The Americans

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Christian Dior

The timeless style guide by legendary French couturier Christian Dior, offering advice on elegance, silhouette, color, accessories, and grooming from A to Z.

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Peter B. Hales

"First published in 1984, Silver Cities rapidly became a classic in the history of photography and in the then-nascent field of visual culture studies. Now this vastly expanded edition presents a lively interdisciplinary history of the first century of urban photography in America. Silver Cities envisions the transformation of American civilization via mass-produced and mass-disseminated photography of cities made between 1839 and the onset of World War II. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, urban photographers were visual explorers of the rapidly evolving urban sphere, but their understanding of that environment was defined by the prevailing cultural prejudices. To examine their visual products is to educate ourselves in the deepest concerns of American culture in the century of its transformation from agrarian youth to urbane maturity. Readers new to the book will find a richly illustrated cultural history of American photography, with familiar names and newly discovered figures. Those familiar with the original will find the new edition fresh and surprising, exploring issues of race, gender, and ethnic identity and analyzing the ways media contribute to the power of the dominant culture. Longer and broader in its scope, with a vastly expanded collection of illustrations, the new edition surveys cities small and large, delves deeper into the twentieth century, and gives names to once-anonymous contributors and locations to once-mysterious places."--

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Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz addresses young photographers and readers interested in what photographers do, but any reader interested in contemporary culture will be fascinated by this detailed account of how her famous photographs were made. From Rolling Stone tour shoots to White House sessions, she explains her craft.

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Katherine Hoffman

"Katherine Hoffman presents a comprehensive and provocative study of the life and work of the photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, focusing on the period from 1915 to his death in 1946, with some introductory material related to his early years. His work as photographer, editor, writer, and gallery director are explored in relationship to his personal biography and cultural milieu, presenting the complex tapestry that was Stieglitz's life and work.This book focuses on the American work, issues of identity, and the rise of Modernism in America. There is discussion of some of his photographs that are rarely illustrated or discussed, that give added dimension to an understanding of Stieglitz's total oeuvre. The newly opened letters along with the many other letters Stieglitz wrote, reveal him to be a man of "letters", as well as a man with a camera. His work as editor and writer of short articles, along with his letters illustrate a strong literary side of Stieglitz discussed in the book, that balanced his visual work.. Stieglitz's life and work may be seen as a significant continuum that progressed from his early European work to his final photographic images taken at Lake George, and in New York City. Stieglitz was a complicated and complex man, revered and idolized by a community of loyal followers, and at the same time despised and hated by some. As the critic Robert Hughes, has written of StieglitzBeyond the personality and the myths that have grown up around Stieglitz, some self-made, some through the power of the press,it is in the end, " the work," that is perhaps most important and enduring, It is that work, along with its fundamental ideas and inspirations, that is the focus of this book, illustrating that Stieglitz has, indeed, left a lasting legacy of light"--