Larry Sultan, The Valley

New photobook at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Larry Sultan / The Valley

Published by Scalo

Since 1988, Larry Sultan has returned time and again to photograph on porn sets in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley--the Silicon(e) Valley of the porn industry. But The Valley is by no means a documentary on porn filmmaking. Rather, it is a dense series of pictures of middle-class homes invaded by the porn industry.
Sultan's lens focuses on pedestrian details--a piece of half-eaten pie, dirty linens in a heap, "actors" taking a break--that offer clues to a bizarre other-world. The lush and intricate images adroitly play with artifice and reality, adding up to rich, elliptical narratives that circle around the concepts of "home" and "desire." These images of homes and gardens, porn actors and film crews, studio and location shootings are an ambiguous meditation on suburbia and its trappings, family and transgression, loss and desire, the utopias and dystopias of middle-class lifestyle.
The Valley and its many-layered photographs outline the complexity of domestic life at the beginning of the 21st century, opening up new perspectives for photography through its innovative combination of staged and documentary photographs.

In 1998, an English magazine asked me to go on a porn set. I flew down to Burbank Airport with my wife, and we went to the house they'd given me the address of. It was a dentist's house on Van Alden. That name had all kinds of connotations when I was in high school. Because the Valley is so haunted for me by the ghosts of childhood, all of these street names have Proustian connotations. All I have to do is to say: Havenhurst, Van Alden, Vineta, Dubois, and a flood of associations comes back to me. [...] After the first five minutes of the strangeness of it all, I started to look around, going to the bedrooms, wandering through the house. It felt like a permission to go into a house in L.A. and to imagine how someone would live their life in this house. I made the pictures for the magazine. I left and thought, "This is it, this is what I have to do." --Larry Sultan

Complete list of photobooks at the NOPW library.

Alec Soth, From Here to There: Alec Soth's America

New photobook at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Alec Soth / From Here to There: Alec Soth's America

Published by The Walker Art Center

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America is the first exhibition catalogue to feature the full spectrum of the work of Alec Soth, one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography, whose compelling images of everyday America form powerful narrative vignettes. Featuring more than 100 of the artist's photographs made over the past 15 years, the book includes new critical essays by exhibition curator Siri Engberg, curator and art historian Britt Salvesen and critic Barry Schwabsky, which offer context on the artist's working process, the photo-historical tradition behind his practice and reflections on his latest series of works. Novelist Geoff Dyer's "Riverrun"--a meditation on Soth's series Sleeping by the Mississippi--and August Kleinzahler's poem "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City" contribute to the thoughtful exploration of this body of work. Also included in the publication is a 48-page artist's book by Soth titled The Loneliest Man in Missouri, a photographic essay with short, diaristic texts capturing the banality and ennui of middle America's suburban fringes, with their corporate office parks, strip clubs and chain restaurants. This full-color publication includes a complete exhibition history, bibliography and interview with the artist by Bartholomew Ryan.

Alec Soth was born in 1969 and raised in Minnesota, where he continues to live and work. He has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation (1999, 2004) and Jerome Foundation (2001), was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography and was short-listed for the highly prestigious Deutsche Borse Photography Prize. His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004 to critical acclaim. Since then Soth has published Niagara (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007), Dog Days, Bogota (2007) and The Last Days of W (2008). He is a member of Magnum Photos.

Complete list of photobooks at the NOPW library.

Robert Frank: Peru

New photobook at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Robert Frank: Peru

Published by Steidl

In March 1949, Robert Frank mailed a birthday gift to his mother in Switzerland: A maquette of a series of photographs he had made during a visit to Peru between June and December of the previous year. Frank assembled an identical book for himself, and these two maquettes now reside in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

A few of the images are well known in Frank's oeuvre, but until now very few people have seen the entire series--which, in 1949, already displayed the hallmark of Frank's distinctive image-sequencing. Peru also exhibits an ease and flexibility that Frank himself confirms: "I was very free with the camera. I didn't think of what would be the correct thing to do; I did what I felt good doing. I was like an action painter." Using a hand-held 35mm Leica camera, Frank documented the country's massive vistas, weathered faces, manual labor and dusty roads stretching to the horizon with a spontaneity of motion that propels the viewer into the midst of the scenery. For the first time, and under the direction of Frank himself, this book presents the complete sequence of images. Peru is a work of major significance in both the artist's history and the history of photography.

Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Complete list of photobooks at the NOPW library.

Ed Ruscha Photographer

New photobook at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Ed Ruscha's relationship to photography is complex and ambivalent. The world-class painter--and author of a 1972 New York Times article called "I'm Not Really a Photographer"--has been known to refer to his work in this second medium as a "hobby", despite considerable, persistent critical interest. Whether he likes it or not, the small albums of plainly-shot, snapshot-sized images he produced in the 1960s and 70s, including Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, intrigued his contemporaries and earned him an unshakable reputation. How? His subject matter was neither purely documentary nor solely artistic, in fact it was stereotypical and banal, with motifs drawn from the car-dominated western landscape. That rebellious material, along with his serial presentation, made for a mythical road-movie or photo-novel effect with Beat Generation overtones. The combination attracted artists and critics both, especially while serial logic was prominent in Pop art and Minimalism, and then retained that interest later as serial work became prominent in Conceptual art. Critics have remained attentive for decades, and Ruscha's influence remains apparent in new work in Europe and North America.

Ed Ruscha, Photographer departs from earlier collections to explore how these images--and all of Ruscha's work in disciplines including painting, drawing, printmaking and photography--are guided and shaped by a single vision.

Complete list of photobooks at the NOPW library.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Hiroshi Sugimoto

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Genius of the large-format camera, the long exposure and the silverprint, New York-based photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has made pictures that seem to contain whole aeons of time within themselves, and suggest an infinite palette of tonal wealth in blacks, grays and whites. Many of these images have now become a part of art culture's popular image bank (as U2's use of Sugimoto's "Boden Sea" for the cover of their 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon, demonstrated), while simultaneously evoking photography's earliest days: "I probably call myself a postmodern-experienced pre-postmodern modernist," he once joked to an interviewer. This absolutely exquisite retrospective is an expanded edition of Hatje Cantz's 2005 volume. It is the first to feature works from all of Sugimoto's series to date: his celebrated portraits of wax figures, his incredible seascapes that seem to suggest a person's first conscious view of the ocean, the extremely long exposures of theaters which elevate the white, luminescent cinema screen and transform it into a magical image of an altar and the fascinating dioramas of scientific display cases, which invite us to travel far into the past. Additions to the original edition are two new groups of works, "Lightning Fields" (2006) and "Photogenic Drawings" (2007).

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at St. Paul's University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA. He currently lives in New York City.

Nina Berman: Purple Hearts - Back from Iraq

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

A Purple Heart is the token honor given to soldiers for their wounds. It makes them heroes. It is the title that Nina Berman has given to her photographs of American soldiers gravely wounded in the Iraq war, who have returned home to face life away from the waving flags and heroic send-offs. The images are accompanied by first-person interviews with the soldiers, who discuss their lives, reasons for enlisting, and experience in Iraq. They provide a glimpse into the myths of warfare as glorious spectacle through the minds of young men desperate to believe in the righteousness of their actions.

One soldier explains that he always wanted to be a hero. He thought the military would be fun--he would jump out of planes. He never imagined it could be ugly until he saw Saving Private Ryan. He is now a cripple, doped up all day on pain medications, flat broke, with one kid and another on the way. Another soldier describes how he called a recruiting station after watching an MTV-style commercial for the Army on TV. An immigrant from Pakistan, he was given his citizenship following his injury. It's a fair trade in his mind: a leg for an American passport.

Berman's photographs are accompanied by essays from Verlyn Klinkenborg, a New York Times editorial page writer, and Tim Origer, a Vietnam veteran and former Marine who fought in the Tet offensive and returned at age 19, an amputee. Essays by Verlyn Klinkenborg and Tim Origer. Paperback, 8 x 8 in. / 176 pgs / 100 color.

