photographers, with equipment ranging from the most expensive professional cameras to disposable cameras bought just for the event, started taking pictures, and by the time the second plane hit fifteen minutes later, the chaos was being completely documented. Some was immediately broadcast; some was censored by the photographers or by their news agencies. French television, for instance, tended to show people dropping from the buildings, some in pairs, some in groups, some holding hands, but American television tended not to show those last descents. As morbid as such pictures might be, families sought them out to get last glimpses of their loved ones. Photos sometimes had to stand in for remains during funerals, since photos lasted while bodies had vaporized. 9/11 happened as photographers were changing from film to digital images. (The book even reproduces a daguerreotype image of the burning towers, made by a photographer who had been using the ancient camera for a historic photo documentation project.) A decade before, rolls of film would have to be developed and distributed before they could be seen, but digital cameras not only allow for immediate assessment of the shot, they allow for its immediate forwarding to a potential publishing source.
Friend barely covers the crashes at the Pentagon and on the field in Pennsylvania, but he does allow his narrative to range on larger issues, such as the wishful thinking that allowed photographs to be interpreted as evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, or the lurid and shameful images someone just had to record of torture within Abu Ghraib, or the "heroic" shot of President Bush on his plane in deep concentration of his new responsibilities after the attacks. Friend writes that this photo, controversially used in Republican fundraising appeals, was promulgated to counter the image of the paralyzed man just sitting with first graders for seven confounded minutes after he learned of the attacks. For the most part, however, this is an absorbing reflection about the attacks on the twin towers, and on photography itself, its current technological forms, and its power to provoke, document, delude, and inspire.
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Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography
Timothy Dow Adams
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
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Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography
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Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
ASIN: 0807847925
Release Date: 1999-11-10 |
Book Description
On the surface, the use of photography in autobiography appears to have a straightforward purpose: to illustrate and corroborate the text. But in the wake of poststructuralism, the role of photography in autobiography is far from simple or one-dimensional. Both media are increasingly self-conscious, argues Timothy Adams, and combining them intensifies rather than reduces the complexity and ambiguity of each taken separately.
Focusing on works by Paul Auster, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Sandra Ortiz Taylor, N. Scott Momaday, Michael Ondaatje, Reynolds Price, Eudora Welty, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston, Adams explores the ways in which text and image can interact with and reflect on one another. Photography may stimulate, inspire, or seem to document autobiography, he demonstrates, but it may also confound verbal narrative. Conversely, autobiography may mediate, motivate, or even take the form of photography. Because both media exist on the border between fact and fiction, Adams argues, they often undercut just as easily as they reinforce each other. Exploring the interrelations between photography and autobiography uncovers an inherent tendency in both to conceal as much as they reveal.
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- Precious history.
- Let the eyes tell us what the picture means
- Precious Images
- A Picture is Worth...
- Great Pictures - Commentary Stinks
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Hidden Witness: African American Images from the Dawn of Photography to the Civil War
Jackie Napolean Wilson
Manufacturer: St Martins Pr
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ASIN: 0312245467 |
Amazon.com
The image is striking: A woman gazes serenely at the camera, baby cradled in her arms in classic Madonna-and-child pose. More striking is the fact that the sitters are black, and the photograph dates from 1860. Few photographs from the mid-19th century feature African Americans, enslaved or free. Those that do are often staged and reflect the biases of the photographer or the printmaker who published them. Others, however, provide glimpses of daily life before the abolition of slavery.
Renowned collector of early photographs Jackie Napolean Wilson has compiled 70 such images in Hidden Witness. Each photograph--whether an outdoor scene, where slaves are afterthoughts in the frame, so-called Mammy portraits of slaves holding white children, studio portraits of proud freemen and women--is accompanied by a brief explanation, contextualizing the image and speculating on the nature of the pictured relationships. Some of the subjects are famous, such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; others, though unknowns, carry a force of their own: the exuberant grin of the prizewinning boxer, the proud stance of a Union soldier, the quiet dignity of a slave nurse. A handsome addition to the history of African Americans and photography. --Sunny Delaney
Book Description
Whether as slaves or as freedmen, African-Americans were virtually invisible in American history during the l9th century. Although photography was introduced to this country in l840, precious few images of African-Americans survive today. Even after the Civil War there were not many African-American photographers, and very few black people had the time, money or freedom for a portrait sitting. Consequently, little photographic evidence remains to bear witness to the lives of four and a half million Americans of African descent.
