From the race that led to the birth of photography, to today’s amazing photographs of space and earth, captured from spaceships and stations, satellites, space telescopes, probes and planetary rovers, through some master photographers of the 20th century documenting everyday life as well as the glamour of the rich, famous and fashionistas, this month’s wide and fascinating selection reminds us of the giant steps this medium has experienced during its relatively short existence.
Leo Fuchs
“Leo Fuchs is a Hollywood veteran who spent over 40 years shooting some of the most moving and memorable images ever made of 50s and 60s film icons. Fuchs’ introduction to moviemaking came as one of the world’s leading “special photographers” on movie sets in Europe and North America. Starting as a freelance magazine photographer, he was one of the rare outsiders invited onto movie sets, where he often befriended actors, actresses, and filmmakers and captured candid shots both during shooting and after hours while socializing with the stars. With the support of his dear friend Cary Grant, Fuchs gave up photography in 1964 and spent the next 20 years as a motion picture producer.
Fuchs’ photographs of Hollywood’s undisputed heyday are collected for the first time in Leo Fuchs: Special Photographer from the Golden Age of Hollywood, along with a rare essay by photography great, Bruce Weber. Film icons Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Sean Connery, Shirley MacLaine, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, and never-before-published photographs of To Kill a Mockingbird’s Harper Lee as well as such legendary directors as Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Alfred Hitchcock
all appear unguarded—unlike any other photographs of the era. These images are complemented by pages of insider details taken from the recorded remembrances of Leo Fuchs himself.” (From amazon.com)
Garry Winogrand
“Widely regarded as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) did much of his best-known work in Manhattan during the 1960s, becoming an epic chronicler of that tumultuous decade. But Winogrand was also an avid traveler and roamed extensively around the United States, bringing exquisite work out of nearly every region of the country.This landmark retrospective catalogue looks at the full sweep of Winogrand’s exceptional career. Drawing from his enormous output, which at the time of his death included thousands of rolls of undeveloped film and unpublished contact sheets, the book will serve as the most substantial compendium of Winogrand’s work to date. Lavishly illustrated with both iconic images and photographs that have never been seen before now, and featuring essays by leading scholars of American photography, Garry Winogrand presents a vivid portrait of an artist who unflinchingly captured America’s swings between optimism and upheaval in the postwar era”. (From publisher)
Terence Donovan Fashion
“Terence Donovan was one of the foremost photographers of his generation – among the greatest Britain has ever produced. He came to prominence in London as part of a postwar renaissance in art, fashion, graphic design and photography. His working-class background and outlook helped change the face of British fashion photography and made him a major figure of London’s Swinging Sixties. A star in his own right, he was equally at home with celebrities and royalty as well as the ordinary girl on the street, whose mannerisms informed his photographs. Gifted with an unerring eye for the iconic image, Donovan was also master of his craft, a technical genius who strove to push the limits of what was possible.
Arranged chronologically, from the gritty monochromatic 1960s and 1970s to the vibrant and colourful 1980s and 1990s, the book reveals how constant invention and experimentation set Donovan apart from his contemporaries and influenced generations to come.” (From publisher)
Vogue – The Editor’s Eye
“Vogue: The Editor’s Eye celebrates the pivotal role the fashion editor has played in shaping America’s sense of style since the magazine’s launch 120 years ago. Drawing on Vogue’s exceptional archive, this book focuses on the work of eight of the magazine’s legendary fashion editors (including Polly Mellen, Babs Simpson, and Grace Coddington) who collaborated with photographers, stylists, and designers to create the images that have had an indelible impact on the fashion world and beyond. Featuring the work of world-renowned photographers such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Annie Leibovitz and model/muses, including Marilyn Monroe, Verushka, and Linda Evangelista, The Editor’s Eye is a lavishly illustrated look at the visionary editors whose works continue to reverberate in the culture today”. (From publisher)
Halim Al Karim
“Halim Al Karim is one of a generation of Arab artists forced by recent global events to live and create unexpected relationships between distant places, geographically and culturally. With dogged determination, he has devised and implemented the codes and means of his own artistic explorations. Without urgency, he has owned to everything, and particularly to all the deserts — those in his soul and the real deserts of his days as a young man buried in a war-torn country. This dereliction has never left him since.
From his current life in the United States, Dubai, and Holland (where he divides his time), from his travels around the world, and from Iraq, of course, where he was born, Halim Al Karim has drawn on and been enriched by diverse experiences, sometimes painful. These have led to an intimate isolation, now connected to forms of art expressed between secrecy and a search for an unspeakable truth.
His work draws meaning from his capacity to resonate with the world and to invent forms, gestures, codes, and symbols that allow him to express his obsessions and problematics in unprecedented ways.
Nadine Descendre, the author of this book, sets out to retrace the footsteps of the artist.” (From publisher)
Capturing the light
“The story of two lone geniuses and the extraordinary race to invent photography At the heart of Capturing the Light, there lies a small scrap of purple-tinged paper, over 170 years old and about the size of a postage stamp. On it you can just make out a tiny, ghostly image – an image so small and perfect that ‘it might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist’; the world’s first photographic negative. This captivating book traces the true story of two very different men in the 1830s, both striving to solve one of the world’s oldest problems: how to capture an image, and keep it for ever. On the one hand there is Henry Fox Talbot, a quiet, solitary gentleman-amateur scientist, tinkering away on his estate in the English countryside; on the other, Louis Daguerre: a flamboyant, charismatic French scenery-painter, showman and entrepreneur in search of fame and fortune. Both men invented methods of photography that would enable ordinary people, for the first time in history, to illustrate their own lives and leave something behind of their passing. Photography would transform art, the documentation of both war and peace, and become so natural and widespread that now, each of us carries a camera everywhere with us, and takes this most magical of processes for granted. Only one question remains: which man got there first?” (From amazon.co.uk)
Astronomy Photographer of the year
“This collection of beautiful images of space taken by photographers from all over the world comprises images from the first four years of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, which is organized by the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in association with Sky at Night Magazine, and powered by the photo-sharing website Flickr.
From giant storm systems in Jupiter’s atmosphere to the colourful wispy remnants of a supernova explosion and the dazzling green curtain of the Northern Lights, the competition brings together some of the last four years’ best space imagery of astronomical objects from within our solar system and far into deep space by astrophotographers from around the world.
All winning, runner-up and highly commended entries from all four years of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition are included, as well as all shortlisted images from the 2012 competition.” (From amazon.co.uk)
SpaceCam, photographing the final frontier
“Photographs of space have always been fascinating and extraordinary and never more so than now that space telescopes such as Hubble are bringing us strange and beautiful images of unimaginably distant regions of the universe, even almost to the beginning of time. Spacecam celebrates the unique perspective of cameras freed from the confines of the earth; looking back at our own colourful planet and the patterns made by coastlines, river deltas and weather patterns, the activity in our own backyard of satellites and space shuttles, exploring the solar system with stunning pictures of our nearest neighbours, and of course the cosmic ballet of deep space. Utilizing amazing photographs from spaceships and stations, satellites, space telescopes, probes and planetary rovers, Spacecam will bring together the beautiful, the pioneering and the scientifically astounding, looking at our own tiny and fragile world, around us at our neighbours, and out into deep space.” (From amazon.co.uk)