From one of America's most distinguished and quirkily gifted photographers, a wildly original book of images that chronicles--and critiques--the curiously familiar social life of bugs. Barbara Norfleet loves bugs for both their beauty and their strangeness, and the fact that they've been on earth so much longer than the human race that they make us look like new kids on the block. In this remarkable collection, she sets out to explore her own vision of bug society--its feelings, its relationships and rituals, its neuroses and malaises at the end of what is, after all, just one more millennium in bug history. From a grasshopper poised triumphantly atop a rock and a spindly-armed pair of Harlequin beetles dancing, to a group of twittering bugs gathered to watch the sun set, a beetle beauty pageant, and a bug hanging, Norfleet captures with extraordinary humor and perception an amazing reflection of our own experience and feelings. Most wonderful of all is what we are led to discover--that bugs are us.

The Illusion of Orderly Progress

Arts & Photography

Norfleet, Barbara

Individual Artists

KNOPF

A historical record in words and pictures of American society in the years following the Second World War. After World War II, the prevalent self-image among America's white middle class was one of affluence, moral superiority, and contentment. This image is reflected in photographs in both advertising and the media during the late 1940s and 1950s showing perfect citizens and their families at work and at play. Many of these apparently candid photographs were in fact created by professional studio photographers―to portray the way most middle-class Americans wanted to present themselves. But what many contemporary artists and intellectuals saw instead of this idyllic picture was widespread complacency and conformity, as well as racism, poverty, political witch hunts, and alienation. Their writings are excerpted here, juxtaposed with images depicting domestic bliss and wealth. This dissonance between the words of the social critics who emphasized our problems and discontents and the photographic images of how we wanted to see ourselves make the subsequent upheavals of the 1960s understandable. 170 duotone photographs

When We Liked Ike: Looking for Postwar America

Photography & Video

W.W.Norton&Company

Looking at Death

David R Godine, Publishers Gripptng and often shocklng photographs of and about deat Before the scientific advances of the 20th century death was a common and close companion, an expected visitor in infancy, childhood and adulthood. But death in our culture has became a taboo subject, the ultimate obscenity, a prospect of terror, and near disbelief. This extraordinary book, assembled from the archives of Harvard University, offers an unflinching look at death by violence, by suicide, by old age and disease. Essays by the author accompan the six sections, probing our responses and raising questions about the images on display in each section.

David R. Godine, Publisher

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Books by Norfleet, Barbara