Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America's iconic yet oft-neglected "third coast." Soth's richly descriptive, large-format color photographs present an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, Sleeping by the Mississippi elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing, and reverie. "In the book's 46 ruthlessly edited pictures," writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, "Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex." Like Robert Frank's classic The Americans, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with a poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust.

"A major figure in American photography, Walker Evans stands among Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand as an artist of the first rank. Evans documented the look and feel of much of his native country in a notably distinct way throughout the majority of the twentieth century. This definitive retrospective of Evans's career, which received France's Prix de Nadar and England's Krasna-Kraus Award when first published in hardcover, is now available for the first time as a reduced-format paperback." "Prepared by John T. Hill in cooperation with Gilles Mora, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye begins with the artist's early abstractions and his project on the Brooklyn Bridge done in collaboration with American poet Hart Crane, and continues through Evans's photographic studies of New England and New York Victorian buildings; his travels to Tahiti and Cuba; his work in Florida and New Orleans; and his three-year involvement with the Farm Security Administration. A highlight of this volume is the material from Evans's highly influential show American Photographs at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, re-created in exactly the sequence that Evans established for the original exhibition." No broader or more comprehensive view of this important, innovative, and distinguished photographer exists to date. With all of the images superbly reproduced from negatives prepared by Thomas Palmer, this volume will long stand as a tribute to an American original.

Expanded from an earlier catalogue of the same title, Still Time originally accompanied a traveling exhibition featuring more than 20 years of Sally Mann's photography. Now available in paperback, this volume celebrates an artist whose acute perceptions and imagination embrace not only the photographs of children for which she is renowned, but also earlier landscapes and some unexpected, compelling forays into color and abstract photography. The 60 images include abstract platinum prints, Cibachromes and Polaroids, landscapes, portraits of women and 12-year-olds and her celebrated family pictures. Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, where she continues to live and work. Among her many awards are three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Corcoran Museum of Art, to name just a few. Her books of photographs include Immediate Family and At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women.

This comprehensive retrospective of Sophie Calle not only celebrates the breadth of her iconoclastic work but also leads to a deeper understanding of her unique artistic vision. The work of conceptual artist Sophie Calle embraces numerous media: photography, storytelling, film, and memoir, to name a few. Often controversial, Calle's projects explore issues of voyeurism, intimacy, and identity as she secretly investigates, reconstructs and documents the lives of strangers - whether she is inviting them to sleep in her bed, trailing them through a hotel, or following them through the city. Taking on multiple roles - detective, documentarian, behavioral scientist and diarist - Calle turns the interplay between life and art on its head. The book presents Calle's best-known works, including "The Blind," "No Sex Last Night," "The Hotel," "The Address Book" and "A Woman Vanishes," as well as lesser known and earlier projects that have largely escaped the public eye. The book also includes diary excerpts and video stills, along with three critical essays, a revealing interview with the artist and a dialogue with fellow artist Damien Hirst.

Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills," a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old.

Diane Arbus redefined the concerns and the range of the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach have established her preeminence in the world of the visual arts. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves. Diane Arbus Revelations affords the first opportunity to explore the origins, scope, and aspirations of what is a wholly original force in photography. Arbus’s frank treatment of her subjects and her faith in the intrinsic power of the medium have produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Presenting many of her lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs in the context of the iconic images reveals a subtle yet persistent view of the world. The book reproduces two hundred full-page duotones of Diane Arbus photographs spanning her entire career, many of them never before seen. It also includes an essay, “The Question of Belief,” by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and “In the Darkroom,” a discussion of Arbus’s printing techniques by Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to print her photographs since her death. A 104-page Chronology by Elisabeth Sussman, guest curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show, and Doon Arbus, the artist’s eldest daughter, illustrated by more than three hundred additional images and composed mainly of previously unpublished excerpts from the artist’s letters, notebooks, and other writings, amounts to a kind of autobiography. An Afterword by Doon Arbus precedes biographical entries on the photographer’s friends and colleagues by Jeff L. Rosenheim, associate curator of photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. These texts help illuminate the meaning of Diane Arbus’s controversial and astonishing vision.

