Books by Colin Westerbeck
Vivian Maier: The Color Work
The first definitive monograph of color photographs by American street photographer Vivian Maier.
Photographer Vivian Maier’s allure endures even though many details of her life continue to remain a mystery. Her story—the secretive nanny-photographer who became a pioneer photographer—has only been pieced together from the thousands of images she made and the handful of facts that have surfaced about her life. Vivian Maier: The Color Work is the largest and most highly curated published collection of Maier’s full-color photographs to date.
With a foreword by world-renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz and text by curator Colin Westerbeck, this definitive volume sheds light on the nature of Maier’s color images, examining them within the context of her black-and-white work as well as the images of street photographers with whom she clearly had kinship, like Eugene Atget and Lee Friedlander. With more than 150 color photographs, most of which have never been published in book form, this collection of images deepens our understanding of Maier, as its immediacy demonstrates how keen she was to record and present her interpretation of the world around her.
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Irving Penn: A Career in Photography
Now available in paperback
Irving Penn’s photographs have become iconic documents of an erafrom his fashion and commercial editorials to his series of nudes and portraits of artists, musicians, writers, celebrities, and tribesmen of New Guinea, Peru, and Morocco. Originally published in 1997 to accompany an exhibition celebrating the Irving Penn Collection and Archives at the Art Institute of Chicago, this book examines Penn’s remarkable and wide-ranging career and his uncompromising artistic vision. With nearly 200 captivating photographs that span the entire scope of his artistic productionincluding poetic portraits of Cecil Beaton, Marcel Duchamp, Arshile Gorky, Elsa Schiaparelli, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Truman Capotethe book features essays by distinguished scholars and reflections by individuals who have known him well or collaborated with him. They also discuss Penn's particular genius for demonstrating how a profound and humane art can be created at the center of a society increasingly dominated by and enthralled with mass media.
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Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A Tale of Two Cities
by Colin Westerbeck, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Arata Isozaki, Fuminori Yokoe, Art Institute of Chicago
Although he is a Japanese photographer who has lived in Tokyo for more than 45 years, Yasuhiro Ishimoto received his art education in the late 1940s and early 1950s at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he studied under Harry Callahan. Ishimoto's photographs of Chicago document a period of profound social, political, and racial change and record the character of the city from its lakefront beaches and downtown streets to its South Side neighborhoods. Ishimoto returned to Japan in 1953 and began a documentation of Tokyo. In his work, Tokyo and Chicago have become sister cities in the personal vision of an artist whose patience as a photographer and tenacity of observation have enabled him to produce the extraordinary body of work evident in such books as Someday Somewhere and Chicago, Chicago. He has also produced two books on Katsura villa, another on flowers, and several others on Japanese subjects.Large as is the range of Ishimoto's tale of two cities, in recent years another side of his sensibility has come to the fore in very subtle studies of rotting leaves, footprints in snow, cloud formations, and wind-ruffled water at his feet. Now 77, Ishimoto is revealing a meditative dimension that has brought him recognition as a Person of Cultural Distinction in Japan and serious regard worldwide for his artistic achievements.
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Unseen Ansel Adams
by Colin Westerbeck, Ian Westwell
During his prolific 60-year career, the godfather of American photography captured iconic images for the Sierra Club and National Park Service, wrote best-selling books, campaigned for the environment, and even took President Jimmy Carter’s official White House portrait. Even so, these make up only a portion of Ansel Adams’s portfolio. These rare photographs in The Unseen Ansel Adams come from the celebrated collection of the University of California. During the 1960s, Adams spent time chronicling the university’s campuses, including images of Berkeley’s majestic campanile, Santa Cruz’s ferny forests, Santa Barbara’s pristine coastline, and UCLA’s stern chancellor. Photography aficionados will certainly appreciate this fresh look at a master’s lesser-known work. Spreads feature beautiful black-and-white photographs that are rich in detail and texture, showcasing Adams’s unmistakable style. Though best known for his photographs of nature, Ansel Adams saw beauty in many forms, including many man-made structures like the modern architecture of UCSD and aerial shots of Los Angeles’s famous freeways. An avid environmentalist, Adams spent his career documenting the wonders of the natural world. See regal eucalyptus groves, sculptural cacti, rocky valleys, and lacy fungus through Adams’s eyes in remarkable photographs he took while on a tour of California. Adams continues to influence contemporary photographers, while enthusiasm for his work keeps growing.
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Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself: A Lifetime Retrospective
by Colin Westerbeck, Joel Meyerowitz
Where I Find Myself is the first major single book retrospective of one of America's leading photographers. It is organized in inverse chronological order and spans the photographer's whole career to date: from Joel Meyerowitz's most recent picture all the way back to the first photograph he ever took. The book covers all of Joel Meyerowitz's great projects: his work inspired by the artist Morandi, his work on trees, his exclusive coverage of Ground Zero, his trips in the footsteps of Robert Frank across the US, his experiments comparing color and black and white pictures, and of course his iconic street photography work. Joel Meyerovitz is incredibly eloquent and candid about how photography works or doesn't, and this should be an inspiration to anyone interested in photography.
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