Books by Peter Galassi
Friedlander
Lee Friedlander is one of the most important of the 1960s generation of photographers for whom the posture of disinterested objectivity served as a vehicle for passionate personal inquiries. His large body of work--he most often produces extended series of pictures on a chosen theme, then publishes them in book form--is broad in subject matter and supple and complex in style, and focuses on what he calls America's “social landscape.” At the same time, he has pursued a playful dialogue with artistic tradition--as though open-eyed curiosity about the world, and a sophisticated taste for the wiles of picture-making were one and the same thing. Lee Friedlander takes a deep critical look at Friedlander's abundantly productive career. Including over 500 photographs grouped by series, and an incisive essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, this oversized publication is the most comprehensive review of the photographer's career to date.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson: Paris Revisited
by Agnès Sire, Peter Galassi, Ann de Mondenard
This remarkable book explores the key role Paris played in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s legendary artistic career, and the way he looked at the city he lived in―and loved.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) was "the eye of the 20th century" and one of the world’s most acclaimed photographers. Paris was his home, on and off, for most of his life and the photographs he took of the city and its people are some of his most recognizable and beloved images.
In this volume are 160 photographs taken from a career lasting more than fifty years. Mostly in black and white, this selection reveals the strong influence of pioneering documentary photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) on Cartier-Bresson, and the clear visual links with surrealism that infused his early pictures. After an apprenticeship with cubist painter André Lhote in 1932, Cartier-Bresson bought his first Leica, a small portable camera that allowed him to capture the movement and rhythms of daily life in Paris. Camera in hand, Cartier-Bresson observed the Liberation from the Nazis in August 1944 from close quarters and the civil disturbances of May 1968. For decades he also thrived in capturing native Parisians going about their lives in the city, as well as photographing celebrated artists, writers, politicians, and anonymous citizens.
This collection is not only a superb portrait of Paris in the twentieth century, but a testament to Cartier-Bresson’s skill as a supreme observer of human life. 180 illustrations
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Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills
The photobook that defined a generation: 69 black-and-white photographs in Cindy Sherman’s seminal cinematic style, made between 1977 and 1980 Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.
Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.
In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.
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Brassai
by Peter Galassi, Antonio Munoz Molina, Stuart Alexander
Brassai was the first great chronicler of the urban underbelly
This sumptuous Brassai overview gathers outstanding prints of his finest and most popular photographs, drawing on the Estate Brassai in Paris and the collections of leading museums in France and the United States. The work is organized into 18 thematic groupings, such as “Paris by Night,” “Portraits” and “Self-Portraits,” “Body of a Woman,” “Graffiti,” “Places and Things,” “Pleasures” and “The Street,” focusing throughout on his celebrated depictions of 1930s Paris.
When Brassai took up photography in the late 1920s, after his move to Paris in 1924 (from his native Brassov in Austria-Hungary, via Budapest and Berlin), the photobook was blossoming as a new art form ripe for exploration. Brassai gave the genre one of its undisputed classics, Paris de nuit (1933)―the first in what is now a long line of photobooks portraying cities by night. The book was popular with both cognoscenti and tourists, and made Brassai famous; he became the first great chronicler of the urban underbelly, with images of prostitutes, gangsters, brothels and night clubs.
Today Brassai is canonical, and easily one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, as this 368-page volume―the most beautifully produced and edited survey of his accomplishment in print―amply attests.
Born Gyula Halász, Brassai (1899–1984) began his career as a sculptor, painter and journalist, forming friendships with artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jacques Prévert, Henri Michaux and Henry Miller, most of whom he later photographed. Brassaï published numerous great photobooks throughout his career, including Voluptés de Paris (1935), Henry Miller: The Paris Years (1975) and Artists of My Life (1982). The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the Art Institute in Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art in New York have all held retrospectives of his work.
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Robert Frank: In America
Because of the importance of Robert Frank's The Americans; because he turned to filmmaking in 1959, the same year the book appeared in the United States; and because he made very different kinds of pictures when he returned to still photography in the 1970s, most of Frank's American work of the 1950s is poorly known. This book, based on the important Frank collection at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, is the first to focus on that work. Its careful sequence of 131 plates integrates 22 photographs from The Americans with more than 100 unknown or unfamiliar images to chart the major themes and pictorial strategies of Frank's work in the United States in the 1950s. Peter Galassi's text presents a thorough reconsideration of Frank's first photographic career and examines in detail how he used the full range of photography's vital 35mm vocabulary to reclaim the medium's artistic tradition from the hegemony of the magazines.
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