Photofile – serie

With the discovery of her archive in a thrift auction house in 2007, Vivian Maier’s posthumous trajectory from relative obscurity to one of the great American photographers of the 20th century is a story of a singular consistent talent. From the mid 1950s throughout her adult life she worked as a nanny between New York and Chicago, and it was during this time that she created a huge body of photographs and films recording every day street life, often including her own self portrait and moments of fleeting reflection within the cityscape. With her work compared to Helen Levitt, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, her photographs are a fascinating window into American life.

A new edition of this collection of Saul Leiter's distinctive work, featuring twelve new photographs. Saul Leiter was one of those photographers who sought neither fame nor commercial success, despite his talent for imagemaking. Born in Pittsburgh, he spent his entire adult life in New York City's East Village, in an intensely creative environment where ideas from Europe and America came together and intermingled. There he encountered Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists, and discovered street photography and the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. His mastery of colour is displayed in unconventional cityscapes in which reflections, transparency, complex framing and mirroring effects are married to a very personal printing style, creating a unique kind of urban view.

No photographer is more closely associated with a city than Brassaï (1899–1984) is with Paris. From the moment he moved there in 1924, he devoted his life and art to immortalizing his adopted city – capturing the street life by day, the cafés and the Seine by night. A friend of Picasso and Henry Miller, Brassaï knew and photographed the leading figures of his day – Giacometti, Sartre, Dalí, Matisse and Mann among them. His most famous portraits and cityscapes, collected in this volume, form a unique vision of life in pre- and post-war Europe.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) studied painting before taking up photography in his early twenties. One of the founders of the photography agency Magnum (together with Robert Capa and others), he is best known for the consummate skill with which he captured the most fleeting of scenes.This volume, introduced by Michael Brenson, includes selections from his photographs of France, Spain, America, India, Russia, Mexico and pre-revolutionary China.

New in the Photofile series, a mini-monograph on Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert. Born in Antwerp in 1941, Harry Gruyaert was a pioneer of European colour photography in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, he created TV Shots, a series of images created by turning the dial on a television set at random and photographing the screen. Later he travelled the world, seeking out different kinds of light and exhibiting a particular fascination with borders, interfaces and incongruous juxtapositions. A member of Magnum Photos since 1982, he describes colour as ‘a means of sculpting what I see ... it’s the emotion of photography.’ Most recently he has begun to explore the experimental freedom offered by digital photography. Autonomous, non-narrative and often witty, Gruyaert’s images are complex encounters with colour and light.

André Kertész is one of four new titles being published in Autumn 2007 in Thames & Hudson's acclaimed 'Photofile' series. Each book brings together the best work of the world's greatest photographers in an attractive format and at an easily affordable price. Handsome and collectable, the books are printed to the highest standards. Each one contains some sixty full-page reproductions printed in superb duotone, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography.

The perfect primer on American photographer Mary Ellen Mark, best known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture and advertising photography. The work of Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) bears witness to her fascination with the human condition and her gift for connecting intimately with her subjects. Skilled at blending into unusual or insular environments, she travelled all over the world and forged a body of work that combined photojournalism with portraiture. From Indian circus performers to American teenagers living on the streets, from Hollywood film sets to inmates in a secure hospital, her photographs are striking for their humanity and empathy.

Man Ray is one of seven new titles being published this spring in Thames & Hudson’s acclaimed ‘Photofile’ series. Each book brings together the best work of the world’s greatest photographers in an attractive format and at an easily affordable price. Handsome and collectable, the books are printed to the highest standards. Each one contains some sixty full-page reproductions printed in superb duotone, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography.

From his early work for Vogue to his portraits of the rich and famous, Helmut Newton (1920–2004) conveyed a unique vision of a wealthy and glamorous world that often shocks but never ceases to fascinate. This book, available again in the Photofile series, presents about sixty of his instantly recognizable shots of haute couture and the beau monde.

When he arrived in Paris, Koudelka had already produced two outstanding works of reportage. One documented the Prague Spring, while the other, on gypsies, could almost have been an ethnological study had its images not been charged with so much emotion. Unknown in 1970, he rose to become one of the most powerful photographers of his day.This book shows that in the lands of exile through which he travels with his amazing urge to see, Koudelka’s own particular talent has been affirmed and expanded.

Whether taking pictures of London streets during the blackout or sleepers in the Underground during the Blitz; coal miners or high society in pre-war Britain; moody, pared-down landscapes or elegant abstracted nudes, Bill Brandt always imbued his photographs with strangeness and mystery, with a Surrealist touch, with rich connotations. This book in the Photofile series reproduces about sixty of his most memorable images.

This revised edition of Sarah Moon is one of two new books this season in Thames & Hudson’s acclaimed ‘Photofile’ series. Each book brings together the best work of the world’s greatest photographers in an attractive format and at an easily affordable price. Hailed by The Times as ‘finely produced’, the books are printed to the highest standards. Each one contains some sixty full-page reproductions, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography.

