Photo Books at RIT Library

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin- Chicago

2009-04-22T01:36:00.007-04:00

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin- Chicago

The title "Chicago" refers to a ghost town in the middle of the Negev desert in Israel. This is a place where the Israeli military conducts training missions. A mock "Arab" town, the soldiers learn how to blast down walls with efficiency and move around to accomplish their goal. The emptiness and movie-set quality that is delivered by this environment is what begins the book, and sets the viewer up for a wide ranging and obscure tour of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Other subjects that are dissected and explored are remnants of diffused bombs hidden in everyday items, a mock miniature Israeli city, and a survey of Israeli tree planting projects intended to obscure the history of the Palestinians that were there before them. While the perspective is constantly being changed, this is an exploration in static imagery. This staticness gives the viewer a sense of uneasiness, contributing to the total picture of the mental state of Israel.

Location: 4th Floor
Call No: TR113.I75 B76 2006
Link to Record

Ernst Friedrich- War Against War!

2009-04-12T21:51:00.011-04:00

Ernst Friedrich- War Against War!

Publisher's Notes: First published in 1924, War Against War! was one of the first photographic collections of explicit battlefield material released for mass consumption. Attempts to censor the book by the Weimar Government and later by the Nazis proved unsuccessful. Ernst Friedrich collected hundreds of photographs of the atrocities and after affects of WWI, juxtaposing them against the propaganda and military rhetoric which he felt romanticized the reality of war.

Location: 3rd Floor
Call Number: U21.F68 1987
Link to Record

Gordon Parks- Moments Without Proper Names

2009-03-30T11:55:00.009-04:00

Gordon Parks - Moments Without Proper Names

Author's Words from Prologue: This collection, I hope, speaks for itself, the photographs and verse echoing one another. I like to think of it as an inward look. For I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter. For me at least, the camera is a technical device, used as a writer uses his typewriter or as a painter uses his brush.

This collection of photojournalist Gordon Parks' work do not follow any narrative. Rather, they serve to illustrate and define the themes that Parks' work focused on: racism, poverty, and violence. His photographs and poems are only samples of his multifaceted career as a photographer, poet, novelist, musician, journalist, activist, and film director.

Location: 4th Floor
Call Number: TR654.P297 1975
Link to Record

Tim Davis- My Life In Politics

2009-03-24T23:31:00.008-04:00

Tim Davis- My Life In Politics

Publisher's Description: "His first in-depth publication of photographer Tim Davis’s work dissects the disenchantment and dissociation that have come to dominate American civil life. It is Davis’s treatise on the state of contemporary politics, politics as an aestheticized banality abstracted from real issues of power. He finds freedom of expression exhibited at its most casual and cursory, with political, commercial and populist signage jostling for space and attention in the social landscape: His documentation of that landscape, as Peter Eeley of Frieze magazine interprets it, asks,“What if campaign signs, badges, bumper stickers and flags aren’t simply the ephemera of Americans’ political lives, but their substance as well?”
My Life in Politics represents photographic seeing at its finest and most subtle. Davis continues Stephen Shore’s colorist tradition, meshing the careful management of a quotidian palette with an incisive eye for those points at which light bends and refracts, becoming something other than mere illumination."

"Somebody needs to tell Tim Davis to stop being such a smart-ass. But it’s not going to be me. The saucy quality of his smarter-than-thou stance keeps his high-wire cultural critique aloft. Just check his captions in this new collection. A photograph of the Connecticut Senate Floor—the floor itself, with an apparently water-logged, magenta carpet, ringed by desks that are peopled only by laptops and towering bound volumes—is described thus: “That’s the budget in blue. A picture of a filibuster, so the senators are on Blackberries or in the can, or getting counted. Every photograph is a filibuster, a running commentary to nobody occupying attention but not space, and also a thing to block the other side—the unseen, the unattended, and the arch—from speaking.” Or how about this, for a picture titled Democrat and Republican: “File me. Lay me away. Fold me in manila. Tear off the carbon. Sticker it. Clip it up. Check me off the list.” (You'll have to see the book to get the reference.) I mean, what’re you gonna do with a kid like this? Language, both within and attached to his images, courses through this book in the same densely connotative fashion as light does in his other volumes (see Illuminations, Greenberg Van Doren, 2006, and Permanent Collection, Nazraeli, 2005). Davis uses his photographs as metaphoric channels for communication and as goads, critical barbs that in a more ingenuous tone might seem earnestly reform-minded. My Life in Politics expresses a voice so outspoken it’s hard to grasp (though his so-titled “1500 Word Essay” shows Davis to be more willfully clarifying and self-revealing), coupled with an incisive vision that, effortlessly and effectively, cuts to the quick and beyond. Use the scalpel while it’s sharp, Tim."
-George Slade

