Eugene Richards: Dorchester Days

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

This is Eugene Richards' 1972 photographic essay, a social document of his home town of Dorchester, Massachusetts, previously only self-published. The book includes additional pictures and a text that speaks of racial tension, violence, poverty and crime, tackling such subjects as the Klu Klux Klan in a way that he did not feel able to at the time of the original publication. On the basis of "Dorchester Days", Richards became a member of Magnum Photos in 1978, leaving to work independently in 1994. His style has set the standard for leading photojournalists such as James Nachtwey and Gilles Peress.

Eugene Richards: War is Personal

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

By early 2006, the war in Iraq was entering its fourth year. No weapons of mass destruction had been found. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were reported injured and dead, more than two thousand American soldiers had been killed, and rates of depression and suicide were rising among American military personnel. Yet all the while, Congress and the media debated what the conflict was costing America in image and treasure, and costing the president in popularity. Troubled by the public's growing indifference to the ongoing horrors in Iraq and critical of his own inaction, acclaimed photographer Eugene Richards began documenting the lives of Americans who had been profoundly affected by the Iraq war.

Bold and epic in scope, War Is Personal is a compilation of fifteen real-life stories that speak of what it means to go to war, to sacrifice, to wait, to hope, to mourn, to remember, to live on when those you love are gone. With heartbreaking photographs and texts, Richards records the funeral of twenty-two-year-old Army sergeant Princess Samuels and profiles veterans such as Tomas Young, who was shot in the spine and paralyzed four days into his tour in Iraq. Richards documents parents such as Carlos Arredondo, who grew so distraught upon hearing of his son's death in combat that he attacked and destroyed a Marine Corps van, severely injuring himself, and Nelida Bagley, whose massively brain-injured son requires nearly round-the-clock care.

Uncompromising and sure to be controversial, War Is Personal is a study of lives in upheaval and a chronicle of greatly differing attitudes, experiences, and understandings of what it means for Americans to go to war.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Known for his long-exposure photographic series of empty movie theaters and drive-ins, seascapes, museum dioramas, and waxworks, Hiroshi Sugimoto has been turning his camera on international icons of 20th-century architecture since 1997.

His deliberately blurred and seemingly timeless photographs depict structures as diverse as the Empire State Building, Le Corbusier's Chapel de Nôtre Dame du Haut, and Tadao Ando's Church of Light in Osaka. The resulting black-and-white photographs, shot distinctly out of focus and from unusual angles, are not attempts at documentation but rather evocation--meant to isolate the buildings from their contexts, allowing them to exist as dreamlike, uninhabited ideals.

Among the other buildings represented in the series are Philippe Starck's Asahi Breweries, Fumihiko Maki's Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium, the United Nations Building, the Chrysler Building, Giuseppi Terragni's Santelia Monument Como, the World Trade Center, Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, Antonio Gaudí's Casa Batlló II, the 1922 Schindler House, and buildings by Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many others in Europe, North America, and Asia. I'm trying to recreate the imaginative visions of the architecture before the architect built the building, so I can trace back the original vision from the finished product. --Hiroshi Sugimoto

Essays by Francesco Bonami, John Yau and Marco de Michelis.
Foreword by Robert Fitzpatrick.

Hardcover ,10.75 x 12 in., 168 pages, 68 Tritone illustrations

Stanley Greene

Stanley Greene discusses his work at an opening.

Herman Leonard: Jazz

New monograph at the New Orleans Photography Workshops Library

Since the 1950s, Herman Leonard's photographs of jazz musicians have been crucial in shaping the image of the music and the world in which it was created. Leonard's friendships with jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis gave him rare access to the innovators who made modern jazz and the places in which they made it. Leonard took his camera into the smoky clubs and after-hours sessions, to backstage parties and musicians' apartments, to build an incomparable visual record of one of the twentieth century's most significant art forms. His luminous images of Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and many others, both in performance and "off duty," are at once supreme examples of the photographer's art and a unique record of a musical revolution. For this definitive collection of his work, Leonard has retrieved scores of previously unseen photographs, published here for the first time, alongside his most famous and widely recognized images. Accompanied by an essay exploring the stories behind the pictures, and an interview with Leonard revealing his techniques, Jazz captures and preserves the glory days of the music that has been called "the sound of surprise."

Robert Frank: London/Wales

New monograph at the New Orleans Photography Workshops Library

Between 1949 and 1953, Robert Frank continually returned to Europe from his new home in New York to take photographs in France, Switzerland, Spain, and Great Britain, photographs that show the development of his uniquely humanist, poetic, and realist eye. In 1951 and early 1952, Frank visited London--"I liked the light, I liked the fog."--and set out to photograph the unique atmosphere of the city. He followed British financiers around the City, capturing them in their traditional top hats and long coats, creating images that depict them in a poetic dance with their fog-shrouded environment. He shot pictures of workers, men delivering coal, children playing on the streets, people waiting or relaxing in the parks, and images of poverty. In these photographs he juxtaposed money and work, wealth and poverty, creating a dynamic photographic project that has never been shown before in its entirety. Then, in March 1953, before the impending nationalization of the country's coal mines, Frank travelled to the town of Careau, in Wales, to photograph the coal miners whose lives revolved around their work. One miner, Ben James, and his family became the subject of a picture essay (originally published in a 1955 issue of U.S. Camera) in which Frank downplayed the classic modernist photographic moment in favor of a more provocative form that offered informal, revealing glances rather than an official document.

In Robert Frank: London/Wales, Frank returns for the first time to these old negatives. The volume explores a stylistic transformation in his work, a period of development which saw his mode of photography move from an innovative romanticism to a highly charged, metaphorical realism. These two consecutive projects, realized in London and Wales between 1951 and 1953, set the stage for his truly groundbreaking documentary, The Americans, completed just a few years later.

You got eyes. --Jack Kerouac writing about photographer Robert Frank

Julie Blackmon: Domestic Vacations

New monograph at the New Orleans Photography Workshops Library
The Dutch saying "a Jan Steen household" originated in the seventeenth century and has come to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, are the direct inspiration behind the layered domestic scenes of Julie Blackmon's photographic work. Raised as the oldest of nine children, and the mother of three herself, Blackmon takes an approach to her work that is at once autobiographical and fictional. According to Anne Wilkes Tucker of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Blackmon has "taken a subject that is ripe for cliche--mother photographing children--and through the subtle, digital manipulations, the use of color and highly graphic images, she's given it humor and edge and taken the subject somewhere fresh."

Philip Toledano: Phonesex

New monograph at the New Orleans Photography Workshops Library

Twin Palms is pleased to offer Phillip Toledano's second book, Phonesex. Toledano has photographed nearly thirty phonesex operators in the intimate setting of their own homes, offering a seldom-seen glimpse into the reality of what otherwise is a fantasy created by the operator's voice, and caller's imagination. Accompanying every portrait is a text written by each subject touching on some aspect of his or her experience as an operator. Whether touching, humorous, or disturbing, every operator's point of view is compelling.

Eugene Richards: The Knife and Gun Club, Scenes from an Emergency Room

New monograph at the New Orleans Photography Workshops Library

Award-winning photographer Eugene Richards was asked by a magazine to report on what happens inside a typical emergency room. Once inside, he took photographs, talked with doctors and nurses and made friends with paramedics. He discovered a world he never knew existed. The Knife And Gun Club is the fascinating account of his exploration of emergency room medicine. Serial in LIFE magazine.