With uncompromising directness, Avedon portrayed his subjects against a white background, with no extraneous details to distract from the essential specificity of face, gaze, dress, and gesture. This challenging innovation, coupled with the artist's intense interest in his subjects and mastery of his craft, resulted in mesmerizing portraits-among them Truman Capote, Willem de Kooning, Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, and Marilyn Monroe, as well as the uncelebrated Americans of his project, "In the American West"-that rival the greatest works in the portrait tradition.

see Richard Avedon American Masters Special DVD Title

E. J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits
E.J. Bellocq
original publication: 1970, Museum of Modern Art (Little Brown & Company)
reprint: 1996, Random House Inc.
9.75" x 11", 33 plates, 88 pgs.

Photographs from the New Orleans Red Light District, Circa 1912. Preface by Lee Freedlander, Edited by John Szarkowski.

These reproductions were made by Lee Freedlander from the original glass plates. The reproductions in the book are outstanding.

It's Complicated
The American teenager
Robin Bowman
2007, Umbrage Editions, 160 pp
List price: $40.00

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Foreword by Malcolm Rogers, 150 duotone plates - soft bound.
Karsh: A Biography In Images is a full revision of the 1996 60-year retrospective of his work and brings that popular catalogue back into print in an affordable paperback format. This new edition covers the photographer's career with greater breadth than its previous incarnation, adding works from his early experiments and his photojournalism commissions in Canada. Karsh's reputation as one of the most sought-after portrait photographers of the 20th century is well established. A roll call of his subjects is a veritable who's who of the modern age--Winston Churchill, Jacqueline Kennedy, Pablo Picasso, Walt Disney, Elizabeth Taylor and Albert Einstein, to name just a few--and this book features many of these figures, in some of the most recognized images of our time. But added to the portraits are a number of lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs--early figure studies, atmospheric views of the Ottawa theatre and scenes of wheat fields, city streets and factories across Canada. With its long autobiographical essay and extensive captions for each photo, many of them new to this edition, Karsh: A Biography In Images is both an elegant celebration and an indispensable overview of a life lived in photography.

Yousuf Karsh: Heroes of Light and Shadow,
Yousuf Karsh
2001, Stoddart Publications,
240 pgs.
(out of print, used copies available)

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 "The first collection of the extensive and superlative work realized by Mary Ellen Mark in the United States, Mary Ellen Mark is composed of many previously unpublished images, as well as photographs from several of her best-known projects. From "Streetwise" to "The Damm Family," Mary Ellen Mark includes the most iconic images from these groundbreaking stories, as well as powerful, never-before-seen photographs Mark accomplished in subsequent years. She makes a deeply felt commitment to her subjects, and her empathy and humanity come through in every image. ..."

Redheads
Joel Meyerowitz
1991, Rizzoli
11.5" x 9.75"
(out of print, used copies available)

Redheads available as softbound editions - List price: $25.00

Arnold Newman,
Arnold Newman
2000, Taschen America
13.14" x 10.78", 276 pgs.
List price: $39.99

"... His career began in 1941 but took off in 1946, when he moved to New York and received his first commission from Life magazine--a portrait of Eugene O'Neill in his library--and then from Harper's Bazaar--the portrait of Igor Stravinsky, all piano with the musician in the corner of the frame. Since then he has constructed an immaculate, cosmopolitan oeuvre that has captured the essential of its subject better than most others, from Piet Mondrian and his rigid easel to Max Ernst in a cloud of smoke and Surrealist objects, from Marcel Duchamp with a ready-made backdrop to Leonard Bernstein in an empty concert hall, from Woody Allen scribbling notes to Joan Miró smiling like Puck. And here they all are, a wonderful cast of artist, poets, scientists, and other characters, alongside an interview with the photographer and a thoughtful essay on his work.

Edited by Pierre Bonhomme, Michael Juul Holm and Lars Schwander.~Foreword by Poul Erik Tøjner.~Introduction by Pierre Borhan.~Afterword Lars Schwander.

"The Brown Sisters presents a photographic project as compelling in effect as it is simple in conception: four women, 25 years. Each year since 1975 photographer Nicholas Nixon has made a group portrait of his wife and her three sisters facing the camera in the same order: Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie. The series now measures a quarter century in the lives of the sisters, who in 1975 ranged in age from 15 to 25; each picture is dense with allusions to the year of experience that separates it from the one before."

 People With AIDS,
Nicholas Nixon
1991, David R. Godine
8.73" x 9.64", 168pgs.
(out of print, used copies available)

This is a reprint from the original artist's book published as a limited edition in 1970.

"There is an expression that if one were to stand at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan, everyone you know would eventually pas by. Ken O'Hara'sONE follows that concept. Shot in the mod 1960s on the streets of New York, it is a compelling visual meditation on mankind. O'hara's full bled images study those small things that make mankind unique. Stripped down to essentials, each page is eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair. Each page shows both the human mask and what lies beneath it. What is expressed in the mouth? What are eyes saying? Each page is a visual equation and a riddle to which you will consistently return" - from the book jacket

Male of the Species, Four Decades of Photography of Arthur Tress,
Arthur Tress
1999, Fotofactory
10.5" x 10.5"
List price: $60.00

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Edward Weston Portraits is the first published collection of Edward Weston's most revealing portraits and shows the artist at his most inspired: "rendering the very substance, the deeper inner image" of sons, lovers, friends, and fellow artists with such commanding immediacy that they linger in the mind's eye long after viewing."