In this age of digital everything, it is easy to forget what a marvel Polaroid film was. To think that here was this thick, easily-marred, heavy-bordered piece of film that would, within seconds, display an image was, in its day, mind blowing.For a select few generations, the simple, black Polaroid camera was a requisite part of high school and college life. There was one at every dorm party, at every school event, at every haunted house, at every roller rink, at every arcade. They were staples of memory boxes and scrapbooks. And they were one of the first mediums for many young artists. After all, what better way to learn about composition and light and framing than with a device that let you see the results within seconds?Polaroid became much more than just that, of course. Their high end camera backs and films were necessary tools for professionals until just a few years ago. On the other end of the spectrum were their art films and camera attachments that let people make photo transfers and slide prints and all manner of other images.Taschen's book encompasses all of that history and exploration and art by presenting hundreds of individual photos all created with Polaroid film. The images range from experimental to candid to test shots to accidental masterpieces by artists from the full range of the photographic arts.As with most Taschen books, it is printed in several languages, laid out with care, dedication, and full credit to artists and copyright holders. The color details are gorgeous and the tome is an excellent addition to any collection or bookshelf.Recommended.

"Untitled" may well be Arbus's most transcendent, most romantic vision. It is a celebration of the singularity and connectedness of each and every one of us. It demands of us what it demanded of her: the courage to see things as they are and the grace to permit them to simply be. For Diane Arbus, this is what making pictures was all about.These photographs achieve a lyricism, an emotional purity that sets them apart from all her other accomplishments. "Finally what I've been searching for, " she wrote at the time. The product of her consistently unflinching regard for reality as she found it, the images in this book have less in common with the documentary than with the mythic.

When I elbowed through the pink David LaChapelles and the anal-retentive Ansels (always the Ansels) I discovered this at the local B&amp;N today, its dust jacket beaten-up and sliced a little on the back, by an incautiously wielded box cutter probably. Usually these defects alone would dissuade me from laying down fifty-five simoleons (less member discount) for a book. But... my consumerist enzyme kicked into overdrive and I had to have it NOW, not next week, not tomorrow, not in an hour. NOW. It's that good. Urban squalor. Roadside motels. Barren landscapes interrupted by parking lots or telephone booths. Prison-like concrete block businesses. Unpopulated downtown intersections. Mall department stores. And an occasional portrait, in haute 1970s style. It's officially my favorite photography monograph of all time, and I'm glad I bought it today (warts 'n all) instead of waiting for Amazon to send me a pristine shrink-wrapped copy at a (no doubt) steep discount. Hooray for fiscal irresponsibility and materialist impatience. I shall resuscitate this economy single-handedly!

Artistic depictions of the American South are too frequently oozing with nostalgic sap. As an expat living in a foreign country called Utah, I suppose I should miss My Old Alabama Home, and I do, but not with an abundance of sentiment. Many bad things happened to me in the South, and while the people truly are friendlier there, and the culture of the Intermountain West does not approach it, I see the imperfections of the South, subtle and not so.And here, in this collection of landscape photographs, I see my South. Through her use of the collodion process, one of the earliest forms of photography, Sally Mann has shown the true beauty of the South. The photos are blurry and streaky. There is imbalance and asymmetry. Our attention is strangely drawn to out-of-focus areas, to darkness, to particles in the light. As the edges are interrupted by blackness, I could almost gasp. I want to feel the textures of this fading, yet somehow unchanging, South. I want to go back there.

When it first appeared in 1971, Larry Clark's groundbreaking book Tulsa sparked immediate controversy across the nation. Its graphic depictions of sex, violence, and drug abuse in the youth culture of Oklahoma were acclaimed by critics for stripping bare the myth that Middle America had been immune to the social convulsions that rocked America in the 1960s. The raw, haunting images taken in 1963, 1968, and 1971 document a youth culture progressively overwhelmed by self-destruction -- and are as moving and disturbing today as when they first appeared. Originally published in a limited paperback version and republished in 1983 as a limited hardcover edition commissioned by the author, rare-book dealers sell copies of this book for more than a thousand dollars. Now in both hardcover and paperback editions from Grove Press, this seminal work of photographic art and social history is once again available to the general public.

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black and white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessors. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the "first color photographer," and certainly the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of Eggleston. From 1966 to 1971, Eggleston would occasionally use a two and one quarter inch format for photographs. These are collected and published here for the first time, adding more classic Eggleston images to photography's color canon.

A photobook classic, and perhaps the work for which New York photographer Nan Goldin remains best known, "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends and lovers collectively described by Goldin as her "tribe." Her work describes a late 1970s/early 1980s New York now long gone, and a world that is visceral and seething with life. As Goldin writes: "Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life."

Photography

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