biography photography

Softcover. Philadelphia, Quirk, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 270 pages. The man. The movies. The life. The legend. Hes played a deranged grounds keeper, a bellowing lounge singer, a paranormal exterminator, and a grouchy weatherman. He is William James Bill Murray, Americas greatest national treasure. From his childhood lugging golf bags at a country club to his first taste of success on Saturday Night Live, from his starring roles in Hollywood blockbusters to his reinvention as a hipster icon for the twenty-first century, The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray chronicles every aspect of his extraordinary life and career. Hes the sort of actor who can do Hamlet and Charlies Angels in the same year. He shuns managers and agents, and he once agreed to voice the lead in Garfield because he mistakenly believed it was a Coen Brothers film. Hes famous for crashing house parties all over New York Cityand if he keeps photo bombing random strangers, he might just break the Internet. Part biography, part critical appreciation, part love letter, and all fun, this enormous full-color volume, packed with color film stills and behind-the-scenes photography, chronicles every Murray performance in loving detail, recounting all the milestones, legendary Murray stories, and controversies in the life of this enigmatic performer. Like-new condition.

Hardcover. GR, Steidl, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Sid Grossman (1913-55) and his work were largely forgotten after his untimely death in 1955. Labeled as a communist by the FBI after the war, his hard-earned reputation as a free-thinking photographer quickly fell into oblivion for the rest of the century and beyond. Grossman was one of the founders of the famous New York Photo League and a notoriously demanding and capricious teacher who always challenged his students. This monograph, the first comprehensive survey of Grossman's life and work, contains more than 150 photographs that demonstrate Grossman's enduring talent. The images range from his early social documentary of the late 1930s to the more personal, dynamic street photography of the late 1940s, as well as later experiments with abstraction in both black and white and color. It features an essay by renowned historian Keith F. Davis, and concludes with excerpted transcripts from recordings of a course Grossman taught in 1950.

Softcover. Rochester NY, George Eastman House, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 127 page book with 40 black & white and color images by Stieglitz. Essays by Eugenia Parry, Laura Downey and Therese Mulligan. A complete illustrated catalog in rear of the collection O'Keeffe left to George Eastman House in 1951.

Softcover. NY, Carroll & Graf, Softcover, 500 pages. A twentieth-century photographer, artist, writer and designer for more than fifty years, Cecil Beaton was at the center of the worlds of fashion, society, theater and film. This book brings together for the first time the never-before-published diaries from 1970 to 1980 and, unlike the six slim volumes of diaries published during his lifetime, these have been left uniquely unedited. Hugo Vickers, the executor of Beaton's estate and the author of his acclaimed biography, has added extensive notes that are as lively as the diary entries themselves. Here is the photographer for British and American Vogue, designer of the sets and costumes for the play and film My Fair Lady and the film Gigi, with a cast of characters from many worlds, at shooting parties in the English countryside, on yachts, at garden parties at Buckingham Palace, at costume balls in Venice, Paris or London. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Carroll & Graf, Softcover, 500 pages. A twentieth-century photographer, artist, writer and designer for more than fifty years, Cecil Beaton was at the center of the worlds of fashion, society, theater and film. This book brings together for the first time the never-before-published diaries from 1970 to 1980 and, unlike the six slim volumes of diaries published during his lifetime, these have been left uniquely unedited. Hugo Vickers, the executor of Beaton's estate and the author of his acclaimed biography, has added extensive notes that are as lively as the diary entries themselves. Here is the photographer for British and American Vogue, designer of the sets and costumes for the play and film My Fair Lady and the film Gigi, with a cast of characters from many worlds, at shooting parties in the English countryside, on yachts, at garden parties at Buckingham Palace, at costume balls in Venice, Paris or London. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Crown Publishing, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Charting the course of her remarkable life and career, MacLaine shares both early memories (her childhood with her brother, Warren Beatty; her decision to leave for New York City at age sixteen; her early work dancing on Broadway) as well as remembrances of her days in the public eye (campaigning for George McGovern, traveling to meet political luminaries, starring in legendary film roles, and developing an interest in spirituality). Along the way, readers gain greater insight into figures such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bob Fosse, Jack Nicholson, the Dalai Lama, Fidel Castro, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and many more. Whether she's sharing what advice Elvis Presley asked her for, how she consoled close friend Elizabeth Taylor after the death of her husband, or which head of state she discussed UFOs with, MacLaine offers her most visual and delightful book yet, giving readers an unprecedented glance into a life like no other. Profusely illustrated in b&w from her personal photo collection. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, E. P. Dutton, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt decoration, in a bright dust jacket with light edgewear, chipping, short closed tears. A collection of 74 color and black and white photographs by Bischof taken all over the world. Part biography, part celebration of the work of the great Swiss photographer and member of Magnum, who had been killed in a road accident five years before. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, E. P. Dutton, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt decoration, in a bright dust jacket with light edgewear, chipping, short closed tears. A collection of 74 color and black and white photographs by Bischof taken all over the world. Part biography, part celebration of the work of the great Swiss photographer and member of Magnum, who had been killed in a road accident five years before. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 736 pages. A rich and revelatory biography of one of the crucial cultural figures of the twentieth century. Lincoln Kirstein's contributions to the nation's life, as both an intellectual force and advocate of the arts, were unparalleled. While still an undergraduate, he started the innovative literary journal Hound and Horn, as well as the modernist Harvard Society for Contemporary Art--forerunner of the Museum of Modern Art. He brought George Balanchine to the United States, and in service to the great choreographer's talent, persisted, against heavy odds, in creating both the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet. Among much else, Kirstein helped create Lincoln Center in New York, and the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut; established the pathbreaking Dance Index and the country's first dance archives; and in some fifteen books proved himself a brilliant critic of art, photography, film, and dance. This stunning biography, filled with fascinating perceptions and incidents, is a major act of historical reclamation. Utilizing an enormous amount of previously unavailable primary sources, including Kirstein's untapped diaries, Martin Duberman has rendered accessible for the first time a towering figure of immense complexity and achievement.

