culture

Hardcover. Germany , Steidl, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 156 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Color photographs throughout. In the early 1970s, the workers at a steel smelting factory east of Havana wrote to Fidel Castro describing their housing needs. Out of this exchange a new city called Alamar was born, conceived by the same workers who would build it and live there. Today it is abandoned; Mauro D'Agati's photographs examine its eccentric spaces.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 398 pages. From colonial times to the present, American composers have lived on the fringes of society and defined themselves in large part as outsiders. In this stimulating book Michael Broyles considers the tradition of maverick composers and explores what these mavericks reveal about American attitudes toward the arts and about American society itself.Broyles starts by examining the careers of three notably unconventional composers: William Billings in the eighteenth century, Anthony Philip Heinrich in the nineteenth, and Charles Ives in the twentieth. All three had unusual lives, wrote music that many considered incomprehensible, and are now recognized as key figures in the development of American music. Broyles goes on to investigate the proliferation of eccentric individualism in all types of American music-classical, popular, and jazz-and how it has come to dominate the image of diverse creative artists from John Cage to Frank Zappa. The history of the maverick tradition, Broyles shows, has much to tell us about the role of music in American culture and the tension between individualism and community in the American consciousness.Leer menos

Hardcover. Sydney AU, T&G PUBLISHING, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 296 pages. This is Pam's 'visual anthropology' of his engagement with various Asian cultures, where he was photographing his life and experiences.

Hardcover. Sydney AU, T&G PUBLISHING, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 296 pages. This is Pam's 'visual anthropology' of his engagement with various Asian cultures, where he was photographing his life and experiences.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages. As a prolific photographer for House Beautiful, Better Homes and Gardens, Architectural Digest, and Sunset magazine, Maynard L. Parker (1900-1976) was a pioneer in documenting residential spaces and landscapes for postwar America. His extensively published, sun-kissed brand of photography made him a critical contributor to domestic design culture from the 1940s into the 1960s. Parker's lens revealed the homes and lifestyles of affluent Americans and celebrities, including Judy Garland, Clark Gable, and Bing Crosby, as well as the interiors, gardens, and built works of Samuel Marx, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thomas Church, and Cliff May, offering an alluring template for living in a new consumer age. Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream is the first monograph to consider Parker and his work. Lavishly illustrated essays by leading scholars set Parker's photography against the backdrop of an unprecedented demographic shift, the Cold War, and a suburban society increasingly fixated on consumption.

Softcover. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. This collection of Ford's works focuses on the development of ceramic chronology-a key tool in Americanist archaeology. When James Ford began archaeological fieldwork in 1927, scholars divided time simply into prehistory and history. Though certainly influenced by his colleagues, Ford devoted his life to establishing a chronology for prehistory based on ceramic types, and today he deserves credit for bringing chronological order to the vast archaeological record of the Mississippi Valley. This book collects Ford's seminal writings showing the importance of pottery styles in dating sites, population movements, and cultures. These works defined the development of ceramic chronology that culminated in the major volume Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947, which Ford wrote with Philip Phillips and James B. Griffin. In addition to Ford's early writings, the collection includes articles written with Griffin and Gordon Willey, as well as other key papers by Henry Collins and Fred Kniffen. Clean copy in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 387 pages. Color and b&w illustrations. Leading medieval historian Nicholas Orme draws together a vast range of sources and disciplines-history, literature, religion, and art-to create a picture of medieval childhood more comprehensive than ever before. Beginning with pregnancy and childbirth, Orme explores the succeeding stages of a child's growth to adulthood. He discusses baptism, the significance of birthdays and ages, and family life, including upbringing, food, clothes, sleep, and the plight of the poor. He also chronicles the misfortunes of childhood, from disablement, abuse, and accidents to illness and death. In a fascinating review of the special culture of children, the author describes their rhymes, toys, and games; their religion and relationship to the Church; and their learning to read the literature for children. The final chapter of the book explains how adolescents grew up and entered the adult world. Mild fade to spine, front fly leaf with two small scars to black paper, otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Random House, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 339 pages. Hardcover with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout. Previous owner's embossed stamping on front-fly leaf and signature. Otherwise clean.

