Annie Leibovitz - Women In Photography Intl -Book Reviews page 1

A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005
by Annie Leibovitz
Pub. Date: October 2006
"I don't have two lives," Annie Leibovitz writes in the Introduction to this collection of her work from 1990-2005. "This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it." Annie chronicles the celebrations and heartbreaks of her large and robust family. She has children of her own. All the while she is working, and the public work resonates with the themes of her life.
NPE Interview - All Things Considered, October 3, 2006

* Publisher: Random House
* Format: Hardcover, 472 pages
* On Sale: October 3, 2006
* ISBN: 978-0-375-50509-6 (0-375-50509-1)

Leibovitz writes in the introduction to her book, "[Susan Sontag] almost died from an infection in May but rallied enough to make it to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where they agreed to give her a bone-marrow transplant, although the chances of it working were slim ... By the middle of November [2004] it was clear that the treatment had failed, and I brought her back to New York in a small air ambulance." Sontag was Leibovitz's longtime friend.

WIPI Disgintuished Photographer Awardee 2003

Check Ramdon House for updated event schedule and book signings

SUSAN SONTAG

Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag Biography

From the Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Watching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity--a daily commonplace in our "society of spectacle." But are viewers inured -or incited--to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock?

In her first full-scale investigation of the role of imagery in our culture since her now-classic book On Photography defined the terms of the debate twenty-five years ago, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and Dachau and Auschwitz to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001.

As John Berger wrote when On Photography was first published, "All future discussions or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book." Sontag's new book, a startling reappraisal of the intersection of "information", "news," "art," and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster, will be equally essential. It will forever alter our thinking about the uses and meanings of images in our world.

From The Critics
Los Angeles Times
Sontag is in top form: firing devastating questions and providing no answers for shelter. She hands us no morality meter, designed to scan a picture and flash up "necessary experience" in green or "atrocity-porn" in red. Instead, she quotes Plato -- the tale of Leontius reluctantly feasting his eyes on executed criminals -- to show that "the attraction of mutilated bodies" has always been recognized, not least in the obsession of Christian art with naked bodies in pain. Only in the 17th century are depictions of atrocity hitched to the notion that war is cruel and should be prevented. But "most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest.... All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic." (Sontag exonerates Goya, whose brutalized victims are, like their torturers and violators, "heavy, and thickly clothed"). — Neal Ascherson

The New York Times
As usual, she provokes. It probably isn't true that ''not even pacifists'' any longer believe war can be abolished, that photos have a ''deeper bite'' in the memory bank than movies or television, that ''the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked,'' and that ''most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest.'' I don't know, and neither does she. On the other hand, when she revises her own conclusions from On Photography to say she's no longer so sure that shock has ''term limits,'' or that ''repeated exposure'' in ''our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities,'' I agree with her for no other reason than I want to. Her job is not to win a verdict from a jury, but to make us think. — John Leonard

Book Magazine - Susan Tekulve
This gripping debut novel examines how easily shrewd lies can be mistaken for acts of love. Spanning twenty-five years, it recounts the stories of three women who marry the same elusive man in succession. Alternately wise, charming and cold blooded, Ken Kimble is as charismatic as Mephistopheles, a sweet liar who promises each woman what she wants most of all in exchange for her complete devotion. To his first wife, Birdie Bell, he offers a way out of her small Southern town. To his second wife, Joan Cohen, a lonely heiress and breast cancer survivor, he offers hope for a final chance at love. His third wife, Dinah Whitacre, is a woman half his age who is disfigured by a birthmark on her face. Before marrying her, Kimble provides an operation that restores her beauty. With each successive marriage, Kimble gains wealth and worldly experience while his wives compromise themselves and fall apart. Haigh renders Kimble's sociopathic behavior in quiet, understated prose, carefully examining the mitigating circumstances that draw each woman to him. Though Kimble's rise to power drives the plot, the sophisticated portraits of his three wives provide the substance and intrigue in this book.

Library Journal
The impact of violent images: Sontag's first full-length work on imagery since her acclaimed On Photography 25 years ago. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews
With a glance back at the essays in On Photography (1977), the eminent intellectual, critic, and writer cobbles together a defense of war photography--with a result that’s as much maunder as miracle. The slightly superior, ever-unflappable tone will be familiar here to Sontag readers, as will be the wonderful aperçus that come along in a kind of pearls-on-a-string parade--"All memory is individual, unreproducible--it dies with each person," for example, or "To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture," or "Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us." Familiar, too, is the Sontagian pleasure of watching a mind roam through fields of history and reading--as the thinker touches down one moment in Plato, at another in Leonardo or Edmund Burke, all the while keeping up knowledgeably detailed references to politics and conflict from the Crimean war up to Somalia and Bosnia. And yet, for all its author’s capabilities, the essay remains only imperfectly satisfying. From Matthew Brady to now, photos of death and war have raised the question of whether prurience or sympathy is raised in the viewer of such images, degradation and moral numbing on the one hand or any kind of useful understanding on the other. Sontag reviews and explores this old question, and her answer, though without doubt the right one--"Let the atrocious images haunt us"--leads her to unexpected banalities ("There is simply too much injustice in the world") and an unfocused ending that all but randomly touches on great matters--whether the mass media create passivity, for example--and just as inexplicably glances away from them ("But it’s probablynot true that people are responding less"), leaving the greatest question--whether there is any "way to guarantee contemplative . . . space for anything now"--nudged at only lightly, and left to slumber on. Moments of brilliance and wonder amid the generally disappointing.