Nina Berman: Homeland

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Nina Berman was one of the first photographers in the US to turn her lens towards her own country, whilst all eyes were on Iraq. She was awarded international prizes in photojournalism from World Press Photo (2005, 2007) and DAYS Japan (2005) for her work on young American veterans coming back from war, widely exhibited and published in the book Purple Hearts - Back from Iraq. In Homeland Berman is an American again looking at America. A product of seven years work, with images from across the country, Berman gives us a peek into the bizarre manifestations of the homeland security state and the ideologies that have reshaped post 9-11 America.

Released to coincide with the US Presidential election of 2008, Nina Berman in Homeland has captured further the unsettling and surreal in her own country over recent years. She has witnessed the rise of the super churches, and photographed military demos, recruitment centres and air fairs where you are never too young to have your own gun. Happy families step through suburbs clutching anti-nuke pills. Small town police train to hunt Al-Qaeda. Military goats perform in 'War On Terror' scripts. And beneath it all stands the image of a warrior Jesus inspiring megachurch millions toward the end times.

Underlying Berman's technicolour images is a sense of fear under the guise of the banal. She sees the growing elements of fanaticism and faith in guns and God, creeping through a cross-section of American society. One asks, are the scenes real, or an elaborate state-sponsored performance art, designed to amuse a public desperately seeking a superhero ending in an age of empire decline?

With an afterword by Michael Shaw, visual critic and creator of Bagnewsnotes.com

Banksy: Wall and Piece

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

The collected works of Britain’s most wanted artist.

Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Banksy is unmistakable (except maybe when it’s squatting in the New York’s Metropolitan Museum or Museum of Modern Art.) Banksy is responsible for decorating the streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cites throughout the world.

Witty and subversive, his stencils show monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, policeman with smiley faces, rats with drills and umbrellas. If you look hard enough you’ll find your own. His statements, incitements, ironies and epigrams are by turns intelligent and witty comments on everything from the monarchy and capitalism to the war in Iraq and farm animals.

His identity remains unknown, but his work is prolific. And now for the first time, he’s putting together the best of his work—old and new—in a fully illustrated color volume.

Banksy, real name unknown, was born in Bristol, England.

Stanley Greene: Black Passport

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

The archetype of the war correspondent is freighted with an outsize heroic mythos to which world-renowned conflict photographer Stanley Greene is no stranger. Black Passport is his autobiographical monograph-cum-scrapbook, and it transports the viewer behind the news as Greene reflects upon his career, oscillating between the relative safety of life in the West and the traumas of wars abroad. This glimpse of the polarities that have comprised Greene's life raises essential questions about the role of the photojournalist, as well as concerns about its repercussions: what motivates someone to willingly confront death and misery? To do work that risks one's life? Is it political engagement, or a sense of commitment to telling difficult stories? Or does being a war photographer simply satisfy a yearning for adventure? Black Passport offers an experience that is both exceptionally personal and ostensibly objective. Built around Greene's narrating monologue, the book's 26 short, nonsequential "scenes" are each illustrated by a portfolio of his work.

Mario Tama: Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Mario Tama's moving body of award-winning pictures documents Hurricane Katrina's shocking disaster and the resilience of recovery, hope, and change.

As a news photographer for Getty Images, Tama's powerful imagery of events like September 11th, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the funeral of Pope John Paul II, and the earthquake in Haiti have appeared in major magazines and newspapers internationally. His numerous honors include the prestigious Cliff Edom's New America Award at the NPPA Best of Photojournalism Awards, POY Year International, White House News Photographers Association, NPPA's Best of Photojournalism, UNICEF Photo of the Year, and Care International Award for Humanitarian Reportage. In 2008 Tama was nominated for an Emmy Award for his Coney Island series, and his work on Baghdad's orphans was exhibited at Visa Pour L'Image in Perpignan.

Features an introduction by Anderson Cooper, who joined CNN in 2001 and has anchored Anderson Cooper 360 since 2003. Previously a correspondent for ABC News and Channel One News, his many awards include four Emmys for his comprehensive and impassioned coverage of world events.

Anne Wilkes Tucker: Louis Faurer

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Louis Faurer was one of America's "quiet" photographers. Known for his raw, melancholy, psychologically charged pictures of life on the street, and in particular for evocative shots of 1940s and 1950s Times Square, Faurer frequently drew on the film noir idiom to create memorable images of moviegoers, box-office lines, ushers, and theaters advertising B movies such as Force of Evil, Edge of Doom, and Ace in the Hole.