Jackie Napolean Wilson, whose own grandfather was born a slave in South Carolina between l853 and l855, has assembled the most comprehensive and significant collection of such images ever brought together in one place. The concrete reality reflected in daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes presents these men and women in situations and attire that bring the truth of their daily lives much closer to us. Such scenes of maternal affection, matrimony, friendship, war and the grim reality of the master/slave relationship help focus our perception of the African- American experience in America in ways not otherwise available to the modern reader. Among these images is the only picture of Abraham Lincoln in the company of an African-American and the earliest known daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass (circa 1843).
Often anonymous, these photographers have left us a mirror, focussing distant light on the past of African-Americans in this country and putting an often invisible people on the historical record once and for all time.
Customer Reviews:
Precious history........2004-06-25
This book has photographs to treasure. To see black people at this period of history recorded in photographs is a precious thing. However, I must agree with the consensus that the text is worthless, which is why I didn't give the book five stars. I was not interested in the author's guesses about these people and many times he was actually obnoxious in his anxiety to make sure the reader saw the photographs with his spin on them.
Particularly moving, besides the portrait on the front of the woman and child were the memorial photograph of the dead baby, and the couple of photos of slaves lined up in front a plantation. It was interesting to see, although it was not the common experience that there were already so many black middle-class pre-slavery, or at least, so many blacks managed to dress up for even a one-time portrait. I have some older photos in my family and I know from that that people put their best foot forward and rented clothes that were better than their usual ones and so forth for portraits. Also, even in the 19th century it was possible to retouch photos and remove things that they did not want to be seen.
Let the eyes tell us what the picture means.......2002-05-20
The photographs are great!! I just wish that the author had let them speak for themselves, or if he felt that he must say something, tell us what he felt when looking at the photos. I don't think that there is a person over the age of 8 that doesn't know about the difficult times that African American faced and still face, but to add them as facts to the photographs is just a bit much. God I want just one book that has photographs of us that talk about our pride and strength seen in our eyes by the len.
Precious Images.......2002-01-26
These photographs are gorgeous. Many of the readers have probably never seen early photos of free and even prosperous proud ante-bellum black people. I would give this book five stars were it not for the commentary. Jackie Napoleon Wilson tries so hard to interpret the photos that he makes ridiculous assumptions. There is no way to know what was going on in these people's heads. As other reviewers have pointed out, becuase of the daugeretype's long exposure time the man in the photo on page 3 didn't just get caught in the scene he must have been posed. When Wilson says the woman and daughter on page 13 didn't have a close attachment he's speaking nonsense. How on earth can you tell that? Despite the commentary this book is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone who is interested in history.
A Picture is Worth..........2001-12-29
Normally a picture is worth a thousand words, not so in Wilson's case. This book would have been better left without text. Still, as a picture book, as a real hidden witness to a past that does not show much in the way of photo documentation, the book has worth. The daguerreotypes and rare photos give a glimpse to the lives of African-Americans before abolition. If the reader will become a looker only and search the photos for the truth, then this book will be a valuable source of enlightenment and understanding.
Great Pictures - Commentary Stinks.......2001-10-04
I picked this book up at the library. As I am also a collector of old photographs, I was intrigued. The book does contain a wonderful collection; it's worth looking at.
But as everyone has observed, I too found the commentary a source of concern and irritation. Much of it is total fabrication. That is definately a pair of rosary bead around the woman's neck on page 46. To claim otherwise is a deliberate intention to misdirect. The woman was far from thinking of her roots. She just wanted to leave a picture for her family to enjoy and remember her by.
Mr. Wilson is an author I will avoid from now on.
Book Description
In this work Robert M. Levine undertakes two separate and important tasks: to provide the first overview of the history of photography in Latin America until the advent of the cheap cameras that permitted mass photography, and to analyze the photographic record for clues to the use of the images as historical documents.
Levine has woven together an account of the development of photographic equipment and processes, with the artists and entrepreneurs who actually took the pictures, and places the emergence of photography firmly in the historical context of Latin American societies.
Treating the photographs themselvesâsome 225 in allâLevine develops criteria for questions we can ask of the photographs in an attempt to extract emotional, psychological, and personal information, as well as the more obvious material evidence. This is an often subjective process, one that can lead to differing results, and observers may well come to conclusions departing radically from those of the author. But this may well be one of the most important functions of an innovative work, the creation of controversy that stimulates forward motion in a discipline.
Customer Reviews:
Comprehensive history of photography in Latin America.......1998-10-08
In addition to a crisp survey of photography in Latin America from the earliest days in the 1840s to the 20th century, the author shows how the photographic images may be used as social documents for historical research. This path-breaking approach values the visual images for what they reveal about society and people's lives. Of great value to researchers and readers who wish to know about how photographs--even if not taken by famous photographers--tell us about vanished times. A must read for students of historical methodology and visual sociology.