Anders Petersen (b. 1944) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. He is noted for his intimate and personal documentary-style black-and-white photographs. In 1967, he started to photograph the late-night regulars (prostitutes, transvestites, drunks, lovers, drug addicts) in a bar in Hamburg, Germany, named Café Lehmitz, and continued that project for three years. His photobook of the same name was published eight years later, in 1978, and has since become regarded as a seminal book in the history of European photography. In 1970, he co-founded SAFTRA, the Stockholm group of photographers, with Kenneth Gustavsson, and simultaneously taught at Christer In 2007, he was one of four finalists for the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

Brooklyn-born photographer Helen Levitt (1913–2009) was an assistant to Walker Evans and a friend of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but forged her own path with fierce independence and endless curiosity about the world around her. She is best known for her street photography, capturing children at play on the streets of Depression-era New York and chalk drawings on walls, but she also cast her eye upon the adult world, seeking out moments of movement, transience and theatricality. Following her first solo exhibition at MoMA in 1943, she devoted more than a decade to filmmaking, but returned to photography in the late 1950s and began to work in colour as well as black and white. Lyrical and witty, her images reveal the streets of New York as flowing with life and unexpected poetry.With 68 illustrations

An illuminating introduction to little-known photographer Issei Suda, who captured the soul of Japan old and new. The work of Issei Suda (1940–2019) is distinct in contemporary avant-garde Japanese photography for its celebration of the beauty of the everyday. His black and white pictures reflect on apparent banality of urban life, capturing ‘the little surprises usually ignored in our world’: the shadow of a figure, the shapes of the street, the expressions on stranger's faces. Suda’s practice revealed the tensions between old and new Japan, juxtaposing the ingrained visual traditions of Japanese culture with the prevailing western vocabulary of fashion, advertising and leisure, as seen through his observant and tender lens.

The perfect primer on the surrealist writer and photographer Claude Cahun. Claude Cahun (1894–1954), the chosen name of the artist born Lucy Schwob, was best known in her lifetime as a writer but built up a remarkable body of photographic work that only came to prominence after her death. Politically active and involved with a wide circle of artists and intellectuals, including the Surrealists, Cahun followed her own rules in both life and art. She is best known for her strikingly staged self-portraits, in which she used costumes, makeup and technical effects to tackle themes of identity and self-representation. Her love of symmetry, mirroring, repurposing and retouching was also reflected in her approach to other styles of photography, including portraiture, photomontage and still-life tableaux. Whether working alone or in collaboration with her life partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), Claude Cahun was a pioneering figure in the aesthetics of modernity who never stopped crossing boundaries of gender and genre.

A concise survey of the pioneering work of London-based Ghanaian photographer James Barnor.With a practice spanning six decades and two continents, ranging from street to studio and fashion to documentary, Ghanaian photographer James Barnor (b.1929) is now recognised as a pivotal figure in the history of photography. Moving between Accra and London throughout his life, Barnor's photographic portraits visibly map societies in transition: Ghana winning independence from Britain, and London embracing the freedoms of the swinging sixties. He has said: 'I was lucky to be alive when things were happening ... when Ghana was going to be independent and Ghana became independent, and when I came to England the Beatles were around. Things were happening in the sixties, so I call myself Lucky Jim.' Barnor's photographs have been described as 'slices of history, documenting race and modernity in the post-colonial world', and he has been the subject of several major retrospectives over the last fifteen years. This concise survey in the Photofile series is the perfect overview of his multifaceted work.

Robert Capa is one of four new titles published this September in Thames & Hudson’s acclaimed ‘Photofile’ series. Each book brings together the best work of the world’s greatest photographers in an attractive format and at an easily affordable price. Hailed by The Times as ‘finely produced’, the books are printed to the highest standards. Each one contains some sixty full-page reproductions, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography.

Salgado’s images of the Sahel famine and his colossal project ‘Workers’ would be enough to make his reputation and justify all the awards he has received. But there is more.A native of Brazil, trained as an economist, Sebastião Salgado has shown a constant faith in mankind, a solidarity that never wavers or flinches in the face of pain, an ability to analyse extreme situations, a fierce drive to affirm what he truly is, a humanist photographer.

Magnum reporter Elliott Erwitt (born 1928) is a witty photographer with an eye that is not always optimistic, but is always stylish. Sudden coincidences and chance encounters with objects and situations allow him to capture glimpses of the ridiculous or comical side of everyday events. Dogs are his favourite subject, an affectionate metaphor for human frailities. Erwitt’s visual jokes become striking and pithy observations about life.

