Eakins Press Foundation – serie

Documenting Walker Evans's lifelong fascination with the picture postcardThe eight scrupulously tritone dry-trap printed postcards that make up A Gallery of Postcards were originally produced by Walker Evans in 1936 by contact printing sections of his 8 x 10-inch negatives onto the smaller Kodak gelatin silver postcard stock. This edition comes with an essay by Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2000 Walker Evans exhibition, from which these postcards are drawn. "Like a poet refining an idea word by word, Evans often clarified and intensified the meanings of his pictures by trimming his prints just slightly to present the leanest possible image," Rosenheim writes. "With the postcards he took that impulse to another level. Evans was a master of the edge and one of the mediums greatest precisionists."

Shelved during the McCarthy era, Model's photographs of jazz musicians—together with a text by Langston Hughes—are finally published for the first time Street photographer Lisette Model spent more than 10 years documenting Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Percy Heath, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and countless other luminaries of America's jazz scene. From the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival to nightclub shows and raucous afterparties in cramped apartments, Model's images are effusive and full of empathy, celebrating jazz at a time when the genre was under increasing political and cultural scrutiny.During the 1950s, the New York Photo League was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee for purported connections to the Communist Party. Model was interviewed by the FBI and eventually placed on its National Security Watchlist. This mounting political pressure led publishers and funders to rescind support of Model, and ultimately caused her to shelve the book dedicated to her jazz pictures, which was to feature an essay by Langston Hughes.Now, this clothbound book finally realizes Model's self-censored project, providing a fresh look at familiar faces who today signify the fight for freedom, equality and creative expression. Alongside Hughes' original essay, texts by author Audrey Sands and saxophonist Loren Schoenberg underscore the importance of this series and the revelatory insight it shines on jazz music, both onstage and off.Lisette Model (1901–83) was born in Vienna. She moved to Manhattan in 1938 and two years later Model hosted her first solo exhibition with the New York Photo League. Following the group's dismantlement by the FBI, Model transitioned to teaching. Her most notable pupils included Diane Arbus, Helen Gee and John Gossage.

With a healthy sprinkle of plastic and tinsel, Friedlander's visions of a commercial, uniquely American Christmas evoke both irony and nostalgiaWhether or not you celebrated Christmas at some point during the last 70 years, you have no doubt encountered many of the scenes shown here in Lee Friedlander's eclectic black-and-white documentation of the holiday season across America. From city sidewalks to cookie-cutter suburbs, Friedlander captures it all: main street store window displays; plastic nativities on snow-covered lawns; inflatable snowglobes and Santa Clauses; questionable St. Nicholas–themed lingerie; oversize or underwhelming Christmas trees; and houses so covered in string lights as to demand nothing short of a miracle from the local power grid.As in all of his work, Friedlander's images of Christmas reflect his own version of the holiday. Is Christmas in America a religious celebration? A commercial precept? A misunderstanding? An indulgent blasphemy? Or all of the above? The only certain thing is that December 25 has provided an opportunity for the people's photographer to hold up a mirror to a flawed, inventive, preoccupied and wonderful society.Lee Friedlander (born 1934) has published more than 60 monographs since 1969. He was represented alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand in the 1967 New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, now understood as a landmark event in American documentary photography, and received his own retrospective at the same museum in 2005. He has lived and worked in New York since 1956.