Hardcover. US, North Point Press, 1st, 1998-05-01, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 376 pages, b&w photos. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. A memoir of her life in the 1930s and 1940s with photographer Edward Weston, by his wife at the time, and sometimes model, Charis Wilson. 86 photographs throughout. including many previously unpublished family pictures, photographs by friends, and many of Weston's own extraordinary images.

Softcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st pbk, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 296 pages, b&w illustrations. The apt subtitle of this award-winning biography, Photographer & Revolutionary, sums up the creative tensions that characterized Tina Modotti's life and brief photographic career. Active as a photographer for only nine years, Modotti was pulled between formal and social concerns. Producing striking modernist compositions of everyday objects, photojournalism of poverty and conflict, and portraits of celebrities and common people alike, Modotti balanced political concerns with formal rigor.First published in 1993 and long out of print, Tina Modotti: Photographer & Revolutionary is the definitive portrayal of Modotti's life and work. Few photographers are more deserving of a biographical treatment than Modotti, whose work as an actress and artist's model introduced her to Edward Weston, who was to become her lover. Soon after she arrived in Mexico City with Weston, Modotti became increasingly politicized, working for the communist newspaper El Machete and establishing herself as the go-to photographer for the Mexican Muralist movement. The book includes extensive archival material, interviews with Modotti's contemporaries and many rare photographs. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Phaidon Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, Hardcover, photographs and afterword by Ferdinando Scianna. 124 pages; full-page duo-toned b&w plates throughout; 10 x 12.5 inches. Biography, bibliography. Since he began taking photographs in the 1960s, journalist and Magnum photographer Ferdinando Scianna has been fascinated by the sight of sleepers. Over four decades Scianna has captured thousands of images of people and animals sleeping in the countryside, in cities, in deserts, on street corners, in moving trains, and in their own homes.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st US, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 287 pages, b&w illustrations. From the construction of the Berlin Wall through every major conflict of his adult lifetime up to the Syrian Civil War, photographer Don McCullin has left a trail of iconic images. Unreasonable Behavior traces the life and career of one of the top photojournalists of the twentieth century and beyond. Born in London in 1935, McCullin worked as a photographer's assistant in the RAF during the Suez Crisis. His early association with a North London gang led to the first publication of his pictures. As an overseas correspondent for the Sunday Times Magazine beginning in 1966, McCullin soon became a new kind of hero, taking a generation of readers beyond the insularity of post-war domestic life through the lens of his Nikon camera. He captured the realities of war in Biafra, the Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the human tragedy of famine and cholera on the Bangladesh border and later, the AIDs epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. McCullin now spends his days in a Somerset village, where he photographs the landscape and arranges still-lifes. Harrowing and poignant, Unreasonable Behavior is an extraordinary account of a witness who triumphed over the memories that could have destroyed him.

