Table of Contents
Overview
The literature on photography is vast and varied and the holdings of the Art & Architecture Library are extensive. Many titles, especially those written before the advent of the "new art history" in the 1970s and 80s, focus on chronological progressions, stylistic imperatives, a hierarchy of works, and the biographies of acknowledged masters. More recent studies are based in theories of perception, memory, and the creation of meaning. For additional guidance in researching photographic topics, see the "Further Research" section, and visit the Art & Architecture Library for consultation with a Librarian.
Pop Advertising, San Francisco (1939). © John Gutmann (1905-1998)
Introductory texts
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Focused studies
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Source texts
From the 19th-century photographers (Niepce, Daguerre) to 20th-century theorists (Barthes, Damisch, and Berger), Trachtenberg provides 31 texts, each with a brief introduction.
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Primary sources
Palais du Louvre et des Tuileries: Motifs de Décoration Intérieure et Extérieure.
Eduard Baldus.
Paris: Ve A. Morel & Cie, 1875.
3 v.
N2030 .B25 1875 Art Locked Stacks
This rare copy of the Edouard Baldus (1813-89) publication on the architectural ornamentation of the Louvre and Tuileries, published serially from 1869 to 1875, is complete in three volumes: v. 1. Décorations Intérieures; v. 2. Décorations Extérieures; and v. 3. Décorations Intérieures et Extérieures. Baldus spent much of his career photographing for the French interior ministry documenting architectural monuments in Paris and elsewhere in the 1850s and '60s. The publication took on added importance in 1871 when, while it was still in progress, the Tuileries and parts of the Louvre were destroyed by the Communards. The set is also significant since it was employed for decades afterward as a pattern book of architectural good taste by designers and architects, thus taking on a greater importance for its influence on French architecture and design
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Urformen der Kunst Karl Blossfeldt 2nd Auflage. Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1929. NK1560 .B48 1929 Art Locked Stacks |
Karl Blossfeldt, a self-taught photographer and professor of art in Berlin, felt that the forms of the natural world, specifically those of plants, revealed an inherent order that should also be seen in the best of art. In his search for the perfect forms of nature Blossfeldt photographed plants for 33 years. His photographic work was first published as Urformen der Kunst in 1928 in both book and portfolio format with 120 photogravure prints. The work proved so popular it was reissued with the gravure plates in 1929 in Berlin, London, and New York, and later in a popular edition (Volksausgabe) of 96 lesser quality plates in 1935, 1936, 1941, 1948, and 1953. A second volume, Wundergarten der Natur (Berlin: Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1932), with an additional 120 plates, was published in the same format (NK1560 .B54 Art Locked Stacks). Blossfeldt's sharply focused close-ups of plants strongly influenced the international development of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) in photography. [Art copy lacks original dust wrapper.]
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Camera Work.
New York: Alfred Stieglitz, 1903-1917.
13 v. ill., plates, mounted photos. (part col.) facsim. 30 cm.
Library has: no. 9-10, 1905; no. 18, Apr. 1907; no. 19, July 1907; no. 23, July 1908; no. 30, April 1910; no.37,Jan 1912; Aug. 1912; no. 40, 1912; special issue, 1913.
TR1 .C5 ARTLCKM
In 1903 Alfred Stieglitz published the inaugural issue of Camera Work, the journal that served through 1917 as the organ of the Photo-Secession, the progressive photography group Stieglitz formed in 1902. Within its covers appeared writings and photographic illustrations by the leading critics and photographers of the era: Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Stein, Sadakichi Hartmann, Max Weber, Charles Caffin, and many others, including Stieglitz himself. Additionally, it was in the pages of Camera Work that Americans were first shown the work of Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, and Brancusi.
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American Photographs.
Walker Evans
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938.
E169 .E85 Art, Art Locked Stacks
In 1938 Walker Evans was the subject of the first solo Museum of Modern Art exhibition devoted to an American photographer. To accompany the exhibition the Museum published American Photographs, with eighty-seven photographs in two sections and an essay by Lincoln Kirstein, who also helped select and sequence the photographs. A brilliant examination of American life and visual culture and a model for all photobooks that followed, American Photographs immediately established Evans as a major American artist. It continues to strongly influence contemporary photographic practice.
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The Americans: Photographs.
Robert Frank.
New York: Grove Press, 1959.
E169.1 .B763 Art Locked Stacks Small-Restricted.
