Jeff L. Rosenheim – författare

The definitive book on the work of a virtuosic and revered American photographer  “Irving Penn: Centennial . . . presents page after page of startlingly fresh images.”—Luc Sante, New York Times  Irving Penn (1917–2009) was among the most esteemed and influential photographers of the twentieth 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, spanning the entirety of his groundbreaking career.  An enlightening introduction situates his work in the context of the various artistic, social, and political environments and events that affected the content of his photographs. Lively essays acquaint readers with Penn’s primary subjects and campaigns, including early documentary scenes and imagery; portraits; fashion; female nudes; peoples of Peru, Dahomey (Benin), New Guinea, and Morocco; still lifes; and much more. Irving Penn: Centennial is essential for any fan of this artist’s work or the history of twentieth-century photography.  Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press  Exhibition Schedule:  de Young, Fine Art Museums, San Francisco (March 16–July 21, 2024)

This eye-opening study of Civil War photography traces the introduction of the camera into the battlefield and shows its influence on history and our responses to warSix hundred thousand lives were lost between 1861 and 1865, making the conflict between North and South the nation’s deadliest war. If the “War Between the States” was the test of the young republic’s commitment to its founding precepts, it was also a watershed in photographic history, as the camera recorded the epic, heartbreaking narrative from beginning to end—providing those on the home front, for the first time, with immediate visual access to the horrors of the battlefield.Photography and the American Civil War features both familiar and rarely seen images that include haunting battlefield landscapes strewn with bodies, studio portraits of armed Confederate and Union soldiers (sometimes in the same family) preparing to meet their destiny, rare multi-panel panoramas of Gettysburg and Richmond, languorous camp scenes showing exhausted troops in repose, diagnostic medical studies of wounded soldiers who survived the war’s last bloody battles, and portraits of both Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.Published on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg (1863), this beautifully produced book features Civil War photographs by George Barnard, Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, and many others.Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art(04/01/13–09/02/13)The Gibbes Museum of Art(09/27/13–01/05/14)New Orleans Museum of Art(01/31/14–05/04/14)

Significant and iconic photographs created over the last 100 years provide an essential history and new interpretation of the mediumBeginning with Paul Strand’s landmark From the Viaduct in 1916 and continuing through the present day, Photography’s Last Century examines defining moments in the history of the medium. Featuring nearly 100 masterworks, it includes both rare and iconic examples of works by photography’s most renowned and influential artists, including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Cindy Sherman, as well as a diverse group of lesser-known practitioners who helped define photography in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Jeff Rosenheim’s detailed and perceptive text addresses the avant-garde artists of the early decades of the 20th century, the changing role of the camera after the Second World War, the rise of the international market for fine photographic prints in the 1960s, the photography boom in the late 1970s, and the implications of calling this period the “last” century of photography. Exquisitely designed and produced, this book offers new insight on the development and significance of photography as an art form over the course of the past 100 years.Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(March 10–June 28, 2020)

The first comprehensive, posthumous monograph and retrospective on Bernd and Hilla Becher, best known for their photographs of industrial structures in Europe and North AmericaFor more than five decades, Bernd (1931–2007) and Hilla (1934–2015) Becher collaborated on photographs of industrial architecture in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States. This sweeping monograph features the Bechers’ quintessential pictures, which present water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and more as sculptural objects. Beyond the Bechers’ iconic Typologies, the book includes Bernd’s early drawings, Hilla’s independent photographs, and excerpts from their notes, sketchbooks, and journals. The book’s authors offer new insights into the development of the artists’ process, their work’s conceptual underpinnings, the photographers’ relationship to deindustrialization, and the artists’ legacy. An essay by award-winning cultural historian Lucy Sante and an interview with Max Becher, the artists’ son, make this volume an unrivaled look into the Bechers’ art, life, and career. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press  Exhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(July 11–October 30, 2022)San Francisco Museum of Modern Art(December 17, 2022–April 2, 2023)

This new study of nineteenth-century American photography presents a bottom-up history of the United States, featuring works by lesser-known practitioners that capture the changing scene across the country  In this groundbreaking history of early American photography, Jeff L. Rosenheim explores how the medium’s evolution as a cultural, commercial, and artistic preoccupation mirrored the dramatic development of the nation’s sense of itself before, during, and after the Civil War and throughout its westward expansion. Alongside acknowledged early masters such as Josiah Johnson Hawes and Carleton E. Watkins, this publication highlights exceptional portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes produced by little-known makers in small towns and cities outside the major urban centers. These daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cyanotypes, cabinet cards, and gelatin silver prints span the gamut of early formats and processes and present a portrait of the burgeoning nation outside of the traditional grand narratives. Tracing the history of technological advances—such as the advent of the Kodak roll-film camera in the 1880s, which increased the accessibility of the medium—this landmark publication both highlights photography as the most democratic of art forms and celebrates the beguiling physical materiality that photographs possessed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press  Exhibition Schedule:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(TBD)