Here are 100 books that Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia fans have personally recommended if you like
Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia.
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Growing up in the 1970s, I loved my family’s cheap plastic Polaroid OneStep camera and the magic pictures that developed right before my eyes. Thirty years later, I was incredibly lucky to be the first researcher to get access to the Polaroid archive just as the company was going bust. For me, the key to Polaroid photography is that it is fun, and all the books on my list are, in one way or another, about the lighter, playful side of photography. I hope that they take you off the beaten track of the history of popular photography and into some quirky and interesting corners.
I wish I’d written this book. I’ve always been fascinated by instructional guides for amateur photographers and the rules they set out to get a ‘good picture.’ I’ve followed many of these rules myself over the years, but what this great book shows is that the rules are constantly changing.
What made a good picture in 1930 is not the same as in 1950 or 1970. This book tells this story in fifty short and punchy chapters, and it has great pictures on virtually every page.
A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital.
We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a "good picture"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly-and happily-outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles.…
Growing up in the 1970s, I loved my family’s cheap plastic Polaroid OneStep camera and the magic pictures that developed right before my eyes. Thirty years later, I was incredibly lucky to be the first researcher to get access to the Polaroid archive just as the company was going bust. For me, the key to Polaroid photography is that it is fun, and all the books on my list are, in one way or another, about the lighter, playful side of photography. I hope that they take you off the beaten track of the history of popular photography and into some quirky and interesting corners.
When I was writing my book on Polaroid photography, people often asked me about Polaroid as an art form. I gave some examples but said there’s so much more to it than that. I’m interested in the ways that photography isn’t just something we look at but something that makes things happen, changing who we are, what we do, and where we go.
This book shows us how much more there is to photography than art. I especially like how the book does this in short, stylish essays, introducing lots of different voices and perspectives, including photographers, curators, scientists, publishers, writers, and anthropologists.
Photography Changes Everything-drawn from the online Smithsonian Photography Initiative-offers a provocative rethinking of photography's impact on our culture and our lives. It is a reader-friendly exploration of the many ways photographs package information and values, demand and hold attention, and shape our knowledge of and experience in the world. At this transitional moment in visual culture, Photography Changes Everything provides a unique opportunity to better understand the history, practice, and power of photography. The publication harnesses the extraordinary visual assets of the Smithsonian Institution's museums, science centers, and archives to trigger an unprecedented and interdisciplinary dialogue about how photography does…
Growing up in the 1970s, I loved my family’s cheap plastic Polaroid OneStep camera and the magic pictures that developed right before my eyes. Thirty years later, I was incredibly lucky to be the first researcher to get access to the Polaroid archive just as the company was going bust. For me, the key to Polaroid photography is that it is fun, and all the books on my list are, in one way or another, about the lighter, playful side of photography. I hope that they take you off the beaten track of the history of popular photography and into some quirky and interesting corners.
These days, you take a picture and see it right away, but when I started taking snapshots, I’d shoot a roll of film, take it down to the photo developer, and wait a day or two to get my snaps back. They always came in a photo wallet, and opening it was a big part of the ritual of finding out how my pictures turned out.
I also used the wallet to store them and still have lots of them from the 1990s and early 2000s. Annebella Pollen’s great little book takes me back to that time and shows me the evolution of those wallets over almost a hundred years, and the care that went into designing them.
Growing up in the 1970s, I loved my family’s cheap plastic Polaroid OneStep camera and the magic pictures that developed right before my eyes. Thirty years later, I was incredibly lucky to be the first researcher to get access to the Polaroid archive just as the company was going bust. For me, the key to Polaroid photography is that it is fun, and all the books on my list are, in one way or another, about the lighter, playful side of photography. I hope that they take you off the beaten track of the history of popular photography and into some quirky and interesting corners.
I’ve always loved the portraits the photographer Félix Nadar made of nineteenth-century Parisian celebrities such as Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.
I went to this book—Nadar’s memoir—to learn more about the making of those pictures. There is a little bit of that, but what really gripped me was the weird and wonderful shaggy dog stories Nadar tells about his adventures in ‘aerostatic photography’—taking pictures from balloons.
