photography portraits

Hardcover. New York, Ecco, 2nd pr., 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 734 pages, b&w illustrations. The definitive biography of the beguiling Diane Arbus, one of the most influential and important photographers of the twentieth century, a brilliant and absorbing exposition that links the extraordinary arc of her life to her iconic photographs. It is impossible to understand the transfixing power of Arbus's photographs without exploring her life. Lubow draws on exclusive interviews with Arbus's friends, lovers, and colleagues; on previously unknown letters; and on his own profound critical insights into photography to explore Arbus's unique perspective and to reveal important aspects of her life that were previously unknown or unsubstantiated. He deftly traces Arbus's development from a wealthy, sexually precocious free spirit into first, a successful New York fashion photographer and then, a singular artist who coaxed secrets from her subjects. Lubow reveals that Arbus's profound need not only to see her subjects but to be seen by them drove her to forge unusually close bonds with these people, helping her discover the fantasies, pain, and heroism within each of them, and leading her to create a new kind of photographic portraiture charged with an unnerving complicity between the subject and the viewer.

Hardcover. New York, Ecco, 2016, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 734 pages. Hardcover. B&w photographs throughout. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. David Zwirner, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards. A new collection of photographs by Diane Arbus illuminates her singular ability to enter private worlds. It brings together forty-five photographs made in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London between 1961 and 1971. Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus (1923-1971) was frequently invited into personal realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, the photographs collected in this volume convey no sense of intrusion or trespass-instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment. Arbus's desire to know people embraced a vast spectrum of humanity. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Softcover. Millerton NY, Aperture/MOMA, 1st pbk, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, (Twins on the cover). No additional printing stated indicating first softcover edition. 80 b&w plates by Arbus. Does contain the "Two girls in identical raincoats" photograph that was struck from all but a few copies due to legal controversy. Published posthumously, the year after her suicide, and in conjunction with a retrospective show at MOMA, the book was edited and designed by Arbus's daughter Doon and Marvin Israel. Diane Arbus left behind her career as a top fashion photographer and turned her attention to society's oddities and outsiders - twins, dwarves, giants, transvestites, the elderly and lonely. Her accent on these people was in no way mocking; rather, these portraits reveal her fascination with life's tragedies as destinies. Mild soil to wrappers.

Softcover. Nordlingen, Greno, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 82 pages, b&w portraits. GERMAN TEXT. Contemporary (1980s) photographic portraits of people from the St.Pauli district of Hamburg.

Softcover. Nordlingen, Greno, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 82 pages, b&w portraits. GERMAN TEXT. Contemporary (1980s) photographic portraits of people from the St.Pauli district of Hamburg. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Italy, Damiani, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 240 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Over 200 color illustrations throughout. Portraits of famous celebrities such as Jessica Alba, Gabriel Byrne, Sofia Coppola, Diane von Furstenberg, Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler, Jack McCollough, Julianne Moore and Sting, as well as landscape photographs.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 405 pages, b&w illustrations. The McLaughlin twins were trailblazing female photographers, celebrated in their time as stars in their respective fields, but have largely been forgotten since. Here, in Double Click, Carol Kino brings these two brilliant women and their remarkable accomplishments to vivid life. Frances was the only female photographer on staff in Conde Nast's photo studio, hired just after Irving Penn, and became known for streetwise, cinema verite-style work, which appeared in the pages of Glamour and Vogue. Her sister Kathryn's surrealistic portraits filled the era's new "career girl" magazines, including Charm and Mademoiselle. Both twins married Harper's Bazaar photographers and socialized with a glittering crowd that included the supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and the photographer Richard Avedon. Kino uses their careers to illuminate the lives of young women during this time, an early 20th-century moment marked by proto-feminist thinking, excitement about photography's burgeoning creative potential, and the ferment of wartime New York.

