Aperture

In the early 1980s, Barbara Crane embarked on a series of photographs shot during Chicago's various summer festivals. Using a Super Speed Graphic camera and Polaroid film, Crane waded in close to the revelers, tracking down the details of their clothing, hairstyles and gestures. The images are tightly cropped and condensed and therefore terrifically alive, bringing us viscerally into the crush of people eating, drinking and enjoying the crowd dynamic. Crane's instrument of choice, the Polaroid, is of course admirably up to the task. As she comments, «The quick feedback of the instant picture is in tune with this energetic style of photographing. This immediacy of result shortens the time it would take my ideas to grow visually, technically and emotionally. What takes a summer of work with Polaroid materials would take three years of picture taking and darkroom time to bring my ideas to fruition.» An incredible inventory of private gestures performed in public spaces, Private Views offers a sun-drenched, sweat-glistening photographic experience. The effect is mesmerizing and intensely compelling, creating a palpable sensuality from image to image, an incredible document--not of a particular event or personalities--but of something less tangible: the public expression of euphoria.

Throughout his tenure as a registry clerk with the Immigration Division of Ellis Island, Augustus F. Sherman systematically photographed more than 200 families, groups, and individuals while they were being held by customs for special investigations. This volume collects and provides an essential revaluation of Sherman's striking portraits, which predate August Sander's cataloging efforts by several years. A historical document of unprecedented worth, Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits includes almost one-hundred portraits taken from 1905 through 1920. The subjects are frequently dressed in elaborate national costumes or folk dress, emphasizing the variety and richness of the cultural heritage that came together to form the United States. Romanian shepherds, German stowaways, Russian vegetarians, Greek priests, and Ghanaian women in elaborately patterned dresses, are treated with equal gravitas. The resulting body of work presents a unique and powerful picture of the stream of immigrants who came through Ellis Island. In its time, the material contributed to the larger project of ethnographic categorization and typology typical of the early twentieth century, much as Edward S. Curtis's portraits romanticized the «last Indians» or John Thomson's «Street Life in London» identified and codified social class in the late 1800s. Though originally taken for his own personal study, Sherman's work appeared in the public eye as illustrations for publications with titles such as «Alien or American», and hung on the walls of the custom offices as cautionary or exemplary models of the new American species. In this book, Peter Mesenh ller, Research Associate with the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum of Anthropology in Cologne, Germany, provides new critical context and analysis of this rich collection, but also addresses the individual images as powerful, engaging photographs created by a master portraitist. The publication is accompanied by a traveling exhibition that will open at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in the summer of 2005.

Expanded from an earlier catalogue of the same title, Still Time originally accompanied a traveling exhibition featuring more than 20 years of Sally Mann's photography. Now available in paperback, this volume celebrates an artist whose acute perceptions and imagination embrace not only the photographs of children for which she is renowned, but also earlier landscapes and some unexpected, compelling forays into color and abstract photography. The 60 images include abstract platinum prints, Cibachromes and Polaroids, landscapes, portraits of women and 12-year-olds and her celebrated family pictures. Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, where she continues to live and work. Among her many awards are three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Corcoran Museum of Art, to name just a few. Her books of photographs include Immediate Family and At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women.

In Photography After Frank, former New York Times writer and picture editor Philip Gefter narrates the tale of contemporary photography, beginning at the pivotal moment when Robert Frank commenced his seminal works of the 1950s. Along the way, he connects the dots of photography's evolution into what it is today, forging links between its episodes to reveal unsuspected leaps. Gefter takes Frank's The Americans as a decisive challenge to photographic objectivity, with its grainy, off-hand-seeming spontaneity and its documentation of life beyond the picket fence. Thus viewed, The Americans provides Gefter with a bridge to the phenomenon of the staged document and Postmodernism's further challenge to image fidelity. Other areas of discussion include photojournalism, the recent diversity of portraiture styles, the influence of private and corporate collections on curatorial decisions and how the market shapes art making. Throughout Photography After Frank, Gefter deftly demonstrates Frank's legacy in the work of dozens of important individual artists who followed in his wake, from Lee Friedlander and Nan Goldin to Stephen Shore and Ryan McGinley. The book includes texts written exclusively for this publication as well as essays drawn from Gefter's critical writings, reviews and even obituaries. Photography After Frank offers a page-turning approach to a subject that will appeal to students and art world aficionados alike.