Hardcover. New York, Rizzoli , 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 280 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Valentina was the twentieth century's first American fashion designer celebrity, working and living on equal social footing with the clientele she dressed (Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Katharine Hepburn, Millicent Rogers, and Audrey Hepburn, among others). One of the few designers who proved that America could live without the Parisian haute couture, her career is a much needed missing link in the history of American fashion. Beyond merely turning out show-stopping evening gowns, Valentina's exotic beauty, dramatic personality, and incomparable style earned her a legendary reputation. Kohle Yohannan explores the carefully constructed persona and lore of this designer who helped define American Couture. Published in association with the Museum of the City of New York's exhibition Valentina: New York Couture and the Cult of Celebrity, this book includes photographs, never-before-seen personal ephemera, sketches, and original platinum prints from master photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, and George Hoyningen-Huene.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. This lavishly illustrated book establishes the towering influence of the scientist Victor Regnault (1810-1878) in the earliest decades of photography, a period of experimentation ripe with artistic, commercial, and scientific possibility. Regnault has a double significance to the early history of photography, as the first leader of the Societe Francaise de Photographie (S.F.P.) and as the maker of more than two hundred calotype (paper negative) portraits and landscapes. His photographic and scientific careers intersected a third field with his appointment in 1852 as director of the Sevres porcelain works.Readers are treated to Regnault's own beguiling pastoral, garden, and forest scenes; striking portraits of the scientists and artists in his circle of friends; quirky images of acoustic experiments; and an insider's view of the Sevres porcelain works. Regnault's richly varied photographs also encompass perhaps the most extensive group of family portraits in early photography, and his romanticized landscapes reflect a moment when the rural outskirts of Paris were being aggressively suburbanized and industrialized.

Hardcover. NY, Atria Books, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 368 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. The definitive biography that unlocks the remarkable story of Vivian Maier, the nanny who lived secretly as a world-class photographer, featuring nearly 400 of her images, many never seen before, placed for the first time in the context of her life. Vivian Maier, the photographer nanny whose work was famously discovered in a Chicago storage locker, captured the imagination of the world with her masterful images and mysterious life. Before posthumously skyrocketing to global fame, she had so deeply buried her past that even the families she lived with knew little about her. No one could relay where she was born or raised, if she had parents or siblings, if she enjoyed personal relationships, why she took photographs and why she didn't share them with others. Now, in this definitive biography, Ann Marks uses her complete access to Vivian's personal records and archive of 140,000 photographs to reveal the full story of her extraordinary life. Based on meticulous investigative research, Vivian Maier Developed reveals the story of a woman who fled from a family with a hidden history of illegitimacy, bigamy, parental rejection, substance abuse, violence, and mental illness to live life on her own terms. Left with a limited ability to disclose feelings and form relationships, she expressed herself through photography, creating a secret portfolio of pictures teeming with emotion, authenticity, and humanity. With limitless resilience she knocked down every obstacle in her way, determined to improve her lot in life and that of others by tirelessly advocating for the rights of workers, women, African Americans, and Native Americans. No one knew that behind the detached veneer was a profoundly intelligent, empathetic, and inspired woman--a woman so creatively gifted that her body of work would become one of the greatest photographic discoveries of the century.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, reprint, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 362 pages, 16 pages of b&w illustrations. Who was Vivian Maier? Many people know her as the reclusive Chicago nanny who wandered the city for decades, constantly snapping photographs, which were unseen until they were discovered in a seemingly abandoned storage locker. They revealed her to be an inadvertent master of twentieth-century American street photography. Not long after, the news broke that Maier had recently died and had no surviving relatives. Soon the whole world knew about her preternatural work, shooting her to stardom almost overnight. But, as Pamela Bannos reveals in this meticulous and passionate biography, this story of the nanny savant has blinded us to Maier's true achievements, as well as her intentions. Most important, Bannos argues, Maier was not a nanny who moonlighted as a photographer; she was a photographer who supported herself as a nanny. In Vivian Maier: A Photographer's Life and Afterlife, Bannos contrasts Maier's life with the mythology that strangers-mostly the men who have profited from her work-have created around her absence. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 160 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to boards. Color and black and white pictures throughout. Originally born in Algeria, Yves Saint Laurent moved to Paris when he was 18, and only three years later he was handpicked by Christian Dior to take the reins as designer of his fashion house. Over time, Saint Laurent resurrected haute couture from the casual mores that predominated in the 1960s, but also offered chic cachet to ready-to-wear clothing. He was among the earliest of designers to incorporate non- European references into his work, and in 1983 he became the first living designer to be feted with a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Vogue on Yves Saint Laurent is a stellar volume in the series from the editors of British Vogue, featuring 20,000 words of original biography and history and studded with more than 80 images from their unique archive of images taken by leading photographers.

