Emmet Gowin has been taking aerial photographs of the landscape in the United States, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Asia, and the Middle East for over twenty years. In his most compelling photographs, one witnesses how man’s footprint has visually scarred and continually altered the earth’s surface. This extraordinary book, published in conjunction with the first major touring exhibition of Gowin’s photographs in over ten years, focuses on images created after 1986. That was the year Gowin began to extend his aerial photography explorations in America by recording images of military test sites, missile silos, ammunition storage and disposal facilities, coal mining, pivot irrigation, offroad motor traffic, and more. The book also surveys his more recent works, which focus on other regions of the world, including the battlefields of Kuwait, new golf courses in Japan, and the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic. Gowin’s richly toned black-and-white images have been characterized as “immorally gorgeous,” since at a distance even his most disturbing images can appear to be beautiful. In this exquisitely produced volume, Jock Reynolds provides an overview of Gowin’s aerial photography and places it in the context of his earlier work and that of such photographers as Carleton Watkins, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Frederick Sommer. Philip Brookman illuminates Gowin’s recent work in the Czech Republic, while Terry Tempest Williams discusses Gowin’s images from the American West, especially his Nevada Test Site series.

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth

Arts & Photography

Philip Brookman

Terry Tempest Williams

Jock Reynolds

Russell, Lord

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Yale University Art Gallery

Helios Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change

Steidl

Robert Frank: An Exhibition of Photography and Films

Individual Artists

Sesnon Gallery

Suzanne Helmuth and Jock Reynolds: Photographas and Documents, 1975-1985

Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery

Robert Frank (1924-) is one of the most influential of the post-war photographers. Emigrating to the US in 1947, he began working in fashion and the advertising industry for magazines like Life, Fortune and The New York Times. A year later he left to travel through South America and Europe, shooting in Peru, Bolivia, London, Wales and France. Some of these images were published in Life and in the book Indiens Pas Morts. In 1955 he became the first European photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. He used it to take a road-trip across the States, shooting scenes of ordinary American life, deliberately retaining the imperfections of the printing process in stark contrast to the perfectionism of contemporaries like Ansel Adams and Minor White. The resulting book, The Americans, radically changed the language of photography, gave rise to a new distinct art form in the photo-book and questioned the authority of the photograph as document. Published to accompany the major retrospective exhibition of Frank in the UK, Robert Frank will survey a career that has continued to develop and break new ground since the 1950s. Photographs from locations including Peru, London, Wales, Detroi

Robert Frank : Storylines

Tate Gallery Publishing

Portrait photographer extraordinaire I?m not so much interested in documenting as in expressing my impressions of the individuals with the constantly expanding narrative means of my medium. ?Arnold Newman Piet Mondrian behind his easel, Igor Stravinsky at his piano, Max Ernst sitting smoking on his throne-like chair: the photographs of Arnold Newman (1918-2006) are classics of portraiture. His subtle arrangements constituted the foundations of ?environmental portraiture.? His photographs integrate the respective artist's characteristic equipment and surroundings, thus indicating his or her field of activity. The enormous fame of Newman's portraits can be ascribed to their daring compositions and sometimes astounding spatial structures. The photographer's beginnings, however, were none too promising. During the Great Depression, Newman had to abandon his art studies for financial reasons. Between 1938 and 1942 he concentrated on socio-documentary photography in the ghettos of West Palm Beach, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. One might think that being forced to earn his living in a photography studio would have stifled his artistic potential: Newman portrayed up to 70 clients a day. Yet he still succeeded in developing a very personal touch and establishing himself in the New York art scene of the early 1940s. His subjects included Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Alexander Calder among many others. With his unmistakable style, Newman became the star photographer of artists, writers, and musicians. This new edition, which includes recent work and an updated biography, provides a sweeping overview of Newman's illustrious career. The author: Philip Brookmanis curator of photography and media art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington. Brookman's projects include the exhibition and book Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks, and the touring exhibitions and books Raised by Wolves: Photographs and Documents by Jim Goldberg, and Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry for the Corcoran Gallery.

Arnold Newman

Taschen

By way of follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut monograph Sleeping by the Mississippi, Alec Soth turns his eye to another iconic body of water, Niagara Falls. And as with his photographs of the Mississippi, these images are less about natural wonder than human desire. "I went to Niagara for the same reason as the honeymooners and suicide jumpers," says Soth, "the relentless thunder of the Falls just calls for big passion." The subject may be hot, but the pictures are quiet, the rigorously composed and richly detailed products of a large-format 8x10 camera. Working over the course of two years on both the American and Canadian sides of the Falls, Soth edited the results of his labors down to a tight and surprising album. He depicts newlyweds and naked lovers, motel parking lots, pawnshop wedding rings and love letters from the subjects he photographed. We read about teenage crushes, workplace affairs, heartbreak and suicide. Oscar Wilde wrote, "The sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life." Niagara brings viewers both the passion and the disappointment--a remarkable portrayal of modern love and its aftermath.

NIAGARA

ALEC SOTH

Richard, Ford

In 1878, the Photographic Times claimed that ten minutes provided sufficient exposure for photographing a landscape. Six years earlier, an English immigrant to the West Coast named Eadweard Muybridge, going by the commercial name of Helios, had already pushed photography far in the opposite direction: not to soak up time into pictures, but to divide time with the quickest exposures then imaginable. In 1872, the tycoon Leland Stanford had commissioned Muybridge to photograph his horse, Occident, to determine whether it ever lifted all four hooves off the ground at once. In proving that this was indeed the case, Muybridge achieved a five-hundredth-of-a-second exposure, and so began an anatomy of motion-in humans, horses, birds-that exploded the possibilities of photography and ultimately led to the development of the motion picture. Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change offers an opportunity to trace the life and art of the great photographer. In the wake of a wave of recent scholarship and renewed interest, it pitches his entire body of work against the backdrop of one of the most transformative periods of American and European history. Published to accompany a retrospective exhibition organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Helios features essays by Philip Brookman, Marta Braun, Corey Keller and Rebecca Solnit that provide a variety of new approaches to Muybridge's art and influences.Born in England, Eadweard J. Muybridge (1830-1904) moved to the United States in his early twenties, working as a bookseller for nearly ten years, until, after a stagecoach accident, he learned photography while convalescing in England. Returning to San Francisco in 1867, operating under the name of Helios, he commenced the work that was to secure his fame.

Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change

Andy Grundberg

Rebecca Solnit

Marta Braun

Corey Keller

Photography & Video

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Books by Philip Brookman