The first complete English translation of Nadar's intelligent and witty memoir, a series of vignettes that capture his experiences in the early days of photography.
Celebrated nineteenth-century photographer—and writer, actor, caricaturist, inventor, and balloonist—Félix Nadar published this memoir of his photographic life in 1900 at the age of eighty. Composed as a series of vignettes (we might view them as a series of “written photographs”), this intelligent and witty book offers stories of Nadar's experiences in the early years of photography, memorable character sketches, and meditations on history. It is a classic work, cited by writers from Walter Benjamin to…
I have created art from an early age. Years later, my studies in civil engineering allowed me to combine my love for the arts with my belief in an orderly world. Meanwhile, reading and writing have always been my favorite pursuits. While collaborating as an editor with other authors, assisting them in their writing endeavors, in 2014, I wrote and published my first book. Sharing my writing on Instagram gave birth to the idea of my first poetry book, something like, published in 2018. Since then, two more poetry collections have been published: A TriAngle in 2019 and something like in reverse in 2020.
I love the way Lauren Eden describes everything about a relationship, from its beginning to its end, through her verses.
The love and heartbreak are presented realistically and vividly. I felt as if I had participated in this relationship until its very end.
Only an artist who knows how to use precise and precious (for this theme) words can create a masterpiece that you want to reread when you need it the most.
Of Yesteryear is a collection of poetry that effortlessly transcribes the chaos of the never ending battle between head and heart. In her debut, Lauren Eden’s succinct and beautiful observations of human nature and its gains and losses will lead readers to understand their own journey in love and self discovery - now, and of yesteryear.
I’m a Sydney, Australia born sociologist and writer and back in 1990 I hitchhiked through the UK, travelled in Europe and arrived in Turkey just as the Gulf War was starting. After three months in the country I was hooked. I now live in Istanbul and write about the people, culture, and history. Using my less than perfect Turkish language skills I uncover the everyday extraordinary of life in modern Istanbul even though it means I’ve accidentally asked a random stranger to give me a hug and left a butcher convinced I think Turkish sheep are born with their heads on upside down.
I’m always seeking to learn more about Istanbul’s multicultural past and Kuzguncuk, on the Asian side of Istanbul, is an area rich in history. The leafy streets and community vegetable garden are now extremely popular with Turkish hipsters, but Mills looked behind the surface by doing an incredible amount of research and conducting fascinating interviews with residents, to bring the past into the present. Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and Turks have always lived together here and in Streets of Memory their individual stories, ethnic histories, and differing memories are carefully woven together to create a deeply nuanced, complex picture of Istanbul.
In this study of Kuzguncuk, known as one of Istanbul's historically most tolerant, multiethnic neighborhoods, Amy Mills is animated by a single question: what does it mean to live in a place that once was--but no longer is--ethnically and religiously diverse? ""Turkification"" drove out most of Kuzguncuk's minority Greeks, Armenians, and Jews in the mid-twentieth century, but they left behind potent vestiges of their presence in the cityscape. Mills analyzes these places in a street-by-street ethnographic tour. She looks at how memory is conveyed and contested in Kuzguncuk's built environment, whether through the popular television programs filmed on location there…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
I am an art historian and was professor of art history at MIT, Tufts, Harvard, and elsewhere. As an undergraduate I studied Jewish history and philosophy and subsequently was assistant editor at Schocken Books focusing on art history and history of ideas. My graduate work was in art history, first in medieval manuscripts and then 19th century French art. I’ve written four books, edited four others, and made 30 documentaries, mostly on art. The French government knighted me “Chevalier dans l’ordre des arts et des lettres.”
I met Svetlana in the last two years of her life and was deeply impressed by her brilliance in literature and the history of ideas and cultures. She died, tragically, in her mid 50s cutting short her extraordinary career, from childhood and youth in Soviet Russia to her stellar career as a Harvard professor of comparative literature. Of her seven books, this highly original study of nostalgia has been particularly important.