Book Description
On V.J. Day in Times Square, ?a sailor kissing a pretty girl ?he's never met before is caught ?in the act. Newly arrived European immigrants at Ellis Island gaze at the camera with ?a mix of apprehension and hope. A groundbreaking still life artfully eroticizes the curves ?and shadows of a twisted bell pepper. These are a few of the more ?than 150 photographs collected in American Photography that document a century of our ?national experience. Whether viewed as a purely artistic medium, a tool for influencing ?public opinion, or a recorder of events both public and personal, photography has been a ?powerful and intimate vehicle for ?communicating our values and our dreams. Focusing on one or more images for each ?year, this companion book to the PBS series considers some of the century's best-known ?photographs as well as everyday snapshots, examining the diverse roles photography ?has played in shaping our lives. From the one-dollar Brownie snapshot of a baby in 1900 ?to ?the awesome potential of computer-enhanced images at the brink of the millennium, ?American Photography covers a range of styles, formats, and subjects as diverse as the ?nation they sprang from. Richly detailed, authoritative, and abundantly illustrated, ?American Photography is a landmark look at the pictures we have taken, and where they ?have taken us.
Customer Reviews:
A century of beauty.......2000-05-01
This has to be my favorite of all the century photo books that came out. The images cover a wide range of subject and intrest, with very few graffic images of wars or violence. It is a wonderful addition to my coffee table!
american photography: a century of images.......2000-01-07
"american photography: a century of images" By Vicki Goldberg and Robert Silberman 1999 A companion to the major PBS series Publisher: Chronicle Books 232 pages
american photography: a century of images
If you only have one book about photography in your home library, this should be the book. Marilyn Dalrymple, reviewer
This is a truly beautiful, fascinating and informational volume. "American photography: a century of images," traces the history of photography from 1900 to 1999. It is not just the mundane, "cameras were invented--color film made its debut in . . . , or Steichen, Adams Avedon were known for . . . ," however. A blurb from the book's cover notes, "New York Times photography critic Vicki Goldberg and art historian Robert Silberman, senior consultants to the PBS series, show how profoundly photography has helped shape the life of our nation, examining it in the realms of home life, advertising, science, news, propaganda, fashion, and celebrity stardom."
"One of photography's great gifts has always been to make possible many kinds of vicarious experience," says the introduction to an article about National Geographic magazine. Photography brought foreign peoples and foreign places into our homes. On the other hand, "Even our worst faults were put before the world's eyes by our photographers because of the extent of our media industry and the openess of our press," say Goldberg and Silberman. These two examples illustrate the awesome power photography possesses.
The first use of halftone screens and the regular publication of photographs in magazines and newspapers (1897, The New York Tribune); the first American photo magazine (Life); the first horrific photographs of war. The image that showed the stars so clearly that the first catalogue of stellar positions based on photographic measurements appeared in 1885; images that proved scientific theories and made social reform possible. Photographs that showed the world how evil the family of man can be. Images that portray the wonder and beauty of our world. All are illustrated and discussed in this one volume.
Well written, compelling, and beautifully illustrated, this book is well worth the price.
Marilyn Dalrymple
New York Times Book Review, Sunday, Dec. 19, 1999.......1999-12-25
"...the photography critic Vicki Goldberg and the art historian Robert Silberman have neatly divided the century into three chronological parts and written 30 brief essays, each focusing on notable aspects, from a photographic point of view, of a particular period. From the authors' vantage point, it certainly seems as though the first two-thirds of the century are when the innovation, energy, passion and commitment are, and the last period is more analytical and self-referential -- rather like life itself. There is a photogoraph for each year of the century, plus others to illustrate chosen themes like war photography or the rise of the news agencies. Goldberg (who also writes about photography for The Times) and Silberman have succeeded in bringing a semblance of order to the past century of photography and have given a lively and informative overview of its many facets."
Book Description
Jack and Jackie sailing at Hyannis Port. President Kennedy smiling and confident with the radiant first lady by his side in Dallas shortly before the assassination. The Zapruder film. Jackie Kennedy mourning at the funeral while her small son salutes the coffin. These images have become larger than life; more than simply photographs of a president, or of celebrities, or of a tragic event, they have an extraordinary power to captivate--today as in their own time. In Shooting Kennedy, David Lubin speculates on the allure of these and other iconic images of the Kennedys, using them to illuminate the entire American cultural landscape. He draws from a spectacularly varied intellectual and visual terrain--neoclassical painting, Victorian poetry, modern art, Hollywood films, TV sitcoms--to show how the public came to identify personally with the Kennedys and how, in so doing, they came to understand their place in the world. This heady mix of art history, cultural history, and popular culture offers an evocative, consistently entertaining look at twentieth-century America.
Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Donna Reed, Playboy magazine, Jack Ruby, the Rosenbergs, and many more personalities, little-known events, and behind-the-scenes stories of the era enliven Lubin's account as he unlocks the meaning of these photographs of the Kennedys. Elegantly conceived, witty, and intellectually daring, Shooting Kennedy becomes a stylish meditation on the changing meanings of visual phenomena and the ways they affect our thinking about the past, the present, and the process of history.
Customer Reviews:
Camelot Rewritten.......2003-11-27
Of the books that have been published on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination on display in my local bookstore, which include memorial editions of LIFE and LOOK magazine that compile all the iconic photos of that time (and sponsored by the History Channel in one case), SHOOTING KENNEDY is a bracing antidote to the lachrymose nonsense posing as historical insight and edifying remembrance that litter the publishing landscape.
In SHOOTING KENNEDY, Lubin employs a process that in post-modern cultural critique has become the prevailing strategy: the Dadaist practice of placing on the dissection table the sewing machine and the umbrella and reporting on their encounter. SHOOTING KENNEDY may, thus, for some readers, seem a bizarre and desacralizing example of the kind of "relativistic" post-modern cultural criticism that upends and sabotages the "milestone event" narrations of history by treating everything as a cultural text, everything as grist for the cultural critique mill.
As an example of this technique, Lubin, late in the book, examines a LIFE magazine spread showing a liquor ad featuring a dandy tipping his hat in salute on the page facing the famous photo of John John's salute of his father's passing coffin. He then offers a disquisition on the suggested birth of the salute in the era of the knight errant, who it is believed, lifted up the visor on his helmet to show another knight his eyes to show he intended no harm. He then goes on to discuss the notion of Camelot as a metaphor for the Kennedy presidency, and then ties in JFK's boyhood reading during his sickly childhood of romantic tales of knighthood by Sir Walter Scott and others.
To the average reader of political history, this will seem an inappropriate invasion of one discipline into the precincts of another -- in this case materials of history and politics examined with theories and tools of art criticism. The similarities Lubin finds between notable paintings from the Western canon and news photos of the Kennedy's and JFK's assassination will seem superfluous, beside the point. So will the parallels he finds between the structure of the Zapruder film and the standard Hollywood movie both now and then. Average readers will be more comfortable with coincidence as the principle behind the suggestive links he finds in history and art,(e.g., Oswald jumping onto the stage in the Dallas movie theater where he sought to hide from the police, John Wilkes Booth jumping onto the stage of the Ford Theater after shooting Lincoln, the Nazi villain in Lubitsch¹s "To Be or Not to Be" being chased onto the stage before being captured and killed), and less comfortable with the idea that life and art are inseparable and dialogic. This approach may seem destabilizing and even decadent. Lubin admits as much. Indeed, he often recognizes that his approach may serve to cast dirt on the icons whose images and histories he examines. He explains that this is not his intent; one's reaction will depend entirely upon whether mentioning Camelot and the Beverly Hillbillies in the same breath seems appropriate.
The post-modern argument has come to prevail in the academy, although in fact it was never really all that radical a position to begin with: reasonable readers of history always recognized that whatever claims to the contrary, historians came to their work with agendas (even "objectivity" is an agenda). Historians, like art historians and art critics develop followings depending on both their skills as a storyteller as well as by how well they support their version of history in their selection of and retelling of facts. In both cases, what emerges always is the sensibility of the critic. There are schools of history in the same way there are schools of art and art criticism.
Still, even accepting the post-modern notions of the text, Lubin's selection of facts and materials has something of the magpie about it -- meaning that his choices, while mostly hits are occasional misses. For instance, how relevant is it that Marat's assassin was the same age as Lee Harvey Oswald? This "insight" is one of those stray facts that pose as enlightening but are not. It is the same kind of quasi-fascinating fact that conspiracy theorists yoke together in their fantastic farragoes. Incidentally, Lubin does an excellent job on the cultural output of these re-writers of the circumstances of the assassination. He takes no sides, he only examines their output in conjunction with that of other forms of reportage, history and journalism.
Altogether an illuminating, creative, and corrective work of criticism.
Average customer rating:
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The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of Fsa Photography
Nicholas Natanson
Manufacturer: University of Tennessee Press
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Binding: Paperback
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Enterprising Images: The Goodridge Brothers, African American Photographers, 1847-1922 (Great Lakes Books)
John Vincent Jezierski
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