The Best Recent Releases on Photography

© Takashi Homma

Edward Steichen Gabriele Basilico William Eggleston Acquisitions at the Whitney, Nelson-Atkins, High Debut Photo Fair Finds Strong Interest in Tokyo A Clear Picture Stieglitz the Greatest Photographer of the 20th Century? When in Basel for... Art Basel

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Takashi Homma’s elegant, understated work is inescapable in Japan, where he moves nimbly between advertising assignments, fashion shoots, architectural photography, and his own more intimate personal images. His photographs are found in every hip lifestyle magazine, and his photo books are in every bookshop. Outside Japan, he has remained something of an insiders’ secret. But the publication of Takashi Homma: Tokyo seems destined to win him a much wider international audience. The book is a kind of visual symphony that evokes the passing moods and countless facets of the city where Homma was born and continues to live. At home in the patchwork of Tokyo’s urban spaces, a connoisseur of the nuances of its quirky street culture, Homma is the perfect guide to one of Asia’s most fascinating cities.

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion: The Conde Nast Years, 1923-1937 
By William A. Ewing and Todd Brandow
Essays by Tobia Bezzola, Todd Brandow, William A. Ewing, Nathalie Herschdorfer, and Carol Squiers
(W. W. Norton & Company; New York)

In 1923, Edward Steichen, one of the leading figures of the high-art Photo-Secession movement, shocked the photography world by announcing that he had signed a contract to work for Condé Nast Publications. During the next 15 years, as the chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, Steichen largely invented modern fashion photography and celebrity portraiture, pioneering a dazzling style of studio photography that has seldom been rivaled for sheer visual seductiveness. This sumptuous volume, which contains both his iconic images and a number of lesser-known yet equally riveting photographs, is undoubtedly the ultimate collection of Steichen’s Condé Nast work of the 1920s and 1930s. It includes his Vogue photographs of the creations of fashion designers such as Chanel, Lanvin, Grès, and Schiaparelli, as well as Vanity Fair portraits of epoch-defining figures such as Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, Amelia Earhart, Paul Robeson, Noel Coward, George Gershwin, and Frank Lloyd Wright. One of the book‘s essayists, Carol Squiers, rightly calls Steichen‘s portraits “imaginative documents of glamour, talent, ego, and style.“

Secrets of Real Estate
by John Gossage 
Essay by Olivia Lahs-Gonzales
(The Sheldon Art Galleris; St. Louis) 

John Gossage learned photography from the legendary figures Lisette Model, Alexey Brodovitch, and Bruce Davidson. His innovative and exquisitely produced photo books have long had a cult following, and collectors will undoubtedly be snapping up copies of this unusual new publication, an example of digital print-on-demand technology. The book resulted from a commission by a St. Louis gallery, which invited Gossage to come to the city to make a series of new photographs. Gossage chose, typically, to wander through scruffy, nondescript neighborhoods and wounded-looking industrial areas. Many of the resulting black-and-white images have an ominous, crime-scene quality. Eerily unpopulated, they are filled with inexplicable objects that could easily pass for examples of contemporary installation art. A row of bricks lined up on the ground like dominos, for example, suggests a found Carl Andre sculpture. Brilliantly evoking the creepy small-town atmosphere found in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Gossage suggests that the “secrets” here are all out in the open.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 
Essays by Elisabeth Sussman, Thomas Weski, Tina Kukielski,
Stanley Booth, and Donna De Salvo
(Whitney Museum of Art/Yale University Press; New Haven, Connecticut)

In 1976, the then-obscure Memphis photographer William Eggleston was given the first solo show ever accorded to a color photographer by the Museum of Modern Art. Since that time, Eggleston, now 69, has continued to expand the expressive possibilities of color photography, in the process attracting legions of followers. This lavish publication (which accompanies the Whitney Museum‘s Eggleston retrospective that opens next month) is the definitive guide to his achievement. It encompasses his entire career, including such rarities as his black-and-white photographs of the late 1950s, made soon after he discovered the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. An extraordinarily prolific artist, Eggleston creates images that run the gamut from lyrical celebration to brooding irony. No other photographer can match his uncanny sensitivity to the everyday mysteries that most of us overlook.