The 1959 American edition of the earlier French edition of Les Americains (Paris: Robert Delpire, 1958; E169.1 .B763 Art Locked Stacks Restricted) sold few copies in its day but became one of the most, if not the most, influential photobooks ever published. Throughout 1955 and 1956 Frank traversed America, photographing the highway and those along it, the archetypal, the common, and the mundane. His portrait of America and his photographic style is intuitive, moody, gritty and unflattering. For an extensive analysis of The Americans see the major exhibition catalog Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2009; E169 .Z8 G694 2009 F (506 p. version); E169 .Z8 G694 2009B F (375 p. version) Art). [Art copy lacks dust jacket shown above.]
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Otoko to Onna = Man and Woman.
Eikō Hosoe.
Tokyo: Kamera Ato Sha, Showa 36, 1961.
TR675 .H68 1961 Art Locked Stacks
Eikō Hosoe has been in the forefront of developments in Japanese photography and photobook design since the 1950s. His first major publication, Otoko to Onna, presented what became a career-defining mode of artistic collaboration with other significant figures in the Japanese arts, combined with an insistent melding of Japanese and Western aesthetic concerns. The featured male figure in this work is the founder of the Butoh dance movement, the dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, who was later featured prominently in another of Hosoe's masterworks, Kamaitachi (GV1780 .H53 H6 1969 Art Locked Stacks Restricted). The rich, grainy black & white gravure printing of Otoko to Onna became a hallmark of Hosoe's photobooks. This initial effort with Hijikata led to Hosoe's extensive collaboration with Yukio Mishima and two opulent photobooks, Killed by Roses (TR654 .H67 1963 Art Locked Stacks) and Ordeal by Roses Reedited (TR654 .H77 1971 Art Locked Stacks Restricted), both of which are considered major icons of the Japanese photobook tradition.
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Photography, 1839-1937.
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937.
TR6 .N55 1937 Art, Art Locked Stacks
Photography, a short critical history.
New York: Museum of modern art, 1938.
TR6 .N55 1938 Art, Art Locked Stacks, Green
The History of Photography From 1839 to the Present Day.
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949.
TR15 .N47 Art, Art Locked Stacks, Green.
With a major exhibition in 1937 the Museum of Modern Art marked the near centennial of photography's (presumed) invention, the 1839 announcement by Jacques-Louis Mandé Daguerre of his Daguerreotype process. The exhibition was curated by Beaumont Newhall and the catalog, Photography, 1839-1937 (1937) served as a template for five later editions that appeared over a fifty-six year span (1938, 1949, 1964, 1982, 1993). A mixture of technological determinism and aesthetic imperative, Newhall's history cast photographic practice as an ever evolving entity that progressed towards higher forms, e.g., the American Western explorers (Timothy O'Sullivan, William Henry Jackson) anticipating the Modern masters (Ansel Adams, Edward Weston). No other American texts have so strongly shaped the notion of a canon of correct photographic practice or photographic masterworks. For a further discussion of Newhall's and other histories, see: Nickel, Douglas. "History of photography: the state of research," Art Bulletin, v. 83, no.3 (Sept. 2001), pp. 548-558.
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Foto-Auge ... Oeil et photo ... Photo-eye.
Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold.
Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag; Dr. F. Wedekind, 1929.
TR653 .R64 1929 F Art Locked Stacks
Two books were published to accompany the Deutscher Werkbund's 1929 "Film und Foto" exhibition in Stuttgart -- Foto-Auge, edited by Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold, and Es kommt der neue Fotograf!, edited by Werner Gräff (TR653 .G7 1929 Art Locked Stacks). With its cover of El Lissitzky's now famous "Self Portrait" of the artist as a hand in service to the eye celebrating the monocular medium (photography), Foto-Auge served both as an catalog of the work exhibited as well as a visual polemic detailing Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's New Vision. Featuring work from the world's leading modernist photographers, as well as anonymous news and bureau photos, Roh's and Tschichold's editing and sequencing energetically riff on the Bauhausian notion of enlightened objectivity.
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Family.
Victor Burgin.
New York : Lapp Princess Press, c1977.
1 v. : chiefly ill. ; 16 cm.
N7433.35 .U6 L37 1977 ARTLCKS
Victor Burgin's Family is one of eleven volumes published in a series in the late 1970s by Amy Baker's Lapp Princess Press. Baker began the series with the aim of providing a conceptual space for artists to explore the possibilities and restraints of the book form. Meant to be affordable, portable, and easily reproducible, Baker set the dimensions of each work at six inches square and selected papers and inks that were widely available to printers.
