Photography

Before the development of light, portable cameras, photographs were taken for rather than by tourists. This catalogue of an exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie explores the development of the medium and the way in which staged studio photographs reaffirmed Western perceptions of Japan. More recent work by photographers such as Evelyn Richter, Heidi Speckler and Wolfgang Tillmans engages with modern issues, including globalization and the economic crisis.

Many of the great names in the history of photography worked in black and white, but digital cameras have, to some extent, relegated its use to a post-production effect. This manual promotes the subtleties and creative possibilities of working in monochrome, combining practical advice on manipulating digital images with insights into how to conceive scenes in black and white and consideration of the tradition of the medium, using examples of artists such as Ansel Adams and Bill Brandt.

A member of the Magnum photo agency since 1958, Bruce Davidson honed his signature style with long-term projects photographing a Brooklyn gang and the inhabitants of a poor district of East Harlem. This retrospective tells the story of his life and career and is illustrated with examples of his best work, from Welsh miners in the 1960s to the New York subway of the 1990s.

Man Ray arrived in Paris from New York in 1921 and was to stay there until 1940. As a painter he sought out the Parisian avant-garde and soon became an influential figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements; and as a photographer he was able to earn a living. Following an illustrated introduction, this book reproduces 74 photographs, including portraits, ‘rayographs’ and experiments such as solarization, that illustrate Man Ray’s seminal role in elevating photography to an art form.

On 3 March 2011 a powerful earthquake shook northern Japan, killing more than 15,000 people and triggering a tsunami that sent the Fukushima nuclear plant into meltdown. Five years later, survivors were allowed to revisit the evacuated town of Tomioka. Rebecca Bathory accompanied them into the exclusion zone. Her photographs of abandoned streets and schoolrooms vividly convey the human cost of the disaster, and offer a stark warning for the future.

Born into a poor immigrant family in Philadelphia in 1912, Eve Arnold found her calling in photography in her late thirties, after studying briefly with Alexey Brodovitch. Drawing on her diaries, letters and extensive photographic archive, this celebration of her life and career demonstrates the range of her work, from recording the lives of the poor and dispossessed in China and India to intimate portraits of celebrities including Marilyn Monroe and Malcolm X.

The first official photographer to the royal court of Benin, Solomon Osagie Alonge (1911–1994) took portraits of its obas, or kings, in their regalia, and created a record of ceremonial life. Produced in collaboration between Washington’s Smithsonian Institution and Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, this book reproduces many of his images, examines their role as a documentary record of an era of change, and explores the practices of early studio photography in West Africa.

Consideration of what constitutes erotic imagery and the boundaries between the nude, the erotic and the pornographic are explored in this portfolio of contemporary photography. In response to the encroachment of pornography into mainstream culture since the advent of the internet, the 32 artists present their personal visions of the erotic from off-beat and fetishistic to intimate and sensual. Explicit content.

Whatever his subject matter, rubbish bins or the human body, Edmund Teske (1911–1996) used the medium of photography – its film, chemistry, optics and mechanics – to create serious, reflective and often composite works of art. This volume accompanied an exhibition of his photographs at the J Paul Getty Museum in 2004. As well as over 110 illustrations, the book contains Julian Cox’s biographical and critical essay and an interview with Teske’s close friend of 30 years, the artist George Herms.

The first photographic nudes of the mid 19th century took their cue from classical sources, but as the medium developed, artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston developed new ways of looking at the human form. This well-curated survey is drawn from the collection of the J Paul Getty Museum and contains 78 works by artists ranging from Thomas Eakins and Man Ray to Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe.

From 1955, when Edward Steichen’s touring exhibition The Family of Man opened in West Berlin, and Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel (‘War Primer’) was published in the East, to the 1980s, this study examines five documentary projects by photographers Karl Pawek, Evelyn Richter, Rudolf Schäfer, Bernd and Hilda Becher and Michael Schmidt, looking at their work in relation to a world transformed by the Holocaust and the ideological, cultural and technological impact of the Cold War.

Apprentice Japanese geishas are known as maikos and undergo a rigorous training in the traditional arts of music and dance and the wearing of strictly codified costume and make-up. This photo-essay allows a rare glimpse into the closeted world of the trainees in their traditional house in the Gion quarter of Kyoto.

'Never act with children or animals,' they say, but many of Hollywood's greatest stars were only too happy to be captured on film with their feline companions. This collection of over 100 vintage photographs offers a glimpse of such luminaries as Dirk Bogarde, Marlon Brando, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak and Elizabeth Taylor in charming unguarded moments with their beloved pets, as well as the nameless strays who ruled the studios.