Hardcover. New York, Norton, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 458 pages, b&w illustrations. Sam Wagstaff, the legendary curator, collector, and patron of the arts, emerges as a cultural visionary in this groundbreaking biography. Even today remembered primarily as the mentor and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, the once infamous photographer, Wagstaff, in fact, had an incalculable-and largely overlooked-influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century. Born in New York City in 1921 into a notable family, Wagstaff followed an arc that was typical of a young man of his class. He attended both Hotchkiss and Yale, served in the navy, and would follow in step with his Ivy League classmates to the "gentleman's profession," as an ad executive on Madison Avenue. With his unmistakably good looks, he projected an aura of glamour and was cited by newspapers as one of the most eligible bachelors of the late 1940s. Such accounts proved deceiving, for Wagstaff was forced to live in the closet, his homosexuality only revealed to a small circle of friends. Increasingly uncomfortable with his career and this double life, he abandoned advertising, turned to the formal study of art history, and embarked on a radical personal transformation that was in perfect harmony with the tumultuous social, cultural, and sexual upheavals of the 1960s.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 358 pages, b&w photos. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 358 pages, b&w photos. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcocer in a bright dust jacket, 257 pages plus 143 b&w pages of photographs in the front of the book. Walker Evans (1903-75) was a great American artist photographing people and places in the United States in unforgettable ways. He is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, addressing the Great Depression, but what he actually saw was the diversity of people and the damage of the long Civil War. In Walker Evans, renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers explores how Evans made his distinctive photographs. Delving into a lavish selection of Evans's work, Alpers uncovers rich parallels between his creative approach and those of numerous literary and cultural figures, locating Evans within the wide context of a truly international circle. Alpers demonstrates that Evans's practice relied on his camera choices and willingness to edit multiple versions of a shot, as well as his keen eye and his distant straight-on view of visual objects. Illustrating the vital role of Evans's dual love of text and images, Alpers places his writings in conversation with his photographs. She brings his techniques into dialogue with the work of a global cast of important artists--from Flaubert and Baudelaire to Elizabeth Bishop and William Faulkner--underscoring how Evans's travels abroad in such places as France and Cuba, along with his expansive literary and artistic tastes, informed his quintessentially American photographic style.

Hardcover. New York , Basic Books, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 651 pages, landmark biography of photographer Walker Evans, once labeled a propagandist, but in reality, was an observer of the true nature of things. Based on unrestricted access to all of Evan's diaries, letters, work logs and contact sheets as well as the diaries of Lincoln Kirstein. Clean copy in an unclipped dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, PowerHouse Books, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 263 pages. Personal history and intimate memoir by the wife of the great American artist. 50 duotone photographs and over a dozen by Walker Evans. Storey's memoir of her ten-year marriage to Walker Evans, is the story of an elegant young woman's infatuation with a great American artist--with the man himself, with what he stood for aesthetically, and with his artistic and social circle--and how her initial passion gradually cooled into disenchantment. Isabelle and Walker were married in 1960. Evans, already a prominent figure in the world of photography, introduced Isabelle to Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Robert Penn Warren, Alfred Kazin, William H. Whyte, and a host of other luminaries. Clean copy.