Portraits and Photos Books

Aazing photographer... his photos are like paintings. text is also nice.
A 5 stars... no doubt!

Although you may have seen many of these images before, I would consider this to be 'The Best of Steve McCurry.' I thoroughly enjoyed that there is a description of how many of the images were taken, not from a technical photography perspective, but under what circumstances Steve made them. It gives you a deeper appreciation of each subject and the effort that went into how he gets such incredible shots. Bottom line: I have just about everything Steve has ever done---this is the best!

What an outstanding collection of images this book contains. They are of very high quality indeed, and the book explores an unusual thesis. Quoting Emmanuel Cooper, " Jo Brunenberg's spare, minimal photographs, explore the paradox between geometrical symmetry and the sensual lines of the body ... Taut and finely crafted, his work uses the male nude and homoerotic desire to touch on issues of personal freedom and the need for order as well as on the illusory and everchanging nature of reality."

I think this is art critic speak for "these will draw you back again and again in wonder".

A really terrific addition to my collection.

A very interesting variety of male nude photographs. Beautifull print quality.

To really know John Cohen and really to know so much about USA culture from the late 1950s until today, but particularly the part that the cultural dissonent and culturally cool parts of the folk and old time revival, and politically as well, you
really need to read this book and see this book

I make no secret of the fact that he has been one of my heroes since I about 58 was about 14, that I have enjoyed his writing and recording, and that through the luck mutual friends, I have met him. I sent my first published book autographed to him more than 30 years ago. I been seated with him at weddings. I have thrived not only on his music but his wonderful photographs,and his great collection of both Andean and Appalachian music for decades. I've been thrilled to see him performing at Newport Folk Festivals, in folk clubs, in living rooms. I am not objectiove, JOHN COHEN IS MY HERO.

However, after forty some years of this, this book hit me and struck me hard, as an important statement about the whole history of USA culture from the 1950s on. After all, John Cohen along with Dave Van Ronk was one of the first persons to feel Bob Dylan was significant. In one of his wildest anti-everything periods, Dylan still wrote and said, "You are right John Cohen," for the sensitive interviews John made with him, for John's sensitive films and photographs sampled here, for introducing John to Allen Ginsburg and other leaders of the Beat art and poetry movement who John started among.

At the same time John was and is a great traditional folk music performer, one of the great members of the New Lost City Ramblers, as well as a player on his own independent CDS. More than that, he is a great collector of both Andean and Appalachian folk music. In this book most importantly for me, John;s photographs and commentary with his relationship with the great musicial genius Roscoe Holcomb of Kentucky, further explicated in his liner notes to his second CD of Holcomb's work "An Untamed Sense of Control" is worth the whole book.


Also you gain a lot of knowledge or better feel for John as an artist who knew the abstract expressionists and the photographers who parallelled them. This is a great book for anyone who remembers the original Cedar Tavern or even the later/current one. This is a great book for people who need to know and feel the way that art and music tried to bridge the gap between the plastic, commercial, prefabricated, cardborn cookie cutter, drek that the consumer society and Madison Avenue and the Brill building dish out, and the liberating spirit of humanity. Not bragadocio layered, sticking out their thumb at normal people, mud in your eye, adolescent rebellion garbage.

Read this, and you find hope, and maybe know how to build a life. At the wedding our John and my best friend, I gave the couple an album of photographs I had taken in Nevada, knowing John and my friend had just returned from a photographic tour in a small plane of the southwest, some of whose pictures are in the book. I also gave a joke biography of myself, entitled how I wanted to be the next John Cohen

Not a bad thing to be.

TT

I treated myself to this book for its relationship with and inclusion of many subjects of my interest: photography, folk & bluegrass music, roots culture, beat culture, NYC 60s art culture, & exotic travel. When I read the description here, I thought, "wow, this sounds like one hell of a great book, tailored to my passions." Well, it's better than that. John Cohen is one lucky guy to have witnessed & recorded all that's in this book. The text is adequately sparse (for a 200-page book), but well-written and provides just enough accompaniment for the fascinating photography reproduced here. Regardless the title, looking through John Cohen's eyes is an ecstatic experience, taking one away to seemingly faraway times and places, especially for someone who was born in the 1970s (me). There is a story within each image, and the large scale of the prints makes you want to crawl inside each one and figure out what's going on. It's an Italian-made book, which explains the high quality; and it's the best ($) I've spent since Dylan was last in town.

From virginal Eden to lascivious lavatory, this frightening photo-document exposes the moral corruption in its most vivid form. Consider yourselves warned!

"Long live the new flesh!" This quote from David Cronenberg's cinematic playground of perversion, Videodrome, announces the theme of Torture Garden, the inimitable London nightclub established in 1990. We are not allowed to categorize it as simply a fetish club, because it is "multi-dimensional, ever evolving and mutating." One way to get a handle is to peruse the strict dress code on its website. Your look better be: burlesque, fantasy, theatrical, period costume, glamour, drag, alien, cyborg, cabaret, mutation, cybersex, fetish, SM, body art, rubber, leather, PVC, or uniforms. Sounds like the East Village on a Saturday night.