Hardcover. St. Paul MN, Minnesota Historical Society, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. 143 pages, b&w photos throughout. After serving in World War II, John Glanton returned home to Minnesota and began taking his camera around the streets, parks, clubs, restaurants, and private homes of Minneapolis, capturing the sights and scenes of everyday life for African Americans in the city. The images--from intimate portraits to public gatherings--reveal a dynamic and diverse community at a time when the nation was entering the postwar boom but before the civil rights movement had taken root. Glanton's photos offer a rare look into the lives and lifestyles of families and individuals often left out of histories of Minnesota's past, showing people at work and play, young and old, happy and sad. The images highlight black-owned businesses of the day, the music and club scene, and weddings and other family occasions to depict the experiences of African American people as presented through the lens of an African American photographer. Long forgotten in the garage of a family member, the photo negatives were recently rediscovered and digitized. A selection of 200 of the more than 800 images are featured here, along with commentary that further illuminates the lives and experiences of African Americans in postwar Minnesota.

Hardcover. NY, McGraw-Hill, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Unpaginated. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Photographs in black-and-white portray residents in the Town of Camden and Wilcox County, Alabama in the early 1970s, with accompanying text by photographer Bob Adelman and editor Susan Hall. A remarkable document by the photographer renowned for his photographic portraits of the Civil Rights Movement.

Hardcover. NY, Pointed Leaf Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. The first monograph on the work of Kenneth Paul Block, one of the most influential fashion illustrators of the twentieth century. The oversize, lavishly illustrated book chronicles Block's lifetime of drawings, watercolors, and astute observations during the artist's over 30-year career at Women's Wear Daily, powerful fashion publication. A long awaited book of astonishingly vibrant fashion and portrait drawings of swan necked beauties by a much admired fashion-insider. Mr. Block studied at The Parsons school of Design and illustrated the work of the most influential fashion designers from about the mid 20th century to the nineties before unoriginal, mediocre photography (and unskilled illustrations) completely dominated how fashion was communicated to the celebrity obsessed, style challenged, uninformed masses. With seemingly effortless ease (the energy in the art looks like it could have been sketched yesterday!), Mr. Block drew the ever changing mood of fashion from London Mod to Italian Modern, Preppy Classic to Japanese Experimental, French couture to American casual and inspired many generations of fashion enthusiasts in the process. Mr. Block's portraits showcase a few of his favorite ladies. A rare and exquisite breed who set the standard for elegance and chic for most of the 20th century. Society beauties like Mrs. Guinness, Mrs. Paley, Mrs. Guest, Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Kennedy speak of a time when grace, poise and mystery mixed with a certain sense of knowing defined a chic, stylish lady. PLEASE NOTE: The book,while clean and bright, has a mild musty smell. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY due to size and weight.

Hardcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, oblong format, in a bright dust jacket, 144 pages. B&w and color photographs by Delevingne. Focusing on Adams County in the Columbia Plateau in eastern Washington, Drylands, a Rural American Saga is a pictorial essay documenting the reality underlying our national self-portrait. Both an exception to and a paradigm of the country's agricultural folkways, Adams County offers a panorama of rolling cropland, sagebrush scree, and deep coulees formed by volcanic forces and ice-age floods. The shortage of rainfall, however, mocks the richness of the soils produced by prehistoric events. Yet as documented in these pages, the harvests of Adams County produce a significant share of the nation's food, standing as clear testimony to the skill and perseverance of those who work the land. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped, price-clipped dust jacket. Book is clean and bright with color and b&w photographs by Evelyn Hofer. "Mostly Dublin as it was, in text, as it is, in photographs. Mr. Prichett...provides a historical perspective, indeed devotes himself to this to the near exclusion of current sights. These he leaves to Miss Hofer, whose portraits of aged revolutionaries, mods, seminaries speak a thousand words, whose delineations of Mountjoy Square, the Port are exquistely etched & tinged. The Earl of Wicklow, Lord Mayne, Sean O'Faolain, the death mask of James Joyce ~ high great names; Trinity College, Kilmainham Jail ~ historical presences are here. Taking as his main theme the relations with the English, Mr. Pritchett notes that "the inevitable politics remain, but the quarrel is over." Front flap creased, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages, b&w illustrations. Photographer E. O. Hoppe journeyed to Australia in the 1930s with the goal of capturing "the true spirit" of the nation. Enthralled by the country and its people, he traveled for a year tirelessly capturing images of life in bustling cities as well as the remote interior. No other photographer had presented such a comprehensive national portrait at the time; his iconic images captured a land both wild and refined. Very good in a bright dust jacket.