Softcover. Bowie MD, Heritage Books, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two softcover volumes 391 & 392 pages. Volumes 1 and 2 complete, a facsimile reprint of the 1897 edition by Lippincott. This two-volume series takes the reader on a journey through the colonies of Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Carolina, and Georgia. The charm of the journey is in its variety, as the reader passes through communities of such striking individuality that they assume the character of different nations. Each colony has a set of opinions and laws peculiar to itself, and it is not uncommon to find the laws of one in contradiction with the laws of another. This text explores the settlement and history of each colony prior to the American Revolution. Topics include development of the colonies' government, laws, religion, schools, boundaries, industries, layout of the cities, fashions, homes, social activities, slavery, architecture, interaction with the Indians, and customs. At least one prominent person from each colony is discussed, amongst them, William Penn of Pennsylvania, John Smith of Virginia, George Calvert of Maryland, and General Oglethorpe of Georgia. Light sunning ti spines.Clean copies.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, First Edition, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 464 pages. Hardcover. Ivory & light grey cloth boards with gilt titles to spine. Black & white illustrations throughout. Bright dust jacket with ligh wrinkles. Clean, unmarked copy.

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. The years from 1945 to 1985 are often identified as the moment in which Los Angeles established itself as a leading cultural center in America. However, this conception of its history entirely excludes the very controversial presence of the Mexican muralists, as well as the work of other artists who were influenced by them and responded to their ideas. It is likewise often thought that Los Angeles' Mexican culture arrived full formed from outside it, when in fact that culture originated within the city--it was in Los Angeles and Southern California that Jose Vasconcelos, Ricardo Flores Magon, Octavio Paz and other intellectuals developed the iconography of modern Mexico, while Anglos and Chicanos were developing their own. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Clemente Orozco, Alfredo Ramos Martinez and Jean Charlot made some of their earliest murals in Los Angeles, influencing the Mexican, Mexican-American and Chicano artists of the 1970s and 80s. MEX/LA: Mexican Modernism(s) in Los Angeles 1930-1985 focuses on the construction of different notions of "Mexicanidad" within modernist and contemporary art created in Los Angeles. From the Olvera Street mural by Siqueiros, to the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and the Disney silver-screen productions, to the revitalization of the street mural, up to the performance art of Guillermo Gomez-Pena, MEX/LA explores the bi-national and hybrid forms of artistic practices, popular culture and mass-media arts that have so uniquely shaped Los Angeles' cultural panorama.

Hardcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 444 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Light fading to dust jacket front. Light edgewear to dj. Black and white pictures throughout. Clean, tight copy. In 1999 Pope John Paul II proclaimed Our Lady of Guadalupe a patron saint of the Americas. According to oral tradition and historical documents, in 1531 Mary appeared as a beautiful Aztec princess to Juan Diego, a poor Indian. Speaking to him in his own language, she asked him to tell the bishop her name was La Virgen de Guadalupe and that she wanted a church built on the mountain. During a second visit, the image of the Virgin miraculously appeared on his cape. Through the centuries, the enigmatic power of this image has aroused such fervent devotion in Mexico that it has served as the banner of the rebellion against Spanish rule and, despite skepticism and anticlericalism, still remains a potent symbol of the modern nation. In Mexican Phoenix, David Brading traces the intellectual origins, the sudden efflorescence, and the theology that has sustained the tradition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Brading also documents the interaction of religion and patriotism, and describes how the image has served as a banner both for independence and for the Church in its struggle against the Liberal and revolutionary state.

Hardcover. NY, Free Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. No artist looms so large in Western consciousness and culture as Michelangelo Buonarroti, the most celebrated sculptor of all time. And no place on earth provides a stone so capable of simulating the warmth and vitality of human flesh and incarnating the genius of a Michelangelo as the statuario of Carrara, the storied marble mecca at Tuscany's northwest corner. It was there, where shadowy Etruscans and Roman slaves once toiled, that Michelangelo risked his life in dozens of harrowing expeditions to secure the precious stone for his Pieta, Moses, and other masterpieces. Many books have recounted Michelangelo's achievements in Florence and Rome. Michelangelo's Mountain goes beyond all of them, revealing his escapades and ordeals in the spectacular landscape that was the third pole of his tumultuous career and the third wellspring of his art. Eric Scigliano brings this haunting place and eternally fascinating artist to life in a sweeping tale peopled by popes and poets, mad dukes and mythic monsters, scheming courtiers and rough-hewn quarrymen. In showing how the artist, land, and stone transformed one another, Scigliano brings fresh insight to Michelangelo's most cherished works and illuminates his struggles with the princes and potentates of Carrara, Rome, and Medici Florence, who raised intrigue to a high art.

