Shadow Catchers

Sixty of Edward Curtis' photographs are included in this story of his life and the Native American cultures he studied early in the twentieth century, creating what is still the most extensive and informative collection of its kind.

The very first photographs of the nineteenth century were produced without the use of a camera. Today, having rediscovered camera-less techniques, a number of artists are using camera-less photography to create beautiful, startling images. Now available in an updated and fully revised edition, Shadow Catchers surveys the work of five leading practitioners – Pierre Cordier, Susan Derges, Adam Fuss, Garry Fabian Miller and Floris Neusüss – who, by casting shadows on light- sensitive paper or by chemically manipulating its surface, capture the presence of objects, figures or glowing light. The resulting pictures are consistently powerful, often with surreal effects and symbolic content. This is the first book to gather together the work of these key contemporary artists, revealing the technical processes and creative practices involved in their art. In an age of mass-produced imagery, Shadow Catchers offers a fascinating insight into a world of handcrafted photographs that are at once visually striking and intellectually stimulating.

Inspired by the life of legendary photographer Edward Curtis, a series of tales about a photographer's developing relationship with the Native Americans he astonishes by showing them pictures of themselves is interspersed with parallel tales about an unsung soldier, a husband, and a father. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.

Edward Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer, and a famous photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time. He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudevill stars, leading thinkers. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continent's original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.

FBI Special Agent Mike Yeager is in trouble. His most recent case---a child kidnapping, his usual---ended tragically, and the FBI has suspended him. Worse, Mike can't seem to forgive himself. He's run away from everything he knows in Philadelphia to the mountains of Nevada in an attempt to forget. Now in Nevada, he's stumbled into the world of a killer: in the small town of San Cristobal, one child was killed accidentally---or so it seems---a few weeks before Mike's arrival. The day after he shows up, an adult is murdered, and soon another child disappears. Mike doesn't want to get involved, but he can't help himself, first because as a stranger in town he's got to prove to the local law enforcement that he's not the killer, and second, because he's in the perfect place to solve the case and redeem himself in the eye of the FBI. Not to mention that at least one more child's life is at stake. Thomas Lakeman is one of those rare talents who has composed a first novel that doesn't read like a debut at all, but instead is written with the precision and tightly drawn suspense of one of the genre's masters.

From the author of the Aurealis-winning Kumiko and the Dragon comes the final captivating book in the Kumiko and the Dragon trilogy.Kumiko is used to having a dragon guarding her night and day, but what she doesn't quite know is why she needs one ... Since discovering the secret of the Shadow Catchers, a group of powerful sorcerers determined to steal magic at any cost, Kumiko knows it's only a matter of time before her family's link to dragons puts them all in grave danger. Is there a way to stop the Shadow Catchers once and for all and will Kumiko take the risk? Kumiko and the Shadow Catchers follows Kumiko's last and most exciting adventure as she travels through a world of shadows and dark magic in order to find freedom for herself and the kingdom of dragons.

Following her National Book Award finalist, Evidence of Things Unseen, Marianne Wiggins turns her extraordinary literary imagination to the American West, where the life of legendary photographer Edward S. Curtis is the basis for a resonant exploration of history and family, landscape and legacy. The Shadow Catcher dramatically inhabits the space where past and present intersect, seamlessly interweaving narratives from two different eras: the first fraught passion between turn-of-the-twentieth-century icon Edward Curtis (1868-1952) and his muse-wife, Clara; and a twenty-first-century journey of redemption. Narrated in the first person by a reimagined writer named Marianne Wiggins, the novel begins in Hollywood, where top producers are eager to sentimentalize the complicated life of Edward Curtis as a sunny biopic: "It's got the outdoors. It's got adventure. It's got the do-good element." Yet, contrary to Curtis's esteemed public reputation as servant to his nation, the artist was an absent husband and disappearing father. Jump to the next generation, when Marianne's own father, John Wiggins (1920-1970), would live and die in equal thrall to the impulse of wanderlust. Were the two men running from or running to? Dodging the false beacons of memory and legend, Marianne amasses disparate clues -- photographs and hospital records, newspaper clippings and a rare white turquoise bracelet -- to recover those moments that went unrecorded, "to hear the words only the silent ones can speak." The Shadow Catcher, fueled by the great American passions for love and land and family, chases the silhouettes of our collective history into the bright light of the present.

Contains photographs of working cinematographers from 1901 to the present, with historical text, biographies of Australian cinematographers & fascinating personal anecdotes from the film industry. Reveals little-known information about the role of cinematographers in Australian cinema, & challenges popular conceptions of our national film history.