Books about Photo essay from Amazon.com

To live in a pristine land . . . roam the wilderness . . . build a home. . . . Thousands have had such dreams, but Richard Proenneke lived them. Here is a tribute to a man who carved his masterpiece out of the beyond..
Price: $9.41 [Notify me when price goes down.]

It's an inspired idea--to better understand the human diet, explore what culturally diverse families eat for a week. That's what photographer Peter Menzel and author-journalist Faith D'Alusio, authors of the equally ambitious Material World, do in Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, a comparative photo-chronicle of their visits to 30 families in 24 countries for 600 meals in all. Their personal-is-political portraits feature pictures of each family with a week's worth of food purchases; weekly food-intake lists with costs noted; typical family recipes; and illuminating essays, such as "Diabesity," on the growing threat of obesity and diabetes. Among the families, we meet the Mellanders, a German household of five who enjoy cinnamon rolls, chocolate croissants, and beef roulades, and whose weekly food expenses amount to $500. We also encounter the Natomos of Mali, a family of one husband, his two wives, and their nine children, whose corn and millet-based diet costs $26.39 weekly.

We soon learn that diet is determined by largely uncontrollable forces like poverty, conflict and globalization, which can bring change with startling speed. Thus cultures can move--sometimes in a single jump--from traditional diets to the vexed plenty of global-food production. People have more to eat and, too often, eat more of nutritionally questionable food. Their health suffers.

Because the book makes many of its points through the eye, we see--and feel--more than we might otherwise. Issues that influence how the families are nourished (or not) are made more immediate. Quietly, the book reveals the intersection of nutrition and politics, of the particular and universal. It's a wonderful and worthy feat. --Arthur Boehm.
Price: $15.52 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"When we're on the road, all we watch is VBS, and our favorite series is Norwegian Black Metal." (Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters) Documentary photographer Peter Beste has spent the last five years working in the milieu of the Norwegian black metal scene. This scene, with its notorious events of murder, church arson, and self-mythology, is absolutely sealed to outsiders. The international black metal fan base is one of the most devoted, fanatical, and proprietary in the world. Beste's access and insight into this world is unprecedented and has yielded an amazing photographic journey, along with a very popular documentary series on VBS.tv, also available on YouTube. Beste, together with Johan Kugelberg, noted writer, editor, and collector of documentary photography, has brought the images into a hermeneutic narrative that makes for a compelling experience along the lines of Anders Petersen's Café Lehmitz, Ed Van Der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank, or William Klein's Life Is Good and Good for You in New York..
Price: $38.40 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In honor of the United Nations-sponsored International Year of the Family in 1994, award-winning photojournalist Peter Menzel brought together 16 of the world's leading photographers to create a visual portrait of life in 30 nations Material World tackles its wide subject by zooming in, allowing one household to represent an entire nation. Photographers spent one week living with a "statistically average" family in each country, learning about their work, their attitudes toward their possessions, and their hopes for the future. Then a "big picture" shot of the family was taken outside the dwelling, surrounded by all their (many or few) material goods.

The book provides sidebars offering statistics and a brief history for each country, as well as personal notes from the photographers about their experiences. But it is the "big pictures" that tell most of the story. In one, a British family pauses before a meal of tea and crumpets under a cloudy sky. In another, wary Bosnians sit beside mattresses used as sniper barricades. A Malian family composed of a husband, his two wives, and their children rests before a few cooking and washing implements in golden afternoon light. Material World is a lesson in economics and geography, reminding us of the world's inequities, but also of humanity's common threads. An engrossing, enlightening book. --Maria Dolan .
Price: $13.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Intertwined in art and life: the prose of Mary Oliver and the photographs of Molly Malone Cook

Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is one of the most celebrated and best-selling poets in America Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005, was Oliver's partner for many years, a pioneer gallery owner and photographer. This book joins Cook's photographs with Oliver's prose—a uniquely intimate intertwining of their lives and art. There are famous faces here, among them Lorraine Hansberry, Walker Evans, Norman Mailer, and even, through a restaurant window in Venice, Jean Cocteau. Other artists and dozens of wonderful characters and scenes are also immortalized by Cook's unfailing eye for telling detail and perfect composition—two strangers playing chess, laundry billowing in a cityscape, a Pueblo Indian with his 1958 Cadillac. Mary Oliver writes of Cook's work, the people they knew, and the places they visited or lived. The poet's beautiful text captures not only the unique qualities of her partner's work, but the very texture of their shared world.

