Reading American Photographs

Considers five documentary sequences or narratives: the antebellum portraits of Mathew Brady and others; the Civil War albums of Alexander Gardner, George Barnard and A.J. Russell; the Western survey and landscape photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan, A.J. Russell, and Carleton Watkins; and social photographs and texts by Alfred Stieglitz and Lewis Hine; as well as documentaries inspired by the Depression, esp. Walker Evans's American Photographs.

The use of the visual arts to show us our own moral and economic situation has today fallen almost completely into the hands of the photographer. It is for him to fix and to reveal the whole aspect of our society: to record for use in the future our disasters and our claims to divinity. Walker Evans, photographing in New England or Louisiana, watching a Cuban political funeral or a Mississippi flood, working cautiously so as to disturb nothing in the normal atmosphere of the average place, can be considered a kind of disembodied, burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His photographs are the records of contemporary civilization in eastern American.~In the reproductions presented here, two large divisions have been made. The photographs are arranged to be seen in their given sequence. In the first part, which might be labeled "People by Photography," we have an aspect of America for which it would be difficult to claim too much. The physiognomy of a nation is laid on your table. In the second part are pictures which refer to the continuous fact of an indigenous American expression, whatever its source, whatever form it has taken, whether in sculpture, paint, or architecture: that native accent we find again in Kentucky mountain and cowboy ballads and in contemporary swing-music. --from the jacket of the 1938 edition~More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the image of essential America that we have long since accepted as fact. His work, presented in stark and prototypical form in American Photographs, has made its impact not only on photography but also on modern literature, film, and the traditional visual arts. First published in 1938 by The Museum of Modern Art, American Photographs has often been out of print. This edition uses duotone plates made for the 1988 edition from original prints, and makes Evans' landmark book available again. The design and typography have been recreated as precisely as possible.

Dogs are as ubiquitous in American culture as white picket fences and apple pie, embracing all the meanings of wholesome domestic life—family, fidelity, comfort, protection, nurturance, and love—as well as symbolizing some of the less palatable connotations of home and family, including domination, subservience, and violence. In Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves, Ann-Janine Morey presents a collection of antique photographs of dogs and their owners in order to investigate the meanings associated with the canine body. Included are reproductions of 115 postcards, cabinet cards, and cartes de visite that feature dogs in family and childhood snapshots, images of hunting, posed studio portraits, and many other settings between 1860 and 1950. These photographs offer poignant testimony to the American romance with dogs and show how the dog has become part of cultural expressions of race, class, and gender. Animal studies scholars have long argued that our representation of animals in print and in the visual arts has a profound connection to our lived cultural identity. Other books have documented the depiction of dogs in art and photography, but few have reached beyond the subject’s obvious appeal. Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves draws on animal, visual, and literary studies to present an original and richly contextualized visual history of the relationship between Americans and their dogs. Though the personal stories behind these everyday photographs may be lost to us, their cultural significance is not.

Examines how photography helped define the ways Latin Americans came to see themselves and the world. Levine (history, U. of Miami) focuses on the evolution of Latin American photography from it's earliest origins in the late 1830s to the rise of mass communications and the accompanying saturation of the public with photographic images of the 1920s and 30s. Includes some 225 photos. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Chronicles Lange's career with over 150 photographs, from her early work documenting the Depression to her photo-essays of the 1940s and 1950s depicting a changing American society--Cover.