You take the Angel Tube to get to the current site of Torture Garden's monthly parties. You really do. These partygoers don't engage in much actual BDSM play, although there is some walkabout bondage. It's mainly a Stand and Model venue, a nightclub/dance scene. There's no room to swing a cane anyway. There's a floor show by some of the top out-there acts in the world. There are performance photos here of (among others) Miranda Sex Garden, the Genitorturers, Ron Athey, Medieval Magick, and Angel Grinders & Chainsaws, who use industrial equipment to send fountains of sparks gushing from the groins of troupe members.

The production package of Torture Garden, the book, is superb. Chaplin's candids capture the feverish ecstasy of a world where nothing is true and everything is permitted. They are brilliantly grouped and sequenced. Sivroni's mostly larger format portraits bring you face to face with folk in costumes far beyond fabulous, exuding the potency of their homemade personas. The Videodrome quote above is one of many at the bottom of every page. These provide a quick, painless introduction to the TG philosophy. A few favorites:

"...sadomasochism enjoys all the forms of religious piety - kneeling, praying, worshipping, sacrificing, invoking and punishing." -- Terence Sellers, The Correct Sadist

"The first duty of man is to become artificial." -- Oscar Wilde

"The body is both a pleasure palace and a torture chamber." -- Charles Levin, Body Invaders

"It's your body, play with it." -- Fakir Musafar, Modern Primitives

"Your body is a battleground." -- Barbara Kruger

At Torture Garden, the concept of costume is raised to extremes of creative imagination, transcendent otherness and disgusting repulsion. By the time you get through this volume, your own definitions of these categories will have been severely mangled. On one night a performer named Franko paraded through the crowd on crutches, accompanied by a nurse. He was nude except for syringes, catheters, rubber tubes and various medical receptacles containing various bodily fluids. On the same night, completely independently, a female partygoer appeared wearing a brassiere consisting of two plasma bags filling with her own blood.

One man's features are covered by a remarkably lifelike effect of the flesh of his face pulled back and nailed to his skull. Hellraiser-style pinheads abound. Crazed male ballerinas, harem girls, rubber boys, sirens, harpies, transvestites, androgynes, hermaphrodites, naughty nurses, naughty nuns, naughty Nazis, welder's goggles, gas masks, catcher's masks, nine-inch nails, helmets, horns, spikes, wounds, rings through everything and to top it off, a spitting-image Laurel and Hardy. Happy Halloween in Hell!

I ordered the book at the beginning of May and it took about three weeks to arrive in Germany. The book was a present, so I could only have a very brief look at it, but I got a very positive feedback. High quality photographies, commented by the author, giving an insight into the life of people and families around the globe.

This extraordinary book is the obvious outcome of Uwe Ommer's epic journey of 180,000 miles through 130 countries in 1424 days to take photos for his '1000 Families' book published just after the millennium. It is a huge book too, over eleven inches square and weighting almost ten pounds with more than two thousand color photos by my reckoning.

The whole journey is in six sections starting in Europe, July 1996, Africa, February 1997 (this continent gets a huge 240 pages, as Uwe more or less travels round the entire coast) back to Europe again in May 1998, North and Central America, September 1998, South America, January 1999 and finally the Middle East and Asia July 1999, oh yes a quick visit to Australia, Japan and China in December 1999.

The format of the book is perhaps the most unusual aspect, it is entirely designed as a scrapbook, which perfectly lends itself to a travelogue. Most spreads have a dominant family portrait (as used in the '1000 Families' book) with other pictures showing where and how these folks live plus plenty of printed items (banknotes, receipts, stamps, contact prints, maps, scraps of local newspapers and more) and also other objects like local fruit and vegetables, stones or tourist trinkets and finally a blank colored shape for the text. It is the way these two hundred plus still-life spreads have been designed that I thought was most impressive especially considering the amount of visual items used, each one has been carefully positioned so that everything works.

Though there is plenty to look at on each spread Uwe's detailed text is a joy to read because he has a delightful down to earth style (I understand that the text was originally written in French so whoever translated it into English did a brilliant job). This becomes evident when he tells of the endless problems with poorly paid civil servants in the third world especially the local police and customs. He also writes interesting captions to all the family portraits. I think it's worth a comment on these family photos, though they are all taken with a looking-at-the-camera style everyone looks relaxed and informal probably because they were photographed where they lived and nicely against a white backdrop that Uwe carried in his Land Rover. These photos give the impression that you could easily walk up to these folk and pass the time of day.

I think Transit is a remarkable travel book (any print designer will love it) showing how millions of people live in small cities and rural areas of the world in a family of man.


***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

I loved the pictures, and am extremely proud & happy because this is a beautiful, classy & wonderfully put together collection of pictures of Black South Carolinians during this period in time.

This book was a visual journey into the lives of early 20th century black america. Many of the pictures could be termed as "dignified photo essays" of life in the black community.You feel as though you are right there behind the lenses of these photo's while they're being taken. They almost have an "ethereal beauty" about them. In these photo's you can see the dignity of a race of people who were considered low class at the time of the photographs, but in the way they are portrayed you feel like you're in the presence of royalty. "A visual treat for the eye's" is the best way to describe this book . It is also well worth reading as you enjoy the beautiful photography! I would highly recommended this book to african americans and those who enjoy a look into the past!

I was amazed at the photography in this book. Andrew Macpherson captures the inner beauty and souls of his subjects. The lighting is extraordinary and the colors give every photo outstanding depth. Andrew is truly a gifted artist!

I don't know how to clearly write the following sentence..... Andrew Macpherson is the photographer who has made The Best images of the people most often photographed. Does that make sense? Looking through this book, for the first time, for the second time, for the fifth time - i was struck by how often it is his photographs in which these oft-photographed, iconic figures look the best they have ever looked.

I've known about Macpherson since he began with The Face, but never really had a sense of his complete catalog of images until recently. He's simply wonderful. And, from all accounts, he seems to be a wonderful person, as well. That's too rare.

It's sad that this talented photographer lost so much of his original work in that warehouse fire. I had read about this prior to seeing the book in person, and wondered about the quality of the reproductions, as some come from scans of actual tear sheets. There is nothing to be concerned about, though. The book is beautiful, through and through.

It may be too early, but i am eagerly anticipating the next book.

This is the book to get for the REAL music fan. Photographer/author David Redfern provides an intimate look back at his career, spanning the 1950s right up to the present (AND the future!). The photographs? Outstanding images, many of the artists in performance and, more often than not, captured upfront and tack-sharp on his medium format Hasselblad. No matter what musical genre you're into you'll find David's been there and captured it: rock `n' roll (the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zep), jazz (Miles, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Ella, Monk, Ben Webster), folk (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez), blues and r&b (B.B. King, Ike & Tina Turner, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Al Green, Keb Mo), pop (the Osmonds, Dusty Springfield, Frank Sinatra) and even country (Willie Nelson, Dolly, Johnny Cash). What makes this book so much fun, though, are the related reminiscences that David shares with us (a quick example: on one occasion he accompanied a writer to get pictures of Miles Davis. As David relates in the book, "Miles opened the door, saw me, and shouted, 'Get out!' I smiled nervously and remained frozen to the spot. Suddenly he grinned and said, 'Hi, how are you? Come on in.'"). Whether you're a photographer OR a music aficionado I think you'll find this a great book to curl up with over and over again (and if you just happen to be a shooter AND a music freak, like I am, then this one's a MUST!).

With the accent on Jazz and Blues photography, but also spanning popular cultural icons including some classic but little known images of the Beatles and Rolling Stones; it's the story of one man's priviledged insite into the music world. This Sixty three year old 6 foot 4" British photographer, armed with a Hasselblad and press pass, catalogued everybody from Sinatra to Sonny Rollins, both onstage, in the studio, or hanging out in some of the legendary clubs. His textual commentary, loaded with amusing and frank anecdotes, makes a fine companion to the pictures, which speak for themselves. Any visitor to London will find his portraits adorning the walls of the famous Ronnie Scott's nightclub.

Great book. I was tickled to see many pictures that I have never seen in any other publication.

I have only this to say about this book: Elvis was the King of Rock-n-Roll -- Unseen Elvis is the King of all Books -- and Jim Curtin the King of Elvis collectors!

This book is exceptional treatment of VanDerZee's photography and the role he played in the development of twentieth century photography. His use of the discipline to represent African American role in 20th century American history and photography. Most cities had at least one serious African American photographer who helped document black life in that city. His use of photography as survival tool and the expression of life in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.

VanDerZee's work survived the most incredible changes in the field of photography i.e. from flash powder to the electronic flash. In VanDerZee's work you can find portraits of great historical African Americans such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois, Romare Bearden, Muhammed Ali, Bill Cosby and many hard working African Americans.VanDerZee photographed for eighty plus years. This book should be read and study by all beginning photographers so that the must understand what one must do to survive in the discipline.

When watching Ken Burn's "Jazz" on television, look for Vanderzee's contribution; when viewing Ken Burns' "Baseball" on video, look for Vanderzee's contribution; when you see images of African-Americans sitting in parlors, going to church in their Sunday finest, or heading off to war, their hearts full of patriotism even in the midst of racial separatism, look for Vanderzee's contribution - he was there. Our history is so much more than what we have seen on television and read in the newspapers; we are so much more than the victimized remains of a harsh and unjustice past; we have survived and found dignity in the most bizarre places, and Vanderzee and other photographers like him went to these places and perserved a dignity that is only now being revealed. Thank you Ms. Willis.