Softcover. New York , Museum of Modern Art , 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Unpaginated (86 pages), maroon illustrated wrappers. This is an album of early photographs taken of the New York red light district around 1912 by Bellocq. Friedlander took prints from the original plates for this book and they provide a fascinating documentary on bordellos at this interesting time in history. Reputedly never taking 'dirty' pictures of the girls, Bellocq confined his endeavors to recording for posterity these ladies in both clad and unclad poses. The foreword takes the form of a conversation between Friedlander and Dan Leyrer, who was also a photographer and a contemporary of Bellocq.

Hardcover. NY, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2019, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. For some 70 years, Leo Goldstein's East Harlembodyof work remained mostly untouched and unseen.The silver gelatin prints were catalogued in 2016,and a selection is gathered here for the first time.The photographs were taken over a number of years,beginning in 1949 when Goldstein was a memberof the Photo League.The East Harlem corpus, edited by Regina Monfort,represents an important and unique addition to thephotographic history of New York City. Because thereare no negatives in existence, it was of particularimportance to preserve the images in book form andmake them available to the public.The selected images reflect the postwar years in theEast Harlem community, which would grow intoa center of Puerto Rican culture and life in the U.S.From the families portrayed gathering on stoops, tothe kids at their shoeshine stations, to youths playingball in the streets, to posters on neighborhood walls,Goldstein's images of East Harlem provide a windowinto the socio-economic, cultural, and politicallandscape of the time.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages, illustrated with color, b&w photos throughout. A visual biography of Edie Sedgwick, 60's fashion and film icon. Like new in an acetate dust jacket.Model, film star, socialite, friend, lover, addict, Edie Sedgwick was the first "it" girl of the Andy Warhol Factory scene and later muse to Bob Dylan. The arc of Edie's life traced the rise and fall of the 1960s from idyllic experimentation to dissolute recklessness. After being toasted by the whole of New York City, Edie died alone of a drug overdose in California at the age of 28. David Weisman (with John Palmer) filmed Edie for the last five years of her life in his cult film Ciao! Manhattan. When he recently uncovered lost footage of Edie, David was inspired to create Edie: Girl on Fire, a book and a documentary film that explores Edie's true story. He and coauthor Melissa Painter have tracked down and interviewed many of Edie Sedgwick's surviving intimates, including Danny Fields, Baby Jane Holzer, and Ultra Violet. They also unearthed hundreds of never-before-published photos portraits, professional ad shoots, and heartbreaking snapshots of the girl who won New York's heart and nearly burned down the Chelsea hotel. The book also features a CD with Edie's last interview ever, a riveting account of a rollercoaster life.

Hardcover. NY, Merrell, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. Over the course of his fifty-year career, American photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) blazed a path into Photo-Modernism rendering portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and nudes. In 1902, a sixteen-year-old Weston took up photography in Highland Park, Illinois, where he worked as an amateur for five years. In 1907, at the age of twenty-one, Weston moved to Tropico, California, now the city of Glendale in Los Angeles County, where he constructed his first studio and set about with great purpose to become a photographic artist. Examining Weston's earliest sharp- and soft-focus photographs reveals that the young artist had already formed a perfect sense of composition that was to be the hallmark of his later work. Presenting Weston's earliest work from a recently discovered family album, Edward Weston: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist compares the artist's naive first artistic efforts with his latest masterworks to show the persistence and evolution of his singular vision to find essential form in the vernacular with an ever-increasing intensity. As a young man deeply intuitive and original in his creative expression, Edward Weston demonstrates that his teenage work, beginning with his amateur snapshots, embrace the same significant form as the later work for which he is now considered a master.

