Showcase 500 Beaded Jewelry: Photographs of Beautiful Contemporary Beadwork (500 Series)

Showcase 500 Beaded Jewelry: Photographs of Beautiful Contemporary Beadwork (500 Series) Review

Today, a large community of highly skilled beaders creates work that's every bit as much art as craft. This gorgeous book showcases 500 images of the world's best contemporary beaded jewelry, produced by 275 artists whose work is notable for exceptional technical expertise, innovative combinations, and sheer beauty. Beaders of all levels will find much to admire--and inspire--in these pages.

 

The extraordinary international roster of accomplished designers includes:

Diane Fitzgerald  *  Ingeborg Vandamme *  Helena Tang-Lim  *  Felieke van der Leest  * 
Marcia DeCoster  *   Paulette Baron  *  Kira Seiden  *  Sherry Serafini  *  Melanie Potter  * 
Jamie Cloud Eakin  *  Sabine Lippert  *  Wayne Robbins  *  Kyunghee Kim  *  Katharina Eder  * 
Tamuna Lezhava  *  Veronica Jonsson  *  Margie Deeb  *  Jean Power  *  Amy Katz  *  
Jean Campbell  *  Ann Tevepaugh Mitchell  *  Nancy Cain  *  Laura McCabe  *  Rachel Nelson-Smith *  Eva Dobos  *  Huib Petersen  *  Carol Wilcox Wells  * as well as many talented but lesser-known artists!

 

 

Broken Things (Faded Photograph Series)

Broken Things (Faded Photograph Series) Review

An old photograph prompts Allison Drake Littenberg to return to Chicago and mend fences with family members and friends, particularly Jack Callahan, the handsome cop she left back in 1969. Now, 30 years later, Jack is bitter from bad decisions and a nasty divorce. Even so, Allie prays that God will use her own broken past to touch his life – and the life of a dying, abused, and disheartened woman who, Allie realizes, is the key to unlocking the answers to decades of questions.

The Tenth Photograph

The Tenth Photograph Review

Ten photographs on an old roll of film in storage, and once you look at them your life changes forever.

Following a crushing breakup, Lionel David plans to dig up an old manuscript to fill the hole left in his life and stumbles across the photos—photos spanning the length of the universe, taken by someone or something out in the cosmos that has been watching him since birth.

Three days later, having accepted the fate with which the photos present him, he persuades his begrudging ex to meet him for coffee. As their relationship draws to its conclusion and the two carry out their final moments together, the true nature of the photographs is gradually brought to light.

This is a short story approximately 3,000 words in length.

Playboy: 50 Years: The Photographs

Playboy: 50 Years: The Photographs Review

Playboy celebrates its 50th anniversary with this lavish collection of the very best of the magazine's photography. More than 250 full-color photographs, chosen from the ten million images preserved in the Playboy archive, chronicle five decades of brilliant, life-affirming art. Playboy: 50 Years revisits the girl next door, the sex symbols, and the gods and goddesses who shaped our culture. It visually tracks the changing politics, fashions, and mores through the frenzied peak of the sexual revolution and beyond - from the almost nostalgic eroticism of the 50s bachelor, a martini his secret of seduction, to the highly charged images of modern sexuality. Celebrity models such as Raquel Welch and Cindy Crawford, along with interview subjects such as Mohammed Ali and Salvador Dali, and infamous bunnies such as Anna Nicole Smith and Pamela Anderson reveal all. Portfolios devoted to the bachelor pad, the perfect cocktail, fashion, and sports cars celebrate Playboy as the ultimate wish book. From the history-making red velvet shot of Marilyn Monroe, "posed with nothing on except the radio," to the highly charged images of such masters as Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton, this book is a breath-taking photographic tour de force. The definitive gift of the season, Playboy: 50 Years is also the only book being published in the fall to coincide with the launch of the magazine's 50th anniversary.

Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums

Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums Review

Photographs have had an integral and complex role in many anthropological contexts, from fieldwork to museum exhibitions. This book explores how approaching anthropological photographs as 'history' can offer both theoretical and empirical insights into these roles. Photographs are thought to make problematic history because of their ambiguity and 'rawness'. In short, they have too many meanings. The author refutes this prejudice by exploring, through a series of case studies, precisely the potential of this raw quality to open up new perspectives.

Taking the nature of photography as her starting point, the author argues that photographs are not merely pictures of things but are part of a dynamic and fluid historical dialogue, which is active not only in the creation of the photograph but in its subsequent social biography in archive and museum spaces, past and present. In this context, the book challenges any uniform view of anthropological photography and its resulting archives. Drawing on a variety of examples, largely from the Pacific, the book demonstrates how close readings of photographs reveal not only western agendas, but also many layers of differing historical and cross-cultural experiences. That is, photographs can 'spring leaks' to show an alternative viewpoint. These themes are developed further by examining the dynamics of photographs and issues around them as used by contemporary artists and curators and presented to an increasingly varied public.

This book convincingly demonstrates photographs' potential to articulate histories other than those of their immediate appearances, a potential that can no longer be neglected by scholars and institutions.

Stanley Kubrick: Drama & Shadows: Photographs 1945?1950

Stanley Kubrick: Drama & Shadows: Photographs 1945?1950 Review

Born in New York City in 1928, Stanley Kubrick began taking photographs when in high school. At sixteen, he sent a photograph he took of a newsstand after President Roosevelt's death to Look Magazine. The publication of the photograph marked the beginning of Kubrick's work for the magazine, which lasted until 1950, when Kubrick made his first 16mm documentary film. During those five years Kubrick completed dozens of photographic reportage assignments in New York City as well as abroad. The resulting thousands of negatives have remained in the archives of Look Magazine ever since Kubrick's photographs vary in subject, but people are the central focus of attention, as is his commitment to narration. Whether capturing the meditative state of passengers in a series of portraits made in the New York subway, following famous boxer Rocky Graziano on the ring and in intimate moments, portraying the coming of age of socialite Betsy Von Furstenberg, or narrating the tale of a shoe-shine boy in the streets of New York City, Kubrick draws psychological portraits that combine drama, irony, and often mystery, anticipating his trademark cinematic style If Kubrick's photographs are fascinating accounts of life in the late 1940s, they are also a major contribution to American photography of that era. At nineteen, Kubrick already had an immense talent in constructing complex compositions in which camera positioning and lighting played a crucial role The book is introduced by an essay by Rainer Crone, who also edited the selection of photographs for this book. Crone is an expert on Kubrick's photographic work, and has already published a catalogue on this subject. An art historian, he gives context and examines Kubrick's photographs in relation to not only his later films but also the history of twentieth-century art and photography. An invaluable contribution to the history of photography, this book explores how one of the most influential and successful film directors of our time used photography to master visual techniques and cultivate his signature style.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)

Timothy H. O'Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) Review

Clarence King's Survey, undertaken between 1867 and 1872, covered a vast swath of terrain, from the border of California eastward to the edge of the Great Plains. It was the first survey to include a full-time photographer—Timothy O'Sullivan—who produced about 450 finished photographs in large-format and smaller-format stereographs. O'Sullivan's images convey a distinct individual quality of perception, at once direct and laconic, as well as a perfect union of objective fact and personal interpretation. As such, O'Sullivan remains the most admired, studied, and debated photographer who worked on the great western surveys of the 19th century.

This handsome and enlightening book aims to enrich and enlarge our understanding of O'Sullivan's pivotal body of western photographs by emphasizing the idea of context. This ambition encompasses several frames of reference: O'Sullivan's best-known images in relation to his larger body of survey work; the function his photographs served in relation to the survey's overall goals and methodologies; and the King Survey itself as a logical part of a complex and prolonged expeditionary endeavor. The volume also includes an essential catalogue raisonné of O'Sullivan's King Survey work.