Within the art world, Molly Malone Cook made her reputation as an early advocate of photography as an art form; she was a champion of the work of now-famous photographers, including Edward Steichen, Eugene Atget, Berenice Abbott, Minor White, Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, and W. Eugene Smith. Perhaps as important, in Mary Oliver's moving words, Cook taught the beginner poet "to see, with searching attention, and compassion."


"Her most affecting work [is] not in verse but in prose…remembrances of her relationship with photographer Molly Malone Cook, who died two years ago. Oliver's half-dozen passages recalling her partner from Our World [are] heartfelt, intimate, loving."
—John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2/5/08


"The photographs Oliver has chosen reflect Cook's intuitive relationship with her subjects (even inanimate objects). The little girl on the stoop in New York City looks directly at the photographer, as does a kindly Robert Motherwell and a fierce, almost intimidating Walker Evans. Even though most of the photographs are dominated by a central person or object, there is a lot to look at in the margins, all part of the story. The stance of her subjects—reading a book, looking through a telescope—is always distinctive, creating the mood of the entire composition. The two photos of Oliver could have been taken only by someone who knew the subject well."
—Susan Salter Reynolds, L. A. Times, 1/6/08


"Cook was evidently an accomplished printer as well as a photographer and the images have been beautifully reproduced…In a photo which Cook took of Jean Cocteau dining in Venice in May 1954—one of her several fine portraits of celebrities—we glimpse the photographer silhouetted in an oval mirror on the wall behind the French poet. Her own face is hidden by her upheld camera but we sense that she controls the composition. In this selection of Cook's work, so admirable in intention, she herself remains something of a shadow in a mirror. But perhaps, given her honesty of eye, we come to know her best by seeing the world as it once appeared through the discretion of her lens."
—Eric Ormsby, The New York Sun, 12/5/2007.
Price: $7.93 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Think of the quirky buildings you pass every day but whose quiet beauty you take for granted—the moviehouses, juke joints, soda fountains, barbershops, roadside diners, and storefront churches. You don’t miss them until they’re gone. As suburban sprawl and strip malls conquer the country, these vestiges of a lost way of life are falling under the wrecking ball. Here the photographer Michael Eastman has made the ultimate road trip, crisscrossing the nation dozens of times, to capture these buildings on film before they vanish. These dreamy images call us to question what we choose to let go in the wake of contemporary life, with a cool melancholy that evokes the work of Edward Hopper, Jack Kerouac, and William Eggleston. There is a wry sense of humor here as well. The book delights in the idiosyncracies of America’s vernacular styles, ranging from Depression Deco to New England clapboard in random juxtapositions that accrue over time in a town’s landscape. Countless visual puns arise among the book’s many detailed images of signs and statuettes. Vanishing America catalogues great everyday American architecture and design. But it also offers a provocative portrait of the silent emptiness that has descended upon vanishing small communities everywhere..
Price: $26.36 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Since the 10.5 million images in National Geographic's possession won't fit in a book, the 250 in this moderately glossy, minimally costly collection will do nicely. Through the Lens is a stunning collection of photos judiciously apportioned to represent the regions of the earth, the sea, and outer space; humans and nature; and even the history of the medium--a few historic black and whites contrast dramatically with the eye-popping modern color shots that dominate the book. As ever, the esthetic key to their impact is the use of big, emotional pictures with witty little captions, and whenever possible, startling juxtapositions. A Boston matron's faux-fur coat looks just like her pet Dalmatian (the caption identifies them as "spots fans"). The world's widest street (in Buenos Aires) by night looks great next to a grassy highway overpass for grizzly bears in Alberta. The famous green-eyed Afghan refugee poses in a purple burkha with her 1985 National Geographic cover. A Moscow shopper tries on a snowsuit, oblivious to the huge face in the ad on the wall behind him, whose nose he obscures and smile he bisects. A fuzzy shot of a 1907 inventor testing a multiwinged "Katydid" flying machine contrasts with a crisp 1974 shot of Skylab soaring far above fluffy clouds. Often, what's striking is the juxtaposition of ideas. An Arctic wolf making an impossible leap between ice floes arcs in midair, only its reflection hitting the frigid water. A 1935 Model T "surfs" a steep dune in White Sands, New Mexico. Chorus lines of stuffed cane-toad corpses with surreally clothespinned snouts perform on a taxidermist's shelf. Newborns are lined up like bread loaves in Shanghai. A woman in a white chador sits in the Tripoli airport, the white lines of fluorescent ceiling bulbs radiating behind her head like a saint's halo. This isn't the fanciest photo book of the season, but it certainly is a good deal. -Tim Appelo.
Price: $17.42 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]