by Mary Street Alinder ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 2014
Alinder's sympathetic history captures the excitement and energy of determined artists who invigorated and redefined the art...
In the 1930s, daring young artists invented a distinctive style of photography.
At a party in October 1932, a group of California photographers decided to band together for exhibitions, calling themselves f.64, a name, they explained, “derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition” that defined their work. Alinder (Ansel Adams, 1996, etc.), who served as assistant to Adams, one of the most well-known members of f.64 and author of its manifesto, comes to this group biography with personal knowledge of many of her subjects, including Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston and Preston Holder. As collaborator on Adams’ autobiography, she became intimately acquainted with the life and work of many of the other members. Group f.64 arose partly in reaction to Alfred Stieglitz, founder of the Manhattan galleries 291 and An American Place, who “had ruled as the largely unchallenged master of creative photography in America for three decades.” Coveting “the grace of his recognition,” the California group nevertheless believed that a Western aesthetic was far different from the photography heralded in New York and also from the popular genre of pictorialism: romantic, painterly images produced by soft-focus lenses and printed on matte, textured paper. The group’s first major exhibition opened at the respected M.H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, mounted by its intrepid director Lloyd Rollins. Among 64 prints were Adams’ rugged landscapes and Weston’s sensuous rocks, shells and vegetables. Although the exhibition did not attract much notice, it inaugurated for the exhibitors a period of “explosive creativity.” From 1933 to 1940, their work appeared in galleries and museums, making them increasingly visible and earning wide acclaim.
Alinder's sympathetic history captures the excitement and energy of determined artists who invigorated and redefined the art of photography.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1620405550
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Tom Clavin
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by Tom Clavin
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by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
by Emmanuel Carrère translated by Linda Coverdale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2011
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
BOOK REVIEW
by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
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by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
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