The sheer granite walls of Yosemite Valley galvanized a dedicated group of rock climbers in the 1960s, who saw the nearly holdless, glacier-polished faces as the purest form of challenge. The awesome Half Dome and El Capitan were first climbed in the late 1950s, ushering in a new era of rock climbing later known as the golden age of Yosemite climbing. During this era, the climbers of the sixties developed the techniques, tools, and philosophies that made Yosemite the most influential rock climbi...
Can film capture what our eyes can't see? There are many examples both historical and contemporary of photographs of spirits or ghosts. These images have been both derided as hoaxes or, at the other extreme, held up as irrefutable proof of the otherworld. One of two books in Reaktion's new series "Exposures", "Photography and Spirit" examines these tantalizingly blurred images of phantoms, psychical emanations and religious apparitions. Drawing on eighty images taken between 1860 and today, John...
Photographer Sarah Stolfa shot the series "The Regulars" while working as a bartender for nine years at McGlinchey's, an old tavern in downtown Philadelphia. Her portraits are both stark and resonant, tender and alienating, and they capture something deeply specific to the place yet relevant to watering holes everywhere. The series launched her career as an artist, winning awards and appearing in the pages of the "New York Times Magazine", the New Yorker, and several gallery shows. "The Regulars...
Andrew D. Lytle's Baton Rouge (The Hill Collection: Holdings of the LSU Libraries)
Andrew David Lytle produced thousands of photographic images in the sixty years during which he lived in Baton Rouge and operated Lytle Studio. His heirs, alas, reportedly shattered his glass-plate negatives by dropping them down a dry well soon after his death, not realizing their value. Andrew D. Lytle's Baton Rouge preserves some of the only images that remain, a vintage treasure for contemporary viewers. These 120 photographs give entrée into life in Louisiana's capital city from the 1860...
These ordinary women lived extraordinary lives under the harshest conditions of the Jim Crow era and during the courageous changes of the Civil Rights Movement. With the help of local pastors, Steele recorded these living witnesses to history and folk ways, and shares the significance of being a Black woman--child, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother in Mississippi--a Jewel of the Delta. From the stand Mrs. Tennie Self took for her marriage to be acknowledged in the phone book, to th...
Each of these five books is taken from Phaidon's '55' series, which represents photographers in 55 key photographs taken from their life's work, giving a chronological overview of some of their most important compositions.
More than 100,000 people visit New Orleans' cemeteries each year to see the arresting aboveground tombs. Sandra Russell Clark's photographs, however, offer a perspective unavailable to the naked eye: her luminous black-and-white duotones register atmosphere and time, as well as the solid substances of chiseled stone, sculpted marble, and wrought iron. Andrei Codrescu offers his poet's view of cemeteries generally and of his adopted hometown's in particular, confiding that he has used places of e...
Fazal Sheikh /Eyal Weizman : the Conflict Shoreline
by Fazal Sheikh and Eyal Weizman
Kelly's exquisite color photographs reveal a modern Irish landscape filled with magical echoes of history and ancient legends.
When people think of American history and the colonial era, they think of Pennsylvania. After all, its most iconic images are of Amish people, picturesque red barns, and rolling wheat fields. Its where Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed. But those sepia-toned images miss the whole pictures of a state that is modern, growing, and vibrant. This is a state where you'll find more Impressionist art than in Paris and more religious artifacts than in the Vatican. Come see that...