A selection from the English Heritage archive of some 25,000 photographs taken by professional architectural photographers Bedford Lemere between the 1870s and the late 1920s, this volume focuses on the period after 1890 and offers a view of Britain at the height of its wealth and power. Accompanied by Cooper's introduction, the photographs are arranged by themes, including public buildings, commerce and industry, transport and technology, leisure and entertainment and life at home during the Great War.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) witnessed and photographed the events, people and places of the 20th century with an instinct for the decisive and creative moment, the significance of the scene and its composition. In this biography, Pierre Assouline retraces Cartier-Bresson’s life ‘to tell the story of one man’s vision’.

Popular Victorian paintings were often reproduced as engravings, but photographers also recreated the scenes with actors, to produce stereoscopic cards for commercial sale. Originally published to accompany the exhibition at the Tate Gallery, this slipcased volume explores the relationship between paintings, popular illustrations and cartoons (such as those published in Punch), and 3D stereo photographs. It also includes a stereoscope to view the examples, which are mainly drawn from the collection of Queen guitarist Brian May.

An association with the sculptor Henry Moore led Gemma Levine into a career as a photographer, making portraits of many of the most influential figures in British life in the 1980s and 1990s, including Princess Diana, Robert Maxwell and Margaret Thatcher. Part autobiography, part portfolio, this book explains her early work with Moore and her travels across Israel in the 1970s, and presents the best of her portraits with anecdotes about the sitters.

The photographer Horace Poolaw (Kiowa, 1906–1984) was born near the Wichita Mountains in the Oklahoma and Indian Territories, which became the state of Oklahoma in 1907. In photographs taken between the 1920s and 1950s, he captured images of his community; a people in transition, but preserving its culture within modern America. This book, published to accompany an exhibition at The National Museum of the American Indian, presents over 150 photographs and several essays by Native American writers and scholars.

The profound influence of Le Corbusier (1887–1965) on architects and urban planners was due in part to his use of photography in the promotion of his architectural works and ideas. In six essays and over 400 photographs by Lucien Hervé, Thomas Flechtner, Guido Guidi and many others, including Le Corbusier himself, this volume explores the role of photography in the architect’s thinking and as a major tool for the promotion and dissemination of his ideas.

Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Alice Cooper, Aboriginal Australians, icons from the fashion world, East End club-goers from the 1960s, rock stars, film stars and Nelson Mandela: David Bailey’s photographs prove that, in the words of Sandy Nairne, the National Portrait Gallery’s director, ‘we stand equal in life’. Published to accompany the 'Bailey’s Stardust' exhibition in 2014, this volume contains over 250 portraits – each one extraordinary – chosen by the photographer himself and introduced by Tim Marlow’s essay, ‘Bailey and Portraiture'.

Founded in Paris after the Second World War, the photographers’ collective Magnum has boasted some of the world’s leading photojournalists among its number ever since. With accompanying historical commentary and an introduction by New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson, this book presents the images of 42 of Magnum's celebrated members, including Josef Koudelka and René Burri, recording the drama of 30 popular revolutions, from Hungary and Cuba in the 1950s to the Arab Spring of 2011.

In 1970s London the photographer Peter Gravelle shot portraits of The Sex Pistols, The Damned, Siouxsie Sioux and other punk icons. But the death of Sid Vicious convinced him to switch to fashion, beginning in 1980 with a shoot for Italian Vogue. This collection of Gravelle’s uncompromising and often experimental work also features personal musings on his relationships and career, both derailed by an addiction to heroin which would dominate his life. Contains graphic images and sexually explicit.

The Hungarian photographer Lucien Hervé (1910–2007) was an athlete in Hungary and a fashion designer in Paris before turning to photography in 1938. In 1949 he was commissioned to do an article on Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseille and began the long collaboration with the Modern Movement pioneer which made Hervé the photographer of choice for many architects. In this volume, over 150 photographs – of architectural and other subjects – accompany a biographical and critical essay by Olivier Beer.

From the success of Roman Holiday in 1953, the arrival of the film industry in Rome and the release of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita in 1960, a new breed of celebrity-scoop photographers emerged, the paparazzi, with Elio Sorci at the forefront. A virtual who’s who of 1960s and 1970s cinema, this portfolio of Sorci’s work includes his famous ‘kissing picture’ that confirmed the love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra.