Books by Sarah Hermanson Meister
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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Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light
Bill Brandt was the preeminent British photographer of the twentieth century, a founding father of photography’s modernist tradition whose half-century-long career defies neat categorization. This publication presents the photographer’s entire oeuvre, with special emphasis on his investigation of English life in the 1930s and his innovative late nudes. The Museum of Modern Art has been exhibiting and collecting Brandt’s photographs since the late 1940s, and has recently more than doubled its collection of vintage prints of his work, which forms the core of this selection. An essay by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, sets the artist’s life and work in the context of twentieth-century photographic history. With rich duotone illustrations that highlight the special characteristics of Brandt’s prints, this volume is an invaluable resource to students and scholars alike. Lee Ann Daffner, the Museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservator of Photographs, contributes an illustrated glossary of Brandt’s retouching techniques, enhancing the appreciation of Brandt’s printing processes. The book also includes a generously illustrated appendix of Brandt’s published photo-stories during the Second World War.
Bill Brandt (1904–1983) moved to London from Germany in 1934 and quickly began his investigation of British society, resulting in what would become his signature publications: The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). He continued to photograph in London throughout World War II, contributing regularly to Picture Post and Harper’s Bazaar. His postwar career expanded to include portraits and landscapes, and the celebrated series of nudes that remain his crowning achievement. His other major books include Camera in London (1948), Literary Britain (1951) and Perspective of Nudes (1961). Brandt died in London in 1983.
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Photography at MoMA: 1920 to 1960
by Quentin Bajac, Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Hermanson Meister, Lucy Gallun
An epic dive into modernist photography by the museum that helped shape its history
The history of photography has been told many times, but never before through the incomparable collection of photographs at The Museum of Modern Art. As the second volume in a set of three books that together present a new and comprehensive history of photography through works from MoMA’s collection, this publication charts the medium during the height of the modernist period, from 1920 to 1960.
Only one other volume--Looking at Photographs, published in 1973--highlights the photographic treasures of MoMA’s collection; neither Beaumont Newhall’s classic History of Photography nor John Szarkowski’s Photography Until Now used the Museum collection as a springboard to approach photography’s distinctive history. The Museum’s significant role in the development of this history, and in the construction of a canon that championed photography as an art form (but also eclipsed certain alternative or unfamiliar practices) requires a reconsidered history for the 21st century. This publication offers a fresh critical lens through which to appreciate works of exceptional significance, surprise and influence, encouraging creative new readings.
The book begins with an in-depth introduction followed by eight chapters of full-color plates, each introduced by a short essay. Masterworks by photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray and Aleksander Rodchenko appear alongside lesser-known gems, and diverse notions of modernism enrich classic interpretations, so that the beautiful fictions and messy realities of photography are complicated, refreshed and, above all, enjoyed.
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