Books by Lincoln Kirstein
The Classic Ballet: Basic Technique and Terminology
by Lincoln Kirstein, Muriel Stuart
“For soundness, for clarity, for succinctness, this manual of basic ballet is the best there is anywhere.”
–Edwin Denby, The Nation
With a precision unparalleled in any other book of its kind, The Classic Ballet presents a lucid text, and nearly six hundred drawings describe and illustrate in minute detail the proper body position, balance point, movement, and attitude of each position and step in the basic classical repertory.
As George Balanchine wrote in his preface: “There are no shortcuts to great dancing, but what is necessary to remember and unalterable in its instruction may be found in this book . . . An admirable source of reference for the highest standard of practice.” It is an invaluable tool for the student or teacher of ballet–as well as a must-have treasure for the balletomane.
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Walker Evans: American Photographs: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition
by Lincoln Kirstein, Sarah Hermanson Meister
A 75th-anniversary facsimile edition of one of the most significant photobooks ever published More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the images of essential America that we have long since accepted as fact, and his work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film and visual arts in other mediums. The original edition of American Photographs was a carefully prepared letterpress production, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Evans that captured scenes of America in the early 1930s. As noted on the jacket of the first edition, Evans, “photographing in New England or Louisiana, watching a Cuban political funeral or a Mississippi flood, working cautiously so as to disturb nothing in the normal atmosphere of the average place, can be considered a kind of disembodied, burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers.” This seventy-fifth anniversary edition of American Photographs, made with new reproductions, recreates the original 1938 edition as closely as possible to make the landmark publication available for a new generation. American Photographs has fallen out of print for long periods of time since it was first published, and even subsequent editions--two of which altered the design and typography of the book in small but significant ways--are often available only at libraries and rare bookstores. This version, like the fiftieth-anniversary edition produced by the Museum in 1988, captures the look and feel of the very first edition with the aid of new digital technologies.
Walker Evans (1903–1975) took up photography upon his return to New York in 1927, following a year in Paris when his aspiration to become a writer withered in the shadow of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Joyce. In 1935, Evans was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to photograph the effects of the Great Depression in the Southeast. During this time he took many of the photographs that appeared in his collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a book which has become a defining document of that era. Evans joined the staff of Time magazine in 1945 and shortly thereafter became an editor at Fortune, where he stayed for the next two decades. In 1964, he became a professor at the Yale University School of Art, where he taught until his death in 1975.
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Walker Evans: American Photographs: Books on Books No. 2
by Lincoln Kirstein, John Hill
Walker Evans' American Photographs is widely deemed the most important photobook ever published. Originally conceived to be a catalogue to accompany his one-man show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 (the first solo show MoMA had given to a photographer), it quickly became a document so definitive of its era that curator John Szarkowski wrote that "it was difficult to know now whether Walker Evans recorded the America of his youth, or invented it." The book opens with images that cite photography, immediately establishing a tension between medium and message, although it is certainly for the message that Evans has become famous: American Photographs points over and over again to the unhappy lot of the poor and the dispossessed in 1930s America. Lincoln Kirstein's accompanying essay (famous in its own right) declares: "What poet has said as much? Only newspapers, the writers of popular music, the technicians of advertising and radio have, in their blind energy accidentally, fortuitously, evoked for future historians such a powerful monument to our moment. And Evans' work has, in addition, intention, logic, continuity, climax, sense and perfection." American Photographs continues to go out of print for long stretches of time, and the first edition of Errata's 2009 spread-by-spread reprint followed suit. This revised edition of that volume presents the original 1938 edition with its 87 legendary black-and-white photographs (reproduced in full-page rather than quarter-page spreads), the classic Kirstein essay and a contemporary essay by Evans scholar John T. Hill.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Walker Evans (1903-1975) took up photography in 1928. His book collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which portrayed the lives of three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Depression, has become one of that era's most defining documents. Evans joined the staff of Time magazine in 1945, and shortly after moved to Fortune, where he stayed until 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography at the Yale University School of Art. Evans died at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975.
The Errata Editions' Books on Books series is an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to students and photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints or facsimiles but complete studies of the original books. Each volume in the series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or expensive for most to experience. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series spans the breadth of photographic practice as it has appeared on the printed page and allows further study of the creation and meanings of these great works of art. Each volume in the series contains illustrations of every page in the original photobook, a new essay by an established writer on photography, production notes about the creation of the original edition and biographical and bibliographical information about each artist.
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