The Photographer S Friend

What is a friend? In this beautiful photographic portrait, 100 talented photographers, including a number of Pulitzer Prize winners, answer this question as they vividly render this fragile, yet powerful, essential bond. Selected from more than 40,000 global entries in one of the most ambitious photographic competitions ever staged, the images reproduced in this book are part of the M.I.L.K. Collection: Moments of Intimacy, Laughter, and Kinship. These engaging photographs depict the powerful connection of friendship that lights up life in both good times and bad. The M.I.L.K. project was conceived to "celebrate humanity," including the honoring of what it is to be a friend. As Maeve Binchy so poignantly describes in her prologue, "as a teacher, a traveler and a writer, I have wandered many places in the world, always and everywhere being touched by images of friendship. Tiny children going to school in Bali, picking huge banana leaves to shelter each other when tropical rain storms threatened their immaculate white shirts. Two old men in Athens, so lost in their daily chess game that they were unaware of the traffic swirling around and tourists pushing past them... Boys in Scotland who were playing brilliant football in an old yard with their folded jackets serving as the goal posts... Shoppers in New York clutching each other with excitement at the thought of the next bargain possibly around the next corner." Open yourself to the wonders of this magnificent volume. In these pages you will truly find yourself among friends.

Heinrich Hoffmann was the photographer to kings, princes, and the glitterati of the first half of the 20th Century. His archive of images ran into the millions and he grew to be rich and moderately famous. An assistant in London to Emil Otto Hoppé, the undisputed leader of pictorial portraiture in Europe at the time, Hoffmann returned to Germany, progressed through the tumult of WWI into the chaos of the Weimar, and there he came into contact with an idealist with a growing following—Adolf Hitler. As official ‘court’ photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann played a critical role in the painstaking cultivation of Hitler’s public image and the glorification of the Third Reich. However, his influence stretched far beyond the realm of propaganda: not only was he present during many of the key moments in the history of the Third Reich, he was also a close, personal friend of the Führer, with exclusive and intimate access to Hitler’s inner circle and to the man himself. It was Hoffmann who introduced Hitler to Eva Braun, his studio assistant. It was also Hoffmann with whom Hitler was on a trip from Munich to Hamburg when the Führer received word that his beloved niece, Geli Raubal had committed suicide. Hoffmann took over two million photographs of Hitler and published several books, including The Hitler Nobody Knows (1933). At the end of the war, Hoffmann was arrested by the U.S. military, who seized his photographic archive, and was sentenced to imprisonment for Nazi profiteering. These memoirs were first published in English in 1955, four years after his release from prison, and represent a crucial eyewitness source for the historian and general reader alike.

Defining photography is impossible. Revealing it is another matter, and that's what The Concise Focal Encyclopedia of Photography does, with each turn of the page. History: The technical origins and evolution of photography are half of the story. The other half consists of the ways that cultural forces have transformed photography into a constellation of practices more diverse than any other mode of representation. Photographers can tell a more in-depth story through a photo like Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother than a journalist ever could with the written word alone. Major themes and practitioners: Over 25 entries, many with supporting illustrations, examine the figures, trends, and ideas that have contributed most heavily to the history and current state of photography. Contemporary issues: The issues influencing photography today are more complex than at any other time in its history. Questions of ethics, desire, perception, digitization, and commercialization all vie for attention. Hear what the experts have to say about crucial issues such as whether or not the images we take today will last the test of time, and if so, how? When material is covered this skillfully, "concise is no compromise. The Concise Focal Encyclopedia of Photography is packed with useful information, compelling ideas, and - best of all - pure pleasure.

People and places of old Los Angeles are shown at their best in this pictorial retrospective from the historic files of photographer William Carroll--a time when job hunters inspect $20 a week wage offerings, new shoes sell for 57 cents a pair, and a street preacher precedes a Salvation Army band playing on Spring Street.

A three-decade-long documentary follows a group of middle-class New York City girls.

The true exploits of a sea captain and her many tales of adventure and nature study.

A witty and thought-provoking collection of visual poems constructed from stacks of books. Delighting in the look and feel of books, conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian’s playful photographic series proves that books’ covers—or more specifically, their spines—can speak volumes. Over the past two decades, Katchadourian has perused libraries across the globe, selecting, stacking, and photographing groupings of two, three, four, or five books so that their titles can be read as sentences, creating whimsical narratives from the text found there. Thought-provoking, clever, and at times laugh-out-loud funny (one cluster of titles from the Akron Museum of Art’s research library consists of: Primitive Art /Just Imagine/Picasso/Raised by Wolves), Sorted Books is an enthralling collection of visual poems full of wry wit and bookish smarts. Praise for Sorted Books “Katchadourian’s project . . . takes on a weight beyond its initial novelty. It’s a love letter to books, book collecting and the act of reading.” —San Francisco Chronicle “As a longtime fan of [Katchadourian’s] long-running Sorted Books project I’m thrilled for the release of Sorted Books—a collection spanning nearly two decades of her witty and wise minimalist mediations on life by way of ingeniously arranged book spines. . . . In an era drowned in periodic death tolls for the future of the physical book, her project stands as a celebration of the spirit embedded in the magnificent materiality of the printed page.” —Brain Pickings “Katchadourian’s stacks possess an understated sophistication; they are true to the intimate nature of books and yet reveal their dramatic features and unexpected potential.” —Publishers Weekly