Harry Ransom Center Photography Series – Serie

Praised as "the last classic freelance photographer" by photohistorian Helmut Gernsheim and as "a true 'Old Master' of the reflex camera" by critic Norman Rothschild, Fritz Henle (1909–1993) was one of the greatest photographers of the mid-twentieth century. Unlike most of his peers who specialized in a particular genre or style of photography, Henle ranged widely and successfully across many genres, including documentary, travel, fashion, commercial, portrait, celebrity, avant-garde, nude, industrial, landscape, and inspirational, to name only a few. He championed the square format photography of the Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera, becoming known later in life as "Mr. Rollei." A master craftsman renowned for exceptional technique and extraordinary composition, Henle was a prolific artist who published more than twenty books of his work, from This Is Japan (1937) to Casals (1975). Beyond his mastery of the craft, however, Henle was driven by a lifelong urge "to show people beauty." "I am obsessed," he said, "by showing them beauty." This volume is the catalogue of a major retrospective exhibition of the life and career of Fritz Henle staged by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It covers the entire range of Henle's work, including significant items from the photographer's archive and family. The catalogue reproduces 127 of Henle's black-and-white and color photographs, which illustrate Henle's mastery of both media. Curator Roy Flukinger's text covers the full arc of Henle's career, from his early training in Germany to his prewar travels and photography in the Mediterranean, India, China, and Japan; his freelance work for LIFE magazine; his fashion editorials for Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and Town and Country; and his later photography and books of photographs of Mexico, Hawaii, Europe, and his final home, the U.S. Virgin Islands. An extensive bibliography of Henle's publications and exhibitions, collections that own his work, and critical commentary on Henle's photography completes this volume.

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, College Art Association, 2012The Gernsheim Collection is one of the most important collections of photography in the world. Amassed by the renowned husband-and-wife team of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim between 1945 and 1963, it contains an unparalleled range of images, beginning with the world's earliest-known photograph from nature, made by Joseph NicÉphore NiÉpce in 1826. The Gernsheim Collection includes some 35,000 major and representative photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a research library of some 3,600 books, journals, and published articles; about 250 autographed letters and manuscripts; and more than 200 pieces of early photographic equipment. Its encyclopedic scope-as well as the expertise and taste with which the Gernsheims built the collection-makes the Gernsheim Collection one of the world's premier resources for the study and appreciation of the development of photography.Published to coincide with a landmark exhibition staged by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which owns the collection, this volume presents masterpieces of the Gernsheim Collection, along with lesser-known images of great historical significance. Arranged in chronological order, this selection effectively constitutes a visual history of photography from its beginnings to the mid-twentieth century. Each full-page image is accompanied by an extensive annotation in which Roy Flukinger describes the photograph's place in the evolution of photography and also within the Gernsheim Collection. Flukinger also provides an enlightening introduction in which he traces the Gernsheims' passionate careers as collectors and pioneering historians of photography, showing how their untiring efforts significantly contributed to the acceptance of photography as a fine art and as a field worthy of intellectual inquiry. Appreciations of the Gernsheim Collection by Alison NordstrÖm and Mark Haworth-Booth confirm its singular importance as a collection of outstanding breadth and depth in the history of photography.

As a curator, theorist, educator, artist, and powerful advocate, Nathan Lyons has played a central role in the expansion of photography over the last five decades. After producing seminal exhibitions and publications as curator at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in the 1960s, he founded the Visual Studies Workshop, an independent arts organization where his innovative programs trained a new generation of photographers, critics, curators, and historians. Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews provides the first comprehensive overview of Lyons’s career as one of the most important voices in American photography. Of primary importance in this volume are Lyons’s own writings, gathered here for the first time. These include essays and articles formulated while Lyons was a young curator, as well as early statements about his own artistic practice and his emerging philosophy of photographic education. Important unpublished lectures are presented here, most significantly “Photography and the Picture Experience,” Lyons’s groundbreaking lecture on the snapshot, and “Sequential Considerations,” addressing photographic sequence and visual books. Lyons’s recent projects bring this volume up to the present. Contributions from other scholars include essays by James Borcoman, Joel Eisinger, Vicki Goldberg, Keith Smith, Anne Wilkes Tucker, and Adam D. Weinberg. Also featured are interviews with Lyons by Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Thomas Dugan, Bob Rogers, and Robert Hirsch, and a newly translated interview by Joan Fontcuberta. Two selections in this volume are drawn from rare unpublished audio recordings made by Lyons in the 1960s: the first, a 1965 interview with Paul Strand on the subject of photographic books, and the second, an extensive discussion with photographers Simpson Kalisher and Garry Winogrand recorded in 1966.