Judaic Studies

Retrospective of a legendary photographer who turns 100 in 2012. Accompanying exhibitions at Camerawork, San Francisco and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Eve Arnold's interest in photography started late with a photo-finishing job in New York City in 1946. A member of Magnum Photos, her list of assignments were a mix of politics, social issues, travel, and current events, with a little glamour thrown in.

Enduring icons of American culture, the car and the highway remain vital as auguries of adventure and discovery, and a means by which to take in the country's vast scale. Lee Friedlander is the first photographer to make the car an actual "form" for making photographs.

First published in France in 1958, then the United States in 1959, Robert Frank's The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In eighty-three photographs, Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians, and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just his subject matter - cars, jukeboxes, and even the road itself - that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally, and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative.

Stephen Shore is one of the photographers who established colour photography as a legitimate medium of artistic expression. American Surfaces is one of the bodies of work which exemplifies why.

A longstanding photobook classic, and the work for which New York photographer is best known, The Ballad of Sexual Dependencyis a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends and lovers collectively described by Goldin as her “tribe.”

"Joanne Leonard will play an important role in the history of 20th-century culture, art, and photo history for her daring and innovative subject matter . . . her complex and multi-layered works address women's life narratives, twinship, dementia, miscarriage, parenting, and the stages and conditions of female subjectivity." --Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds

Gay Block began photographing her mother, Bertha Alyce, in 1973 and continued until Bertha Alyce's death resulting from a stroke in 1991. This collection of Block's photographs (sections of which involve nudity) presents her complicated, and at times difficult, relationship with her mother and a mother-daughter quest for healing. This intensely personal and intimate account could easily be a reflection of any family today. Essays by Eugenia Parry, author of Crime Album Stories: Paris 1886-1902, and Kathleen Stewart Howe, curator of the University of New Mexico Museum, accompany the photographs. To complete the presentation, the award-winning DVD "Bertha Alyce" is included (28 minutes in length).

In 1968, just before Easy Rider roared its way into American consciousness, Danny Lyon published The Bikeriders. A seminal work of modern photojournalism, this landmark collection of photographs and interviews documents the abandon and risk implied in the name of the gang Lyon belonged to: the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club.

Leonard Freed (1929-2006) was inspired to capture the African American experience while he was in Berlin in 1962 to photograph the building of the Berlin wall. He noticed a black soldier standing in front of the wall and was struck by the fact that this soldier was ready to defend America abroad, while at home African Americans were facing their own battle for civil rights.

Documents the resilience and power of the multiracial humanity that American photographer Builder Levy experienced in the city streets of New York during these decades. At that turbulent time, people around the world were struggling for freedom and independence and throughout United States people were marching in the streets for improving their life conditions. This exhaustive monograph gathers pictures that Levy took during the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam protests in the 1960s, the peace march that was held in 1962 in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis; the poverty-ravaged Brooklyn of the 1960s, 70s and 80s; the inner city communities where he was a New York City teacher of at-risk adolescents for 35 years; Martin Luther King at Reception in 1968 after the W.E.B. Du Bois Centennial Tribute at Carnegie Hall where he gave the keynote speech; and marches and demonstrations in support of the Freedom struggle; for a NYC civilian review board and to stop police killings; for quality education for all NYC children, and against NYC school segregation.

Originally published in 1979, "Cape Light" became an instant classic and one of the most influential photography books published in the latter part of the 20th century. Common scenes -- tiny figures on a beach, a porch railing against a storm-darkened sky, a blue raft against a summer cottage -- all are transformed by the poignant light of the Cape and the photographer's subtle and luminous vision. This exquisitely printed book captures every nuance of color and light in that unique juncture of sky, sea, and land that is Cape Cod.

This is a book of photographs depicting the way of life photographer Merry Alpern discovered and then documented in the winter of 1993-4. From an open window of an apartment in Wall Street, the two tiny windows of an after-hours sex club opposite could be seen.

This is a reprint of the immensely successful Early Color (2006), which presented Leiter's remarkable body of colour work to the public for the first time in book form. Although Edward Steichen had exhibited some of Leiter's colour photography at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, it remained virtually unknown to the world thereafter.

The definitive account of the life and work of Richard Avedon, to accompany a major retrospective of the photographic work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Timing, skill, and talent all play an important role in creating a great photograph, but it is perhaps the most basic, primary element - the photographer's eye - which is most crucial. In The Eyes Of The City Richard Sandler not only showcases decades-worth of his strong eye for street photography, but also the eyes of his subjects as he catches them looking into his camera at just the right moment. From 1977 to September 11th 2001, Richard regularly walked through Boston and New York City, encountering all that the streets had to offer.

Mitch Epstein was 48 and living in New York when his mother called him about the fire. On a windy August night in 1999, two 12-year-old boys had broken into a boarded-up apartment building owned by Epstein's father in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and, just for the hell of it, set it ablaze. The fire had spread, engulfing a nineteenth-century Catholic church, then a city block.

Photographer Lauren Greenfield capures often shocking, always startling images of children at school, at play, or at home in the precocious city of Los Angeles. The stunning color photographs range from the children of the gang culture of South Central and East L.A. to the affluent, often show-business world of the Westside.

Gillian Laub's photographs of her family from the past twenty years, now collected in one volume, explore the ways society's biggest questions are revealed in our most intimate relationships. Family Matters zeroes in on the artist's family as an example of the way Donald Trump's knack for sowing discord and division has impacted communities, individuals, and households across the country. As Laub explains, "I began to unpack my relationship to my relatives-which turned out to be much more indicative of my relationship to the outside world than I had ever thought, and the key to exploring questions I had about the effects of wealth, vanity, childhood, aging, fragility, political conflict, religious traditions, and mortality." These issues became tangible in 2016, when Laub and her parents found themselves on opposing sides of the most divisive presidential election in recent US history; and further exacerbated in the lead-up to the 2020 election, in the wake of a global pandemic and protests in support of Black Lives Matter.

In 'Girl Culture', Lauren Greenfield combines a photojournalists sense of story with fine-art composition and color to create an astonishing and intelligent exploration of American girls. Her photographs provide a window into the secret worlds of girls social lives and private rituals, the dressing room and locker room, as well as the iconic subcultures of the popular clique: cheerleaders, showgirls, strippers, debutantes, actresses, and models. With 100 hypnotic photographs, 20 interviews with the subjects, and an introduction by foremost historian of American girlhood Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Greenfield reveals the exhibitionist nature of modern femininity and how far it has drifted from the feminine ideologies of the past.

Leipzig (b.1918) has been photographing on the streets of New York for 50 years. Here are 90 b&w photos from the 1940s and 1950s, presented with some brief captions, conveying both the particulars and the universals of the time and place.

A visual and verbal study of 140 years and five generations of Jewish culture in Wyoming.

This is a completely new and revised edition of William Klein's classic New York photographs. Selected by Klein himself, it includes many photographs never previously published nor exhibited. The original edition of the work, published in 1956, has been out of print for over 20 years and is now a collector''s item fetching prices of up to $500 per copy.

A small dimly lit apartment with chipped paint and damaged tiles provides the backdrop to this remarkable family history. From inside her humble home, photographer Arlene Gottfried has documented the three women in her family in a project spanning decades.

Photographs, Richard Nagler ; introduction & commentary by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Weegee was among the first to fully realize the camera's unique power to capture split-second drama and exaggerated emotion.

"I don't have two lives," Annie Leibovitz writes in the Introduction to this collection of her work from 1990--2005. "This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it."

An intriguing visual memoir that is also an exploration of the all-American family, both as a reality and a construct.

Portraits of rich and poor people living in America are accompanied by their handwritten comments on their lives.

In this, Plachy's most complex and personal book to date, we are asked to reconsider ideas of self-portraiture and going home again. In 1956, in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution, Plachy and her parents escaped into Austria carrying only a small valise.

Forget the jokes about late '70s South Beach being the Yiddish-speaking section of "God's Waiting Room"; yes, upward of 20,000 elderly Jews made up nearly half of its population in those days--all crammed into an area of barely two square miles like a modern-day shtetl. But these New York transplants and Holocaust survivors all still had plenty of living, laughing and loving to do, as strikingly portrayed in Shtetl in the Sun, which features previously unseen photographs documenting South Beach's once-thriving and now-vanished Jewish community.

Photographs show dances, birthday parties, graduation parties, graduation ceremonies, baptisms, weddings, debutante balls, dinner parties, gallery openings, and nightclubs.

Before gentrification, New York City was a gritty and inspiring place. And in its midst was Arlene Gottfried, whose eye for the sublime caught it all. Sometimes Overwhelming, her second powerHouse Book, is a manic yet romantic ode to the people of New York City in the 1970s and 80s. From Coney Island to a Hasid at Riis Beach's nude bay to the disco nights of sexual abandon and the children in the original Village Halloween parade, Sometimes Overwhelming is a delightfully lighthearted look at the most outrageous people you might ever see.

Gathers photographs of runaway children living in the streets of Seattle and includes their comments on how they live.

Bruce Davidson's groundbreaking Subway, first published by Aperture in 1986, has garnered critical acclaim both as a documentation of a unique moment in the cultural fabric of New York City and for its phenomenal use of extremes of color and shadow set against flash-lit skin.

"A Way of Seeing" is the late Helen Levitt's classic presentation of New York street photography accompanied by an incisive essay by the influential journalist, novelist, poet, screenwriter, and film critic James Agee.

Where I Find Myselfis 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.