Gilles Mora Livres

This is the most complete monograph on the work of W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978), one of the heroes of American photojournalism. Beginning in the 1930s, working for Newsweek and other magazines, he created poetic photo essays of enormous and lasting impact. Drawing from Smith's own archives and including illuminating texts, this comprehensive volume features more than 300 superb duotone reproductions of both famous and never-before-published images from his most important works. Smith's Life Magazine photo essays are represented by images created in the 1940s and 1950s including, among others, the landmark Country Doctor, Spanish Village, Nurse Midwife and Albert Schweitzer: Man of Mercy. Among his later independent works are the hugely ambitious series on Pittsburgh and Haiti from the late 1950s. His last project was the disturbing 1970s essay Minimata, on the consequences of industrial pollution in Japan.The photographs were selected by photographic historian Gilles Mora and designer John T. Hill from the Smith collection at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona.

Exploring the evolution of photographic techniques from calotype to digital imaging, this work demystifies the aesthetic concepts and critical language surrounding photography developed over the past 150 years. It provides clear explanations that enhance understanding of both historical and contemporary practices in the art of photography.

The photography that Americans invented in the sixties and seventies was as innovative, bold, and vital as their music. In the wild years between the publication of Robert Frank's landmark The Americans in 1958 and the discovery of the postmodernist Cindy Sherman in the early 1980s, the photographers featured in this book embarked on their own personal quests for an independent and unique photographic language that would redefine the scope and content of documentary photography as well as the expressive potential of the photographic image. Real heroes of a challenging, dynamic modernity, they believed in a medium with endless possibilities and devoted themselves, with an abundance of creative energy, to reinvigorating it in a wide range of inventive ways. GIlles Mora introduces us to the work of these heroic photographers, and to the curators, gallery owners, critics, and collectors who facilitated their rise in the art world and the marketplace. Members of an authentic artistic community, inspired by the legacy of Walker Evans, they include major figures such as Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Les Krims, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, BIll Owens, Robert Adams, Henry Wessel Jr., William Eggleston, and Joel Meyerowitz, along with the gallery owner Lee D. Witkin and the great MoMA curator John Szarkowski. This generation of photographers knew it was remarkable. Today, with Giles Mora as a guide, we can look back on it with greater appreciation. The Last Photographic Heroes offers a personal perspective on this lively and engaging chapter in modern photography, presenting not only a critique but also a veritable visual anthology of major photographic works and artists. -- from dust jacket.

Between the World Wars, America's Great Depression spawned the need for many public works agencies, in particular the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This book presents the FSA's catalogue of documentary photography - a collection of images documenting America's cultural and economic conditions.

The book features impressionistic photographs by renowned French photographer and critic Gilles Mora, capturing the vanishing culture of the Deep South. Through these rarely seen images, Mora provides a poignant exploration of the region's unique heritage and the subtle beauty of its landscapes and communities.

Considered one of the most significant painters of the period between the two world wars and founder of the precisionist school, Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) was also one of the pivotal photgraphers of the modernist movement in America. His direct style can be likened to that of his contemporaries Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Edward Steichen and he is probably best known for documenting the transformation of the American urban landscape (in both his photos and paintings), and for an early series of photos that pay homage to his 19th-century farmhouse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.