Burgin's response to his commission was to embrace the sequentiality that a bound book demands, presenting a textual narrative, a series of images, and a progression of upper- and lowercase letters. The thick paper pages, bound with a plastic spiral, mimic the design and simplicity of children's alphabet books. Yet, as in many of his other works, Burgin appropriates this simplicity in order to draw attention to the complex, unwritten cultural messages that photographs and other cultural objects can bear. As he textually describes the submission of family structure to the dictates of capitalism, he also employs ordinary, black-and-white photos in order to illustrate his point, the neutral-seeming images "absorbing" meanings in their juxtaposition with his text. And hidden in the letters, photos, and caption words on the right side of each page are the elements of three overarching concepts: F-a-m-i-l-y (spelled by the letters at the top corners), F-a-t-h-e-r (spelled by the first letters of the objects in the photos), and M-o-t-h-e-r (spelled by the first letters of the words beneath the photos). These three roles are always highly dependent upon, and influenced by, the socio-economic forces that surround them.
Further reading on Lapp Princess Press:
Korner, A. "Interview: Amy Baker, Editor of Lapp Princess Press Ltd., Talks to Athony Korner." Drawing 1, no. 1 (May-June, 1979): 8-10.
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© 1977 Victor Burgin. Used with permission.
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The old farm.
pictured by Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr.
New York : R.H. Russell, 1901
[64] p. : ill. ; 37 cm
TR739.5 .E53 1901 F ARTLCKM
By 1901, the year in which Rudolph Eickemeyer, Jr.’s The Old Farm was published, American industry had modernized enough to make a purely agrarian society seem quaint. For Eickemeyer the quaint and simple were a draw, as was the ability of the modern medium of photography to convey notions of the pastoral, especially when practiced in a pictorial mode. For this volume, he selected images of farm life that represented “the smaller, more intimately personal sort on which our forefathers learned their first lesson of hardship and endurance.” Interspersed with these quiet, picturesque photographs are quotations from famous poems (by Wordsworth, Tennyson, Emerson, and others) which emphasize the images’ mood.
The Old Farm was meant to appeal to a popular audience interested in traditional subjects, and the book’s format of pleasant, graphically framed images and inserted text was reminiscent of the Kodak family photo albums that were becoming increasingly popular at the time. Indeed, Eickemeyer was interested in producing images that had mass-market appeal, a commercial stance that was at odds with the interests of many of his contemporaries. On a practical level, the photos’ half-tone printing assured that many copies could be printed quite easily. A printing process developed during the 1880s and 90s, half-tone printing involves the rephotographing of an image through a screen, which separates the image visually into discrete, easily printable dots. It is used in newspaper printing even today.
Further reading on nostalgia and popular American photography:
Davis, Keith F. An American Century of Photography : From Dry-Plate to Digital : The Hallmark Photographic Collection. Kansas City, Mo.: Hallmark Cards, in association with H.N. Abrams, 1999.
Siegel, Elizabeth. Galleries of Friendship and Fame : A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010.
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Autograph etchings by American artists.
under the supervision of John W. Ehninger. Illustrated by selections from American poets.
New York : W.A. Townsend & Company, 1859.
10 p., [12] leaves, [12] leaves of plates : ill. (mounted phot.). ; 35 cm.
NE2003 .E45 1859 ARTLCKM
With the publication of this album of albumen prints in 1859, John W. Ehninger introduced the photographic technique of cliché-verre, which he had learned from its practitioners while studying in Paris, to the United States. Cliché-verre (“glass negative”) is a process of transferring a drawing from a glass plate to photo-sensitized paper using projected light. It is, in a sense, a form of etching that does not require the use of a metal plate for intaglio printing. Rather, the artist draws into an opaque medium directly onto the glass plate, sometimes with varnishes added to allow for tonal variations. The resulting photographic print, created without a camera, has the linear, etched looked of a traditional, ink-based print.
Ehninger’s choice of this technique for Autograph Etchings was partly for practical reasons: he wished to produce multiple copies of the album’s drawings using a method that was simpler and more efficient than etching or engraving. Perhaps more importantly, he was interested in selecting a printing method that did not involve the intermediation of an engraver (what Ehninger called "the inevitable distortions which accompany the best efforts of the engraver"); instead, the artist’s hand was directly reflected in the print. To create the book, Ehninger asked twelve American artists to illustrate twelve American poems (Ehninger himself provided one of the illustrations). The result is an album of images and text with themes ranging from “Autumn” to “Noon” to “Childhood.” While the cliché-verre technique had a French flavor, the album itself was resolutely American, the selected poems celebrating the American landscape and its agricultural and cultural traditions. The illustrations were contributed by well known American artists such as Asher B. Durand and Eastman Johnson, as well as by younger artists at the beginning of their careers.
Further reading on Ehninger and cliché-verre:
Glassman, Elizabeth, and Marilyn F. Symmes. Cliché-Verre, Hand-Drawn, Light-Printed : A Survey of the Medium from 1839 to the Present. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1980.
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