A essential collection of works by Don McCullin, the legendary photojournalist universally recognized for his war photography and images of urban strife. Don McCullin is one of the greatest photographers of conflict in our time. His career has encompassed nearly seventy years – a relentlessly photographed era steeped in conflict. McCullin’s photographs reveal the bleak underbelly of northern England, wars in Cyprus, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia and Beirut, riots in Derry, and famine and disease in Bangladesh. All are photographed with unswerving compassion. With all the beauty of classical tragedies, collectively McCullin’s photographs constitute one of the great documents of human conflict and its attendant grief, expressed with a visual lyricism that allows us to glimpse the unbearable. The Photofile series brings together the best work of the world’s greatest photographers, in an affordable pocket format. Handsome and collectable, the books are produced to the highest standards. Each volume contains some sixty full-page reproductions printed in superb duotone, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography. The series has been awarded the first annual prize for distinguished photographic books by the International Center of Photography, New York.

Guy Bourdin (1928–1991) was a fashion photographer whose talent and strength of vision were apparent even in his earliest works. He shared Helmut Newton’s taste for controversy and stylization, but Bourdin’s formal daring and the narrative power of his images exceeded the bounds of conventional advertising photography. Shattering expectations and questioning boundaries, he set the stage for a new kind of fashion photography.

The Photofile series brings together the best work of the world’s greatest photographers. Each book contains a selection of the photographer’s most important and representative images, plus an introduction and a bibliography. American photographer Berenice Abbott first took up the art while working as an assistant to Man Ray, but soon left to set up her own studio, where she photographed the leading lights of Paris’s literary and artistic circles, including James Joyce and Jean Cocteau. She also met and was inspired by the great photographer Eugène Atget, whose work she tirelessly promoted. On her return to her homeland, Abbott began her major project, Changing New York, in which she documented the interaction between the city’s dramatic architecture and its people in a series of remarkable images that made her name. By the time of her death at the age of 93, Abbott’s diverse body of work had earned her a place as one of the greatest American photographers.

This addition to the affordable Photofile series brings together the best work of Ernst Haas, one of the world's greatest photographers. One of the early pioneers of colour photography, Haas began his photographic career in the 1940s in Vienna, rising to fame following the publication of his photo essay on returning prisoners of war from Russia. In 1951, Haas decided to make his home in NewYork, and became renowned for his work with motion photography and advertising campaigns for companies such as Marlboro, Chrysler and Volkswagen. With a selection of his most representative images and a bibliography for further reading, this is an ideal introduction to the photographer.

Daido Moriyama is one of two new books this season in Thames & Hudson’s acclaimed ‘Photofile’ series. Each book brings together the best work of the world’s greatest photographers in an attractive format and at an easily affordable price. Hailed by The Times as ‘finely produced’, the books are printed to the highest standards. Each one contains some sixty full-page reproductions, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography.

A side effect of the rise of photography as a popular art form has been the accumulation of a huge body of images whose photographers and subjects remain unknown. Among these are many fascinating photographs – some almost masterpieces – that could easily have been lost forever, were it not for their chance rediscovery in libraries and archives, homes and institutions. This book presents a selection of these mysterious and highly collectable images. They portray a striking range of people, animals and objects, captured in scenes that may be witty, touching, sinister or surreal. As viewers, our imaginations are immediately engaged as we try to reconstruct the story behind each picture, and the collection as a whole forms a quirky, alternative history of photography as a medium and its endless power to surprise.

Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was a pioneering figure in 20th-century photography. As well as being the first African-American photographer to join the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and to become a staff photographer for Life magazine, he was also a writer, film director and composer. Although best known for documenting issues such as poverty, race relations and civil rights, he was remarkably versatile, turning his gift for visual narrative to subjects as diverse as news coverage, fashion, art and sport. He also captured prominent figures of his era, from Malcolm X to Marilyn Monroe, in a series of memorable portraits. Working in the US and around the world, he was driven by a commitment to social justice: ‘The common search for a better life and a better world is deeper than colour or blood.'

A member of Magnum, Marc Riboud has travelled the world, from Europe to the Middle East and from Vietnam to the United States. Repelled by violence, indifferent to the pursuit of ‘events’, yet irresistibly drawn by the desire to see, he is a reporter under the spell of life itself. Whether covering the Cultural Revolution or the Soviet Union before perestroika, he waits for the inner truth to ‘rise to the surface of things’. These photographs reveal his intense awareness of the innate power of each image.

William Klein (born 1928) is a photographer who has always moved against the current. A painter, filmmaker, graphic designer and fashion photographer, Klein grew up in New York but has been based in Paris since 1948. His shots are often intense and immediate, disrupting the established order of things and capturing fragmented snatches of distortion and movement. Although best known for his images of New York in the 1950s, he has also worked in other urban environments, including Tokyo and Moscow, as well as producing a striking series of painted contact sheets. Throughout his varied body of work, his insatiable desire to confront the chaos of the world shines through.