Softcover. Surrey UK, FAB Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 352 pages, b/w illustrations. The essential subterranean tract of 2005, Midnight Mavericks is a rollicking tour through the hearts and minds of today's most uncompromising artists from the lower depths of entertainment culture. Profiled are controversial underground icons, angry stand-up comedians, exploitation filmmakers, hardcore crime novelists and controversial cartoonists, including Abel Ferrara, John Waters, Andrew WK, Chris D, Mike Diana, Lydia Lunch and Jim Goad. Includes Sounds from the Underground, a bonus 70minute CD of interview excerpts and songs from the musicians featured in the book.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Smithsonian Institution Press , 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 257 pages, index, bibliography, notes, glossary, b&w illustrations. In precolonial Rwandan culture, the body and the organization of the universe were thought of in terms of the flow and blockage of fluids. Operating in a "gift economy," the king and ritual specialists regulated these fluids--milk, honey, rain, blood--thereby ensuring the health of the people and the fertility of their land and cattle. Today, much of same imagery suffuses popular healing, and many sicknesses are depicted as perturbations in the flow of bodily humors. However, not all healers adhere to the precolonial symbolic forms.Identifying a primary image schema in Rwandan popular concepts of the body and cosmology, Milk, Honey, and Money explains how specifically Rwandan forms have been affected by the culture's capitalist transformation. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 256 pages. Through a lively text and 250 stunning duotone images (most never previously published), Millionaires, Mansions, and Motor Yachts re-creates an era of opulence and extravagance that today seems incredible. Dominating this volume are the mansions and yachts of Alfred and Jessie du Pont. Equally larger-than-life personalities include Thomas Lawson, his expansive estate, Dreamwold, and yachts such as Dreamer; empire builder John Spreckels's 227-foot Venetia; Emily Cadwalader, who commissioned a vessel destined for world renown as a U.S. presidential yacht, before checkmating this achievement by ordering the largest private yacht ever built, the 407-foot Savarona; Eugene Tompkins, the "Napoleon of Theater Managers"; George Fabyan; Harry Darlington; and William Rands. Enfolded in this volume's fascinating pages are not only the wealthy individuals who shaped this era but also curmudgeonly writer/yachtsman Thomas Fleming Day, photographer Nathaniel Stebbins, and the designers and builders who created the splendid yachts that here return to life.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st English, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 131 pages. With an introduction by award-winning author Alberto Manguel, Milongas is Edgardo Cozarinsky's love letter to tango, and the diverse array of people who give it life. Argentine writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky traces [tango's] fascinating journey through time and the seedy brothels and rough Argentine and European bars where the dance could be quite mannered or could spark with theatrical violence . . . Cozarinsky takes us through the ebbs and flows of the popularity of the tango, and also through a number of its evolutionary adaptive speciations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Czech Republic, Kant, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 264 pages. Venturing across five decades of American culture, this landmark book explores how modern graphic design emerged in the United States and how it became an intrinsic feature of the country's identity. Author and design professor Christopher Long tells this story in a wholly new way, exposing many long-forgotten figures and movements and resurrecting the debates and conceptions that were integral to the new art. In a series of deeply involving portraits of American artists and innovators who helped shape the very look of the modern age, Modern Americanness offers a sweeping story of the country's visual culture and its distinctiveness across a variety of designed objects: magazine covers, food labels, event posters, chapbooks, advertisements, propaganda and much more. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. NY, Jonathan Cape /Harrison Smith, 1st, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 295 pages. Decorated cloth with black cloth spine, bright gilt lettering on spine. A French doctor's account of Chinese life & civilization, based on his twenty years of life, work & travel there; he was Director of the Imperial School of Medicine at Chengtufu. Typically patronizing and moralistic; the author credits China with having been great in the past, but now in the grip of a profound lassitude, only to be helped by Europeans. Translated from the French by Elsie Martin Jones. Previous owner's name, date on front fly leaf otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, Original black lettered cloth quarter laid on pictorial boards, 184 pages. A fascinating exploration of how photography, graphic design, and popular magazines converged to transform American visual culture at mid-century. This dynamic study examines the intersection of modernist photography and American commercial graphic design between 1930 and 1960. Avant-garde strategies in photography and design reached the United States via European emigres, including Bauhaus artists forced out of Nazi Germany. The unmistakable aesthetic made popular by such magazines as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue--whose art directors, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman, were both immigrants and accomplished photographers--emerged from a distinctly American combination of innovation, inclusiveness, and pragmatism. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 revolutionary photographs, layouts, and cover designs, Modern Look considers the connections and mutual influences of such designers and photographers as Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Herbert Bayer, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Cipe Pineles, and Paul Rand. Essays draw a lineage from European experimental design to innovative work in American magazine design at mid-century and offer insights into the role of gender in fashion photography and political activism in the mass media.

Softcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st pbk, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 410 pages. Collection of essays on the impact of global modernity in the region. Between the 1890s and 1920s, cities in the vast region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean were experiencing political, social, economic, and cultural changes that had been set in motion at least since the early nineteenth century. As the age of pre-colonial empires gave way to colonial and national states, there was a sense that a particular liberalism of culture and economy had been irretrievably lost to a more intolerant age. The book provides a comparative analysis of contested versions of the concept of modernity. The book examines not only the "high" culture of scholars and the literati, but also popular music, the visual arts, and journalism. Clean.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press , 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 192 pages, color and b&w illustrations. An extraordinary look at how the style of Piet Mondrian's abstract paintings was posthumously appropriated by 1960s fashion, Pop art, and consumer culture. Yves Saint Laurent's 1965 Mondrian dresses are among the twentieth century's most celebrated and recognizable fashions, but the context of their creation involves much more than meets the eye. In Mondrian's Dress, Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis offer a fresh approach to the coupling of Piet Mondrian's interwar paintings with Saint Laurent's couture designs by exposing the rampant merchandising and commodification that these works experienced in the 1960s. The authors situate the consolidation of Saint Laurent's fashion brand alongside the work of such Pop artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann, and show how conventional understandings of Mondrian's avant-garde abstractions were transformed by the mass circulation of his signature style. Beyond its attention to 1960s fashion, Pop art, and consumer culture, Mondrian's Dress offers critical assessments of Saint Laurent's so-called dialogue with art, the remarkable art collection that he built with his partner Pierre Berge, and the crucial role that photography plays in the marketing of couture.

Softcover. New York , Ruth Orkin Photo Archive, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 46 pages, softcover. Interview of Engel by Julia Van Haaften. Includes numerous black and white images. Like the other great photographers who made so-called "street photography" the most important genre of the medium, Morris Engel's snapshots of life on the streets have endured and outlasted all hyped-up, media-culture fads. Morris Engel was a prominent member of The Photo League, and was Navy photographer during the Second World War.

Hardcover. NY, Guggenheim Museum, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 228 pages. During the late 1960s and 70s, a paradigm shift occurred within visual culture: photography and the moving image were absorbed into critical art practices. In particular, these mediums were used to record ephemeral or performative events and to render visible conceptual systems or to question the supposed objectivity of representation itself. This volume focuses primarily on artworks from the last decade and proposes that the extensive use of reproducible mediums in today's art has its roots in an earlier formative period. By the end of the 70s, many artists turned to photography as a vehicle through which to critique photographic representation and to subvert an art system premised on the notion of the original. While this practice came to define much of the 80s postmodern art, its legacy for the 90s was essentially the license to indulge in photographic fantasy, image construction, and cinematic narrative. Artists working today freely manipulate their representations of the empirical world or invent entirely new cosmologies. They process their subject matter through conceptual systems or use digital processes to alter their images. Some directly intervene in the environment, subtly shifting components of the found world and establishing their quiet presence in it; others fabricate entire architectural environments for the camera lens. This current state of the arts and its recent history are represented via more than 150 works by 55 artists, including Nam June Paik, Kara Walker, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Fischli & Weiss, Ann Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Elger Esser, others.