Here are 93 books that Beneath the Roses fans have personally recommended if you like
Beneath the Roses.
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After flirting with careers as an archaeologist, pilot, concert pianist, and diplomat, I settled on photographer after just a few month’s residence in Heidelberg, Germany, while studying for my Masters in Comparative Literature. The camera provided close personal interaction with people, while hearing their stories from a wide variety of cultural perspectives and social environments. Introduced by parents, I formed an obsession with opera, Native American drum music, vinyl recordings, and historic places, particularly Georgia O’Keeffe country, “south of the border” from our Colorado base. My family of musicians and artists stopped, listened, and loved the light and land of the Four Corners. I self-define as a photojournalist-poet, a griot.
Up close and personal acquaintance with the late irreverent, prolific, and totally charming painter, who also sculpted and worked in wood and silver. No art-speak, just an amazing character, extolled by a master of pictures in words. Wealth of reproductions.
You’ll want to buy a painting once you’ve read the book.
After flirting with careers as an archaeologist, pilot, concert pianist, and diplomat, I settled on photographer after just a few month’s residence in Heidelberg, Germany, while studying for my Masters in Comparative Literature. The camera provided close personal interaction with people, while hearing their stories from a wide variety of cultural perspectives and social environments. Introduced by parents, I formed an obsession with opera, Native American drum music, vinyl recordings, and historic places, particularly Georgia O’Keeffe country, “south of the border” from our Colorado base. My family of musicians and artists stopped, listened, and loved the light and land of the Four Corners. I self-define as a photojournalist-poet, a griot.
Of prolific nature photographer Fielder’s many books, this is my fav.
It commands attention, a gift to be treasured, big, bold, luxurious. You’ll drown in the luscious reproductions, as though you were on the trail with him!
The unexpected bonus: his commentary tells you about his experiences loose in the wild, how chance weather patterns and animals made for dramatic imagery, his devotion to craft, and sheer delight in tramping the land of the West.
John Fielder is Colorado's preeminent nature photographer. Colorado Black on White is his 50th Colorado book. In the mold of Colorado's best-selling book of all time, Colorado 1870-2000, Fielder represents his state exclusively in black and white. He edited 230 color images from his life's work in Colorado over the past 40 years, and rendered each in blacks, whites, and subtle tones of gray. Without the distraction of color, the viewer engages the shapes, textures, lines, and edges of this most scenic of states as never before.
Divided into eight chapters, Fielder spares no subject endemic to his adopted state.…
After flirting with careers as an archaeologist, pilot, concert pianist, and diplomat, I settled on photographer after just a few month’s residence in Heidelberg, Germany, while studying for my Masters in Comparative Literature. The camera provided close personal interaction with people, while hearing their stories from a wide variety of cultural perspectives and social environments. Introduced by parents, I formed an obsession with opera, Native American drum music, vinyl recordings, and historic places, particularly Georgia O’Keeffe country, “south of the border” from our Colorado base. My family of musicians and artists stopped, listened, and loved the light and land of the Four Corners. I self-define as a photojournalist-poet, a griot.
It’s a huge book! Huge in size, huge in the image reproductions, huge in the photographic artist’s effort to construct composite images of dramatic international scenes from many iconic places, such as Times Square, Paris, Rome, National Parks of the World, that transform from day to night.
Yes, all in the same image! One side is night that slowly across the image melds into day. Technological marvel, but no kitsch here. Hundreds of hours, thousands of images layered together to create an entirely new art form.
If you were to stand in one spot at an iconic location for 30 hours and simply observe, never closing your eyes, you still wouldn't be able to take in all the detail and emotion found in a Stephen Wilkes panoramic photograph. Not only does Wilkes shoot over 1,500 exposures from a fixed angle, he also distills this visual information afterward in his studio, painstakingly composing selected frames into a single image.
Day to Night presents 60 epic panoramas created between 2009 and 2018, shot everywhere from Africa's Serengeti to the Champs-Elysees in Paris, from the Grand Canyon to Coney…
After flirting with careers as an archaeologist, pilot, concert pianist, and diplomat, I settled on photographer after just a few month’s residence in Heidelberg, Germany, while studying for my Masters in Comparative Literature. The camera provided close personal interaction with people, while hearing their stories from a wide variety of cultural perspectives and social environments. Introduced by parents, I formed an obsession with opera, Native American drum music, vinyl recordings, and historic places, particularly Georgia O’Keeffe country, “south of the border” from our Colorado base. My family of musicians and artists stopped, listened, and loved the light and land of the Four Corners. I self-define as a photojournalist-poet, a griot.