Hardcover. New York, Aperture, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 96 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs by Edward Weston. Clean, bright copy. Among some of the portraits are D.H. Lawrence, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Orozco, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Fonda, James Cagney, Stravinsky, E.E. Cummgs and many distinctive nudes. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY OTTO on the title page. This captivating novel opens in 1917 as Cymbeline Kelley surveys the charred remains of her photography studio, destroyed in a fire started by a woman hired to help take care of the house while Cymbeline pursued her photography career. This tension-- between wanting and needing to be two places at once; between domestic duty and ambition; between public and private life; between what's seen and what's hidden from view--echoes in the stories of the other seven women in the book. Among them: Amadora Allesbury, who creates a world of color and whimsy in an attempt to recapture the joy lost to WWI; Clara Argento, who finds her voice working alongside socialist revolutionaries in Mexico; Lenny Van Pelt, a gorgeous model who feels more comfortable photographing the deserted towns of the French countryside after WWII than she does at a couture fashion shoot; and Miri Marx, who has traveled the world taking pictures, but also loves her quiet life as a wife and mother in her New York apartment. Crisscrossing the world and a century, Eight Girls Taking Pictures is an affecting meditation on the conflicts women face and the choices they make. These memorable characters seek extraordinary lives through their work, yet they also find meaning and reward in the ordinary tasks of motherhood, marriage, and domesticity. Most of all, this novel is a vivid portrait of women in love--in love with men, other women, children, their careers, beauty, and freedom.

Hardcover. Boston, Bulfinch/Little Brown, reprint, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket with a tiny chip to the front panel. Edited by Doris C. O'Neil. Features an introduction by Bryan Holme. An attractive collection of 141 duotones from this famous photographer who spent much of his storied career working for Life magazine.

Hardcover. Milan, Sei Swann, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Illustrated throughout with full-page color portrait plates, many folding. Slim folio, black cloth, d.w. First Sei Swann edition. A fine copy in a fine dust wrapper. An interesting book with photographs taken of people looking at themselves in a mirror -- they could not see the photographer or the camera.

Softcover. NY, Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 135 pages, b&w illustrations. Photographs taken in 1956 show Elvis Presley on the road, in rehearsal, backstage with fans, and in concert. A treasure trove of rare Presley photographs shot by Atlanta photographer Jay B. Leviton, who was on assignment for Collier's magazine during August, 1956. Leviton's unrestricted access to Elvis produced first-rate candids, portraits and concert sequences of Elvis's early triumphant years. 130 photographs. Introduction by Kurt Loder. Clean copy.

Hardcover. US, Glitterati, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 272 pages. In his debut book of photography, with a foreword by one of the luminaries of NYC culture and entertainment, Adrian Buckmaster's monograph presents a staggeringly beautiful collection of portraits - a cross-section of humanity in all of its glorious diversity, from the ordinary to the extraordinary and everything in-between. Having spent his early years shooting commercial beauty and fashion, Buckmaster soon shifted focus to more personal projects, challenging conventional notions of beauty and celebrating the eccentricities of those whom society might classify as "misfits." Echoes of Buckmaster's early career remain, in the form of exquisite costuming, make-up, and scenic design. Despite an element of performance, there is an undeniable rawness to these portraits, in which subjects are both aware of the camera's gaze and sympathetically self-conscious, robing and disrobing, revealing and concealing. Buckmaster's photographic genius is encapsulated in his uncanny ability to fastidiously art direct while simultaneously stripping away layers of formality and convention. Arranged in three movements: Imposing, Revealing, and Inventing, this collection progresses from traditional portraiture to increasingly intimate portrayals, as subjects expose, create, and invent themselves. Included in this endlessly varied spectrum of characters are Burlesque performers, families, brides, lovers, and all manner of tattoos and body piercings. There are classical reclining nudes, reminiscent of Edouard Manet's Olympia or Titian's Sleeping Venus, dancers with incredible physical strength and dexterity, women costumed as peacocks and geishas, a contortionist inside a trunk, even a green-skinned man, bejewelled like an Indian deity.