. Lyden - Böcker

Shortly after the dawn of photography, the unlikely partnership between the respected painter David Octavius Hill and the young engineer Robert Adamson produced some of the most important photographs in the history of the medium. Their alliance began when Hill, while working on his large commemorative painting of the people involved in forming the Free Chruch of Scotland in 1843, began using photography as a tool to document the church elders. What followed was a four-and-a-half-year partnership - cut short by Adamson's untimely death in 1848 - that produced a large body of work. During their association Hill and Adamson experimented with some of the earliest calotype processes creating hundreds of portraits, staged dramatic photographs, and architectural and landscape images. The Getty Museum holds more than 400 works by Hill and Adamson, 47 of which are featured in this volume. The plates are accompanied by commentary from Anne M. Lyden, curatorial assistant in the Department of Photographs at the Museum. A colour foldout of Hill's above-referenced painting "The Signing of the Deed of Demission (The Disruption Picture)" appears in the back of the book.The book includes a chronology of the key events of the artists' partnership and an edited transcript of a colloquium on the artists, with participants: Lyden; Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum; Sara Stevenson, curator of photographs at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; Alison Morrison-Low, curator, History of Science Section, National Museums of Scotland; Jonathon Reff, photographer, Los Angeles; Michael Wilson, private collector, Los Angeles and London; and David Featherstone, independent editor and curator, San Francisco.

In 1830 the British actress Fanny Kemble described the sensation of riding in a train as "strange beyond description". This revolutionary new mode of transportation came into being at almost exactly the same time as an equally revolutionary new invention: photography. The two would radically change our perception of time, space and our place in the world, leading to a new way of seeing that Anne M. Lyden, in this thoroughly engaging account, calls "railroad vision". In Lyden's words: "It is difficult for one to fully grasp how revolutionary these two nineteenth-century innovations were, yet their mutually beneficial relationship has shaped our experience of the modern world". With more than 100 photographs, many from the collection of the Getty Museum, "Railroad Vision" illustrates the parallel histories of railroads and photography - from a photograph of George Stephenson's steam engine locomotion, to powerful images from the American Civil War, to a mid-20th-century photograph by O. Winston Link of a train roaring by a drive-in movie theatre.Images by Carleton Watkins, Walker Evans, William Eggleston and others capture the fascination inspired by railroads and the experience of travel by rail. Whether commissioned by railroad companies or made as independent works of art, these photographs testify to the enduring connection between two technologies that forever changed our perception of the world. "Railroad Vision" includes new information on many trains and locomotives that should be of particular interest to railroad enthusiasts.

Paul Strand (1890 - 1976) defined twentieth-century American photography in a prolific career that spanned more than sixty years. His photographs explore the abstract and dynamic qualities found in the natural world, search for humanity in portraits of people and places, and document the experience of life itself. Highlighting the development of the photographer's aesthetic from his early encounters with Cubism to his humanistic depictions of people throughout the world, this book presents nearly forty years of Strand's wide-ranging and powerful work. In Focus: Paul Strand is published to coincide with an exhibition of the photographer's work at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles from May 10 through September 4, 2005. Commentaries on the pictures, along with an introduction and chronology of Strand's life, are provided by Anne Lyden, associate curator of photographs at the Getty Museum.The book also includes an edited transcript of a colloquium on Strand's work that incorporates Lyden's contributions along with those of five other participants: David Featherstone, a freelance writer and editor; Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty Museum; Naomi Rosenblum, independent scholar; Mark Ruwedel, photographer and professor of photography at California State University, Long Beach; and Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Gray Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University.