I first met Klyukin’s huge, foldable-section metal sculptures at the Venice Biennale.
I had heard of him, but was overwhelmed by the size and quantity—plus his writings that appeared on ceiling-height, painted fabric banners. Particularly of note: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,and his collection calledIn Dante Veritas,which pulls the characters and their sins out of Dante’s Inferno, and updates them in sculpture and words to the 21st Century.
This book presents the extraordinary three-dimensional “live sculptures” by the Russian architect, designer, writer and artist.
Having some engineering experience, Klyukin was able to experiment and derive a concept of connecting steel sheets on a non-existent, speculative axis without any actual fasteners. The principle of mobility of each individual piece was the basis for this technological innovation. Each sculpture created without physical fasteners is easily assembled and disassembled. This new experience brought new satisfaction. One of the statuettes done using the “live sculpture” technique, the Golden Madonnina, was used as the official award during Milan Design Week in 2017, a…
My interest in photography began as a student at Pratt Institute, a preeminent art school, and I have worked in the field my entire adult life, not as a photographer but as a picture editor and photography critic. I was the Page One Picture Editor of The New York Times and wrote regularly about photography for the paper. I have published two biographies: one on Richard Avedon, among the more significant artists of the 20th century, and another on Sam Wagstaff, one of the earliest collectors who established the art market for photography; a book of collected reviews and essays called Photography After Frank; and essays on individual photographers for museum catalogues and artist’s monographs. I produced the 2011 documentary, Bill Cunningham New York.
As a photography critic for The New York Times, Grundberg was present when a generation of artists began to take apart the photographic image and transform its meaning in society. He wrote about post-modern practice in the present tense, as it was happening. This book is a collection of his reviews and essays from the 1980s when the medium was at a crossroads; the factual veracity of photography was enduring challenges at every turn and the valuation of the photograph as an art object was under critical scrutiny.
A leading critic's inside story of "the photo boom" during the crucial decades of the 1970s and 80s
"Grundberg . . . is a vibrant, opinionated, authoritative guide to the medium's past and present."-Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times, "Best Books of 2021: Visual Arts"
When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography's "boom years,"…
When I was young, my passions were flying and art. I became a pilot at age 17. Later, I became an architect, and much later, in 2000, I decided to become a fine art photographer. After ten years of shooting from the ground, I decided to take to the air again and began shooting aerial photographs, primarily of cities. I now have three aerial books published: LA NY, Thames & Hudson, Paris From the Air, Rizzoli, and London From the Air, Rizzoli. My aerial photographs are exhibited and collected throughout the world.
I think that Brad has an amazing photographer's eye.
Using drones, he has created a unique book of photographs of swimming pools from above. This could have been a mundane subject, but in Brad’s hands, each photo is perfectly framed, sized, and cropped to reveal geometry you would not expect, reminiscent of a colorful abstract painting. What I like about his work is how he can look at a pool and find the perfect abstract detail: a sinuous curve, geometric lines, and rectangles, little bits of pool furniture, blue sparkling water combined in a way that no one else would have seen.
In Pools From Above, aerial photographer Brad Walls captures the unexpected beauty, curves, hues and textures of unique aquatic architecture from around the world.
Produced over a span of three years in four countries, this photo collection is the culmination of Walls' long journey to discover the beauty in commonplace landscapes seen from unexpected vantages.
I'm
Mitch Cullin, or so I've been told. Besides being the ethical nemesis of the
late Jon Lellenberg and his corrupt licensing/copyright trolls at the Conan
Doyle Estate Ltd., I'm also a documentary photographer, very occasional author
of books, and full-time wrangler of feral cats.
The
black-and-white images of Ralph Eugene Meatyard have long fascinated me and
informed my visual work and writing. Meatyard was, by profession, an optician
in Lexington, Kentucky, yet his personal passion was making photographs. His
subjects were his wife, children, and family friends, who he often posed in
murky settings as they wore masks and held dolls. These images are both
disquieting and euphonious, tapping into something primal that hints at the
secretive world of childhood.
