Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Photography

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Black Cañon, Colorado River, From Camp 8, Looking, Above, 1871, Albumen print, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Check out the Art Tattler International Web site for a great preview.

Day one in twelve days of books from my wishlist.

Two gorgeous photography books available in the Art Institute gift shop, good for a destination shopping trip.

Check out the exhibit: Timothy H. O'Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs. Then pick up the book: Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan for any fans of photography generally, history, Western Americana. General book and art lovers should find interest in O'Sullivan's photos too; much of his work finds men (and their essentials and accoutrements for survival and exploration) dwarfed within awesome, overwhelming landscapes, beautiful, certainly, and the images are charged with a current of foreboding. Both the "pure" landscapes and views incorporating the human form similarly suggest stories and spark the imagination.

You can order direct from Yale Univ. Press too.

 
























Richard Misrach is a longtime favorite. Misrach's 2010 book Destroy This Memory looks at post-Katrina New Orleans. Misrach's eye is unique, his technique is dropdead gorgeous (let's just say he is considered responsible for "bringing color photography back"), and his subjects are meat and gristle, so his books are all substantial, worth the investment and deserving permanent shelfspace, as the images bear ongoing examination.

In his Modern Art Notes for the Artinfo blog, Tyler Green describes Misrach's gestalt for his Katrina book: "Misrach’s book focuses not on the totality of the devastation but on one way New Orleanians responded to it. . . . New Orleanians spray-painted messages on their homes, cars and propped-up boards of plywood. The graffiti are warnings, announcements, pleas and even sly jokes shared with neighbors, government, city officials and neighbors. They are among New Orleanians’ first written responses to their hell."

 

According to Green: "Misrach didn’t just make his pictures into a book, he printed them and gifted full sets of prints to five museums that serve as storehouses of our visual record of ourselves and our culture: the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, the MFA Houston, SFMOMA and the New Orleans Museum of Art.  Misrach is also donating the royalties from book sales to the Make it Right Foundation, which is active in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. (Readers may also click here to give to Make it Right.)"

If you're not in Chicago, or you can't make a visit to the Art Insitutitue, Destroy This Memory is offered at a nice sale price via the publisher at: Aperture Foundation (while you're there, if you subscribe to the magazine, at a 50% discount, you get a free copy of Aperture's Masters of Photography series: Paul Strand with your subscription). 

“I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas.”—Richard Misrach 

(If you do make it to the museum, you can always pick up a membership for someone you love, a year's worth of beauty and its effects.)