Ansel Adams’ Yosemite: The Special Edition Prints

Yosemite has been a topic of shooting for me this year. Ansel Adams is famous for shooting images of the first national park in the United States.

In the late 1950s, Adams selected eight photographs of Yosemite National Park to offer exclusively to park visitors as affordable souvenirs. He hoped that these images might inspire tourists to become activists by transmitting to them the same awe and respect for nature that Yosemite had instilled in him. Over the following decades, Adams added to this collection to create a stunning view of Yosemite in all its majesty.

These photographs, the Yosemite Special Edition Prints, form the core of this essential volume. Adams’ luminous images of Yosemite’s unique rock formations, waterfalls, meadows, trees, and nature details are among the most distinctive of his career. Today, with America’s public lands increasingly under threat, his creative vision remains as relevant and convincing as ever.

Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective

Celebrated American artist Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976) enjoyed a long career as a photographer, creating a large and diverse body of work that underscored her unique vision, versatility, and commitment to the medium. An early feminist and inspiration to future generations, Cunningham intensely engaged with Pictorialism and Modernism; genres of portraiture, landscape, the nude, still life, and street photography; and themes such as flora, dancers and music, hands, and the elderly.

Edward Weston

Few photographers have created such a legacy as Edward Weston (1886–1958). After a decade of successfully making photographs with painterly soft-focus techniques, he became the driving figure behind a group of West Coast artists dubbed Group f/64, which pioneered the sharp, precise school of “Straight Photography.” With that stylistic leap, Weston’s career moved into high gear, creating photographs of extraordinary sensual realism, perfectly poised between compositional stillness and searing intensity.

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

We all know Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos―the Migrant Mother holding her child, the shoeless children of the Dust Bowl―but now renowned American historian Linda Gordon brings them to three-dimensional life in this groundbreaking exploration of Lange’s transformation into a documentarist. Using Lange’s life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, Gordon masterfully re-creates bohemian San Francisco, the Depression, and the Japanese-American internment camps. Accompanied by more than one hundred images―many of them previously unseen and some formerly suppressed―Gordon has written a sparkling, fast-moving story that testifies to her status as one of the most gifted historians of our time.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer

Reproduced in exquisite black and white, the images in this book range from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s earliest work in France, Spain, and Mexico through his postwar travels in Asia, the US, and Russia, and even include landscapes from the 1970s, when he retired his camera to pursue drawing. While his instinct for capturing what he called the decisive moment was unparalleled, as a photojournalist Cartier-Bresson was uniquely concerned with the human impact of historic events.

Irving Penn: Centennial

Irving Penn (1917–2009) was among the most esteemed and influential photographers of the 20th century. Over the course of a nearly seventy-year career, he mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, and detail. This indispensable book features one of the largest selections of Penn’s photographs ever compiled, including famous and beloved images as well as works that have never been published.

Walker Evans: American Photographs

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.

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

A good street photographer must be possessed of many talents: an eye for detail, light, and composition; impeccable timing; a populist or humanitarian outlook; and a tireless ability to constantly shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot and never miss a moment. It is hard enough to find these qualities in trained photographers with the benefit of schooling and mentors and a community of fellow artists and aficionados supporting and rewarding their efforts. It is incredibly rare to find it in someone with no formal training and no network of peers.