Family man, optician, avid reader and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard created and explored a fantasy world of dolls and masks, in which his family and friends played the central roles on an ever-changing stage. His monograph, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, published posthumously in 1974, recorded his wife and family posed in various disquieting settings, wearing masks and holding dolls and evoking a penetrating emotional and psychological landscape. The book won his work critical acclaim and has been hugely influential in the intervening decades. Dolls and Masks opens the doors on the decade of rich experimentation that immediately preceded…
I’ve been a documentary photographer for the past 50 years and my work has been featured in major magazines in the United States and Europe including The New York Times Magazine, Life, Fortune, Geo, Time & Newsweek, and others.I have six books in print, including JAZZ with Wynton Marsalis & Nonfiction Photographs with filmmaker Errol Morris. I love teaching photography and co-founded the Essex Photographic Workshop in 1975. My work is in many collections, including The Peabody Essex Museum, The Worcester Art Museum, Polaroid Collection, Agfa Corporation, Participant Productions, Bose Corporation, Bibliotheque Nacionale, France. Solo exhibitions of my work include the Walker Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Burden Gallery.
There’s an image of a large white horse standing above a man who’s kneeling in front of him, gesturing toward the horse’s face with one hand. He is having a conversation with this horse, trying to convince him of something. It’s one of the most beautiful photographs ever! On another page is a fully feathered chicken being dried out, hanging upside down from a clothesline in what appears to be a field of wheat. It’s astonishing how beautiful this image is. Josef Koudelka is one of the great masters of photography who has taught us all how to see the mystery and awe in places we walk by every day. Through his work, Koudelka has shown me the breadth and depth that photography embraces.
About Exiles, Cornell Capa once wrote, Koudelka's unsentimental, stark, brooding, intensely human imagery reflect his own spirit, the very essence of an exile who is at home wherever his wandering body finds haven in the night. In this newly revised and expanded edition of the 1988 classic, which includes ten new images, Koudelka's work once more forms a powerful document of the spiritual and physical state of exile. The sense of private mystery that fills these photographs mostly taken during Koudelkas many years of wandering through Europe since leaving his native Czechoslovakia in 1968 speaks of passion and reserve, of…
As a reader, I’m drawn to characters and subjects I can relate to. Strong women who go their own way, ones who march to their own drummer. There is a raw honesty to their stories with subjects of creativity, grief, and loss. And as a writer of both fiction and personal essay, I write about these same issues as well, subjects I seem to turn to again and again. When I write, I try to tap into the emotions that might be buried but I’m always looking to move my readers whether it’s with tears or laughter, and the women in the books I chose do that for me.
Hold Still by Sally Mann – another memoir by an intriguing, strong-willed, fascinating woman. I became interested in Sally Mann when I first saw her book of amazing photographs of her children, Immediate Family. Since then I kept up with her photography and was thrilled to read her memoir. She writes of her childhood in the south, her parents, her relationship with her husband and children, the controversy surrounding those early stages photographs, her career, and beyond in absolutely lovely prose accompanied by many photos. She’s an impressive, talented woman, and her success is well deserved.
This National Book Award finalist is a revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann.
In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her.
Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications,…
I’ve been a documentary photographer for the past 50 years and my work has been featured in major magazines in the United States and Europe including The New York Times Magazine, Life, Fortune, Geo, Time & Newsweek, and others.I have six books in print, including JAZZ with Wynton Marsalis & Nonfiction Photographs with filmmaker Errol Morris. I love teaching photography and co-founded the Essex Photographic Workshop in 1975. My work is in many collections, including The Peabody Essex Museum, The Worcester Art Museum, Polaroid Collection, Agfa Corporation, Participant Productions, Bose Corporation, Bibliotheque Nacionale, France. Solo exhibitions of my work include the Walker Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Burden Gallery.
I own five signed copies of this book which I loan out to young photographers. The lesson in this book of documentary photographs is the irrelevance of information and the importance of emotion. In this way, Jeff’s work redefines photography by expanding the very notion of what a documentary photograph is….and can be. In 2004 Jeff was diagnosed with lymphoma. Soon afterwards Kodak discontinued the production of Kodachrome, the film his entire visual vocabulary was based on and now was gone forever. What do you do when confronted with physical and creative mortality? The Last Roll, by Jeff Jacobson, is an amazing response to this question.
"A few days before Christmas, 2004, I was diagnosed with lymphoma," writes Jeff Jacobson in his preface to The Last Roll. The NY Times LENS Blog described Jacobson as "pushing the visual boundaries of photojournalism" in this work providing a first-person depiction of a cancer patient's changing perspectives on life, death, art, and the world at-large.
A former Magnum photographer known for his quirky style, Jeff Jacobson was one of the first art photographers to use color film exclusively. For his 1991 book My Fellow Americans he traveled the country, capturing the look and mood of a decade. Over time,…