Much of Faurer's best work, though, is of ordinary activity and people, and he frequently haunted the streets of New York, finding poetry amid the crackle of the city. In an untitled picture taken in 1937 in Philadelphia, the trousers, jacket cuffs, and cane of a seated man are in sharp focus, as are a box of pencils and a sign announcing, "I am totally blind." Hurrying past him are the blurred figures of pedestrians. Other shots such as I am Paralyzed, Daddy Warbucks, and Eddie reveal a rare social awareness.

Faurer also worked as a fashion photographer for nearly thirty years, producing work for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and Flair, with a particular gift for highlighting his subject's ephemeral grace. He was a lasting influence on Robert Frank and other members of the New York School of photography.

This book, the first to examine Faurer's work in depth and bring it to a modern readership, brings together a great deal of previously unpublished material, as well as images not seen since they originally appeared in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s.

Philip Toledano: Days with my Father

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Days With My Father is a son's photo journal of his aging father's last years. Following the death of his mother, photographer Phillip Toledano was shocked to learn of the extent of his father's severe memory loss. He started a blog on which he posted photographs and accompanying reflections on his father's changing state. Through sometimes sad, often funny, and always loving observations, we follow Toledano as he learns to reconcile the elderly man living in a twilight of half memories with the ambitious and handsome young man he occasionally still glimpses. Days With My Father is an honest and moving reflection about coming to terms with an aging parent.

Jennette Williams: The Bathers

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Jennette Williams's stunning platinum prints of women bathers in Budapest and Istanbul take us inside spaces intimate and public, austere and sensuous, filled with water, steam, tile, stone, ethereal sunlight, and earthly flesh. Over a period of eight years, Williams, who is based in New York City, traveled to Hungary and Turkey to photograph, without sentimentality or objectification, women daring enough to stand naked before her camera. Young and old, the women of The Bathers inhabit and display their bodies with comfort and ease--floating, showering, conversing, lost in reverie.

To create the images in The Bathers, Williams drew on gestures and poses found in iconic paintings of nude women, including tableaux of bathers by Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir, renderings of Venus by Giorgione and Titian, Dominique Ingres's Odalisque and Slave, and Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. By alluding to these images and others, Williams sought to reflect the religious and mythological associations of water with birth and rebirth, comfort and healing, purification and blessing. She also used copies of the paintings to communicate with her Hungarian- and Turkish-speaking subjects--homemakers, factory workers, saleswomen, secretaries, managers, teachers, and students. Working in steam-filled environments, Williams created quiet, dignified images that invoke not only canonical representations of female nudes but also early pictorial photography. At the same time, they raise contemporary questions about the gaze, the definition of documentary photography, and the representation and perception of beauty and femininity, particularly as they relate to the aging body. Above all else, her photos are sensuously evocative. They invite the viewer to feel the steam, hear the murmur of conversation, and reflect on the allure of the female form.

A CDS Book Published by Duke University Press and the Center for Documentary Photography

Danny Lyon: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

In the summer of 1962, Danny Lyon packed a Nikon Reflex and an old Leica in an army bag and hitchhiked south. Within a week he was in jail, looking through the bars at another prisoner, Martin Luther King, Jr. Lyon soon became the first staff photographer for the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which already had a reputation as one of the most committed and confrontational groups fighting for civil rights. The photographs and text in this book capture the story of one of the most inspiring periods in America's twentieth century.

Bert Stern: Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Bert Stern, the famous commercial and fashion photographer of the 60s, was the last to be granted a sitting by Marilyn Monroe six weeks before her tragic death. The three-day session yielded nearly 2,600 pictures—fashion, portrait, and nude studies—of indescribable sensual and human vibrancy, of which no more than 20 were published. And yet these few photographs ineradicably shaped our image of Marilyn Monroe. This book presents the complete set of 2,571 photos. The monumental body of work by the master photographer and the Hollywood actress marks a climax in the history of star photography, both in quantity and quality. It is a unique affirmation of the erotic dimension of photography and the eroticism of taking photos, and it is the world’s finest and largest tribute to Marilyn Monroe.

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

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