A ground breaking study about longing in its positive and negative forms, focusing on post-communist cities such as St. Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin, and writers Nabokov, Brodsky, and Kabakov. Erudite, brilliant, and witty, this is a great cross-genre study of our modern condition.
Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Svetlana Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities-St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.
I’m sure we all remember some of the first books we picked up, and how they’ve stayed with us despite every year that ticked away. These were stories that didn’t just resonate with us as kids; a part of them lasted—transcended age and periodic experiences. I love books that you can reach for no matter how old you are, with lessons and stories that can be enjoyed by anyone. My own writing is a reflection of that: timeless tales that bridge the gap between adolescence and adulthood, hoping to touch hearts with a spectrum of knowledge in science, myth, and philosophy.
I think every reread of this book unveils another layer to its complexity. The Little Prince is a classic tale that will mean different things to different people—a mesmerizing journey to wide-eyed children, a reminder of the world’s fragility to adults, and a longing for nostalgia by those grown who may have had their innocence stripped away early. The first time I read it, I was swept away by the pictures and pretty words, and yet still, there was an ache in my heart that only later, on my next read, did I truly understand. But every reader can feel it; the beauty and grief for a place or time we may never return to.
In 2000 Harcourt proudly reissued Antoine de Saint-Exupery's masterpiece, The Little Prince, in a sparkling new format. Newly translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Howard, this timeless classic was embraced by critics and readers across the country for its purity and beauty of expression. And Saint-Exupery's beloved artwork was restored and remastered to present his work in its original and vibrant colors. Now Harcourt is issuing uniform full-color foreign language editions. The restored artwork glows like never before. These affordable and beautiful editions are sure to delight an entire new generation of readers, students, children, and adults for whom Saint-Exupery's…
First, I'm a woman and I'm inspired by women from the past who overcame the rules of the day in which they lived. It doesn’t matter where they lived, or what they tried to overcome, but to have bucked the patriarchal system and achieved some measure of success, is phenomenal. Second, I became inspired by silent film star Marion Davies, and I wrote a book about it. I never intended to write historical fiction. My first book was a memoir about sailing to Tahiti at fourteen with my father and two sisters. But life has a funny way of directing us where we need to go. Here I am: inspired by women from the past!
How would you feel to inherit your family business (the Post cereal company) but not be able to run it? I’d be infuriated.
Here is the story of one of the richest women in the country who needed to marry so her husband could have a seat on the board. But men in the early 1900s did not abide women on the Board of Directors of any corporation.
Learn how Marjorie Post navigates the world trying to find love and be true to her father’s dream.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Marvelous . . . I just had to be there with the Post cereal heiress through every twist and turn.”—Martha Hall Kelly, New York Times bestselling author of Lilac Girls
“New-money heiress Marjorie Post isn’t content to remain a society bride as she remakes herself into a savvy entrepreneur, a visionary philanthropist, a presidential hostess, and much more.”—Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Rose Code
Mrs. Post, the President and First Lady are here to see you. . . . So begins another average evening for Marjorie Merriweather Post. Presidents have come and gone,…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
I’ve always been fascinated by the American counter-culture and its promise to change society, be it with radical lifestyles, drugs, or creating new cultural settings. I was going to study this from a more sociological approach until I discovered the history of the psychedelic movement and its promise to create a new society by reforming American individuals from within. Although I wound up becoming more interested in what the counter-culture actually achieved rather than dwelling on its excesses, I am currently working on a new book project that will shed light on an organization that managed to achieve both.
This is a collection I have constantly gone back to over the years and is probably my all-time favorite in the history of the counter-culture. I love the blend of rigorous research and easy reading, as well as the breadth of topics and diversity of approaches.
It is replete with thoughtful analyses and eloquent descriptions of the counter-culture, without ever giving in to the nostalgia of era or condemning it for that has gone wrong since. A great starting point if you want a good overview of the history of the American counter-culture.
Amidst the recent flourishing of Sixties scholarship, Imagine Nation is the first collection to focus solely on the counterculture. Its fourteen provocative essays seek to unearth the complexity and rediscover the society-changing power of significant movements and figures.