Founded by photographer and writer Sara Terry, the nonprofit Aftermath Project documents the long-term repercussions of conflict that are so often neglected by the popular media. Terry, whose work has been widely exhibited at such venues as the United Nations and the Museum of Photography in Antwerp, initiated this project after her extensive documentary work on postwar Bosnia. Through grant competitions and partnerships with other institutions, Aftermath disseminates reportage on postconflict rehabilitation and attempts to create new avenues for peace. War Is Only Half the Story presents the winners of the Aftermath Project's first annual grant competition: Jim Goldberg, whose project The New Europeans records the struggles of asylum seekers and immigrants; Wolf Bowig, whose The Forgotten Island: Narratives of War in Sierra Leone (second place) is recounted through the eyes of five-year-old Morie, the sole survivor of an attack on Bonthe Island; and runners-up Andrew Stanbridge (postwar reconstruction in Laos), Asim Rafiqui (the hidden costs of war and peace-building efforts in Kashmir) and Paula Luttringer (a survey of sites in Argentina where women and their children were abducted between 1976 and 1983). The imagery in this volume represents some of today's most challenging and diverse documentary work.

In 1968, Josef Koudelka was a 30-year-old acclaimed theater photographer who had never made pictures of a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21, when Warsaw Pact tanks invaded the city of Prague, ending the short-lived political liberalization in Czechoslovakia that came to be known as Prague Spring. Koudelka had returned home the day before from photographing gypsies in Romania. In the midst of the turmoil of the Soviet-led invasion, he took a series of photographs which were miraculously smuggled out of the country. A year after they reached New York, Magnum Photos distributed the images credited to an unknown Czech photographer to avoid reprisals. The intensity and significance of the images earned the still-anonymous photographer the Robert Capa Award. Sixteen years would pass before Koudelka could safely acknowledge authorship. Forty years after the invasion, this impressive monograph features nearly 250 of these searing images-most of them published here for the first time-personally selected by Koudelka from his extensive archive. Interspersed with the images are press and propaganda quotations from the time, also selected by Koudelka, alongside a text by three Czech historians. Though the images gathered in this remarkable publication document a specific historical event, their transformative quality still resonates.

Martin Parr's vast collections of photography books and postcards are world-renowned. Unbeknownst to many, he is also an obsessive collector of photographic and themed objects. In Parrworld: Objects and Postcards, a luscious two-volume set, his affinity for focused accumulation is presented with appropriate thoroughness, and with typical Parrian humor. Some of the items in the first volume, Objects, have already achieved notoriety — for instance, the wrist watches featuring Saddam Hussein's visage. Others mythologize well-known figures such as Lenin and the Spice Girls. Then there is the kitsch — from wallpaper to trays and objects commemorating Sputnik, Charles and Di's wedding and 9/11. While Objects is the first publication to document Parr's 25-plus years of such collecting, Postcards is the last word on an extraordinary collection of over 20,000 cards. Presented in album format, it is a highly entertaining yet serious study of postcard history, and includes early cards that depict local news events such as car crashes and murders. The book finishes in Boring Postcards territory with a selection of cards promoting motorways and shopping. Objects is introduced by Parr and Postcards features an introduction by Thomas Weski, curator of the companion exhibition, Parrworld, This remarkably designed set is bound to appeal to a wide audience, but in particular to Parr collectors who thought they already owned everything Parr. Martin Parr, born in Epsom, England in 1952, is the author of more than 30 photography books, including Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight, Boring Postcards and Mexico, His photographs are held by museums worldwide, including the J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate Modern, London. Parr is a member of Magnum Photos.

Australian photographer Matthew Sleeth is a consummate observer, exploring the world around him with an acute and often humorous eye. His latest project, Ten Series/106 Photographs, emphasizes how the sequencing of images as an essential part of creating photographic meaning, a conceit with precedents in the work of Ed Ruscha and others. Sleeth's playfulness, wry sensibility, and unorthodox visual style, however, also recall practicing photographers like Lars Tunbjork and Lee Friedlander. With its range of typologies, Ten Series/106 Photographs is varied and eclectic. Topics include Japanese women in uniform, tagged trees and plants in an arboretum, Red China, and Mount Fuji, inspired by old Japanese prints but with each image taken from a modern vantage point. Through its casual exploration of these disparate themes, Ten Series/106 Photographs offers a view of a contemporary world that is structured on somewhat arbitrary types, categories, and systems of classification, all the while making allusions to the role that photography has played in this process.

These essays address us in the quiet voice of a working photographer, an artist and craftsman who has thought long and seriously about his endeavor, who has tested and questioned his own assumptions in the light of actual practice. The result is a rare book of criticism, one that is alive to the pleasure and mysteries of true exploration. Written over a ten-year period, and originally published in 1981, this timeless collection of writings now includes a new preface by the author. Robert Adams possesses the wit to avoid cant, dogma, and platitudes of the scholar that can deaden our responses to the lively business of art. His eight essays pose a host of questions about photography's place in the arts — and in our lives: How is photography art? By what standards are we to judge the success or failure of a photograph? His reflections are delicate, unusually calm, but they also carry the force of sure conviction, the passion of absolute dedication. Few visual artists are capable of articulating the subtle, potent wellsprings of their own creative achievement. Adams does so with extraordinary grace and power. This book offers not only an insight to the work of a distinguished photographer, but also an illuminating challenge and corrective to the usual pieties and pettiness of photography criticism today.