"So…this book joins the ranks of other great books that, at the time of their release, were thrown to the remainder piles. I may piss off a few people but I do not feel at all odd adding Davis’s name to the same remainder pile list that has included books by Winogrand, Eggleston and Frank."
-Jeff Ladd

Location: Over Collection 4th Floor
Call No: TR654 .D38 2006
Link to Record

Torbjørn Rødland-White Planet, Black Heart

2009-03-24T22:00:00.006-04:00

Torbjørn Rødland-White Planet, Black Heart

Publisher's Description: "Torbjørn Rødland is to photography what the Pet Shop Boys are to pop music: a master of the delicately orchestrated clichée overload, a surcharge of the too obvious, too cute or too inane, played to the point where the images are drained of all trace of common sense and suggest a new sense of silence or mystery.
Rødland has a knack for producing images that make you ask what are, in fact, appropriate motives for art photography: Images of single audio or video cassettes? Bleak black and white renditions of countryside churches? George W. Bush’s favourite ice cream? A black banana? Girls and pets, pets and girls? He creates a complex of readings that inveigles the viewer into spending time with each single image, to reconsider its meaning and relevance. White Planet, Black Heart makes no excuses as it reinvents the romantic impulses of popular culture."

Location: 3rd Floor
Call No: TR655 .R63 (2006)
Link to Record

Joel Meyerowitz- Cape Light

2009-03-24T20:26:00.009-04:00

Joel Meyerowitz- Cape Light

Publisher's Description-Originally published in 1979, Cape Light became an instant classic and one of the most influential photography books published in the latter part of the 20th century. Common scenes—tiny figures on a beach, a porch railing against a storm-darkened sky, a blue raft against a summer cottage—all are transformed by the poignant light of the Cape and the photographer's subtle and luminous vision. This exquisitely printed book captures every nuance of color and light in that unique juncture of sky, sea, and land that is Cape Cod.

Location: 3rd Floor

Call No: TR655 .M4637 (1978)

Link to Record

Paul Graham- A1: The Great North Road

2009-03-24T20:13:00.011-04:00

Paul Graham- A1: The Great Road North

Photo-eye description: "Paul Graham's first book, self-published in 1983, documents The Great North Road that runs the length of England 400 miles from London to Edinburgh. The route has been in use since Roman times and was once the busiest motorway in the country with an active roadside economy of shops, cafes, hotels. In the 1950s it was supplanted by the newly constructed M1 a speedier and smoother motorway for an England moving slickly into a modernity of effeciency and consumerism. Along the A1, the business and people were left to decline into grimy obscurity. Graham's subdued color photos are a mournful document of a grey nowhere land in a country moving too fast to stop for a cup of tea. Photographed with a large format camera 1981 to 1982"

Location: 3rd Floor

Call No: TR790.G724 (1983)

Link to Record

(more images can be found here)

Masahisa Fukase- Solitude of Ravens

2009-03-24T20:04:00.008-04:00

"Arguably the post-Provoke masterpiece of Japanese photobooks," write Parr & Badger of this book's original Japanese edition. Fukase's work share's with Provoke "a similar combination of the intensely personal with the metaphorical, another allegory for the state of the country...The raven is a symbol of ill-omen in Japan as in the West...But if Karasu is a bitter indictment of the industrialized country, dehumanized and picked over by the natural scavengers of capitalism, the skies heavy with pollution, it is also a superb demonstration of how the photobook can also deal with the private...Fukase's cry of despair is perhaps one of the most romantic photobooks...The imagery is beautiful, surprising, haunting, but ultimately it is Fukase's masterly handling of the narrative and rhythm that makes it so memorable."

Location: 3rd Floor

Call No: TR729.B5 F8513 (1991)

Link to Record

Michel Campeau- Darkroom

2009-03-24T19:56:00.009-04:00

Michel Campeau- Darkroom

Publisher's Description: “For a photographer like myself, who in fact has not worked in a darkroom for over years, these images are horribly familiar. Those fix stains in the sink, the eerie red light, reminiscent of a brothel, the wonky enlarger and a profusion of different tapes holding the whole thing together. . . I feel lucky to have escaped and yet there is something very alluring about these images. . .” — from the introduction by Martin Parr Darkroom is the first book in a series edited by Martin Parr, for Nazraeli Press, with the aim of presenting work that has never before been published in book form but which most definitely “should have been.” This evocative set of images has risen from visits to over darkrooms in Campeau’s native Canada, and while it might be a stretch to imagine a less promising subject matter, the end result is a superb and fascinating tribute to an increasingly rare working environment. Michel Campeau lives and works in Montreal.

Location: Over Collection 4th Floor

Call No: TR655 .C35 (2007)

Link to Record

Roe Ethridge- Rockaway, NY

2009-03-24T19:45:00.007-04:00

Roe Ethridge- Rockaway, NY

Publisher's Description: "The mood of Roe Ethridge’s Rockaway, NY suggests a nostalgic depiction of scenes from a coastal village. The snow covered boardwalk, the cemetery, the shops in town, and a quiet street in late summer all appear at first glance to be genre scenes, revealing Ethridge’s casual application of diverse pictorial modes and themes. The locales blend, imitate and disguise one another. Photographed in disparate geographical sites, from St Barts to upstate New York, Ethridge plays the roles of both a thematic archivist and a wandering narrator, mappin an uncertain ground in which it is unclear if the representation is a blank image, nothing more than the sum of it’s surface, or the fountainhead of some deeper significance."

Kate Bush writes of Ethridge "In his work there appears no cause and no ending, no discrimination between editorial and art, between document and construct, between technology and affect."

Location: Over Collection 4th Floor

Call No: TR655 .E84 (2007)

Link to Record

Henri Cartier Bresson - Man and Machine

2009-03-20T20:51:00.011-04:00

This collection of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson on man's continuing dialogue with machines was commissioned by the IBM World Trade Corporation in 1967.

Selection from Forward: "This series of photographs is in its quiet war a partial portrait of mankind–in our close and often subconscious dialogue with technological change...This new relationship appears most dramatically neither in the formal struggle between the engineer and his electronic or mechanical world, nor in the conscious association of the worker with his tools, but rather in the incidental occurrences of everyday life.

I find it funny that IBM commissioned these, because these photographs don't exactly show how wondrous and enjoyable technology has made our lives. They show people befuddled, confused, and fascinated with this new encroachment. I may be projecting my own thoughts here, but I find a certain amount of stress and malaise in these photographs. But most importantly, these are good photographs. H C-B's ability to find the magic in everyday life is undeniable.

Location: 4th Floor
Call Number:TR654.C37 1971
Link to record

Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas © IBM World Trade Corporation

Hanover Fair, Germany © IBM World Trade Corporation

William Eggleston- William Eggleston's Guide

2009-03-20T14:17:00.000-04:00

Publisher's Description: William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes, and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's hometown of Memphis--an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle, the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, gray-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table.

Location: 3rd Floor

Call Number: TR647 .E3 (2002)

Link to record

Ed Panar- Golden Palms

2009-03-20T13:53:00.000-04:00

Publisher's Description: "Golden Palms is a collection of Ed Panar’s photographs of Los Angeles, where he lived for two years without a car. The cumulative effect is a subtly hilarious and beautiful walking tour through generic back streets, showing us a side of contemporary LA that most people speed by. Includes an interview with Ed and Charlotte Cotton." (J&L Books)

Location: 3rd Floor
Call Number: TR655 .P36 2007

Link to record

Walker Evans- American Photographs

2009-03-18T22:03:00.001-04:00

Location: 4th Floor

Call Number: E169 .E85 (1988)

Link