Product Details:
ISBN: 0374248583
Format: Hardcover, 144pp
Pub. Date: FebruaryÊ2003
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Edition Description: 1ST

ALSO SEE:

Annie Leibovitz - WOMEN - Susan Sontag
Annie Leibovitz (Photographer)

PURCHASE

Other books by Susan Sontag - Her books, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; a play, Alice in Bed; and six works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography and Illness as Metaphor.ÊIn 1982, FSG published A Susan Sontag Reader.

ALSO SEE additional biographical info

Sylvia Plachy Self Portrait with Cows Going Home 2004,
Aperture,
208 pages Hardcover,
$50
Publication date: Sept 27, 2004
To pre-order, please contact Aperture
Aperture Sylvia Plachy page of images

PHOTOGRAPHER SYLVIA PLACHY PRESENTS A PERSONAL HISTORY OF EASTERN EUROPE IN SELF PORTRAIT WITH COWS GOING HOME

"For forty years of travel back and forth, I have brought back these images and stories and offer them as a bouquet at the shrine of my childhood memory." Sylvia Plachy

In 1956, in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution, thirteen-year-old Sylvia Plachy fled her native Hungary with her parents, carrying nothing but a small suitcase and a teddy bear. She ultimately arrived in the U.S. in 1958 and became a U.S. citizen in 1963. Over the past forty years, Sylvia Plachy has returned to her homeland regularly to photograph Eastern Europe at various periods of transition and to search for her lost childhood. For the first time, this extraordinary body of work is being published as a collection in Self-Portrait with Cows Going Home (Aperture, September 27, 2004). An intensely personal photographic journey, the book serves as an extended self-portrait, a record of the Eastern Europe of Plachy' s childhood, and a celebration of many years of superb image making.

In Self-Portrait with Cows Going Home, Plachy explores her attachment to places and people and her complex relationship to the country that she was forced to leave as a child. Her journey home is a dense layering of stories and memories told in pictures that convey the elusiveness of homecoming. A gifted storyteller, Plachy's poetic and affecting images evoke a wide range of human emotions-from joyful to funny, from touching to sorrowful. The accompanying text includes childhood stories and impressions of places to which Plachy has traveled in her work as a photographer.

This volume, that Plachy calls "a farewell to my long attachment to my birthplace," includes pictures from family albums as well as scenes from the landscapes and villages of Hungary, Romania, Russia, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the former Yugoslavia. They are testimony to Plachy's endless curiosity and engagement with people and places. The picture of a circus bear standing upright and reaching forward with a look of profound sadness and intelligence on its face is as deeply felt as a portrait of Plachy's son, Adrien Brody, taken on the set of Roman Polanski's film The Pianist. In image after image Plachy captures the absurd and off-beat in human interactions, but she also conveys the complexity of the changes taking place in the places she has visited.

Sylvia Plachy's first book, Sylvia Plachy 's Unguided Tour (Aperture, 1990), won an International Center of Photography Infinity Award. Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry (1996) and Signs and Relics (2000) followed, both of which garnered Plachy much critical praise. Self-Portrait With Cows Going Home is an important addition to Sylvia Plachy's rich body of work.

Plachy has exhibited her work at several U.S. venues including the Whitney Museum, the Queens Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts. She has also had shows in Budapest, Ljubljana, Manchester, Berlin, Vancouver, Perpignan, Arles, and Pingyau, China. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, GEO, Granta, Artforum, Conde Nast Traveler, New York Times Magazine, among many other outlets. For over eight years, the Village Voice published a weekly uncaptioned, black and white photograph of Plachy's work under the heading "Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour."

Self-Portrait with Cows Going Home
22 four-color and 98 duotone images 11% x 9% inches,
208 pages, Hardcover
ISBN: 1-931788-43-X
$50.00, £22.50;
Publication date: October, 2004

Aperture - a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to advancing fine photography - was founded in 1952 by six gifted individuals: photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, and Minor White; historian Beaumont Newhall; and writer/curator Nancy Newhall. With scant resources, these visionary artists created a new periodical, Aperture magazine, to serve photography enthusiasts worldwide. As the medium flourished, so too did the Aperture Foundation, expanding to include the subsequent publication of books; limited edition prints; and a traveling exhibitions program that has circulated over 100 exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad.

Contact Information
Andrea Smith Publicity Director,
Aperture Sylvia Plachy page of images
ASmith@aperture.org
(212) 505-5555 z 328

Signs & Relics
Forward by Wim Wenders 1999,
The Monacelli Press,
224 pages Hardcover

Unguided Tour
Afterward by Guy Trebay
Music by Tom Waits 1990,
Aperture Foundation Inc.
Hardcover $100
includes "flex disc" by Tom Waits
Out of Print; limited number available

Red Light * OUT OF PRINT
Sylvia Plachy & James Ridgeway
Publisher PpowerHouse Books, 1996
£25.00 hardback * OUT OF PRINT
ISBN: 1-57687-000-6 256 pages, 109 duotones

Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the Continental Divide
A Biographical Dictionary, 1839-1865
Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn

(book image will be available soon - late September)

This biographical dictionary of some 3,000 photographers (and workers in related trades), active in a vast area of North America before 1866, is based on extensive research and enhanced by some 240 illustrations, most of which are published here for the first time.

The territory covered extends from central Canada through Mexico and includes the United States from the Mississippi River west to, but not including, the Rocky Mountain states. Together, this volume and its predecessor, Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840-1865, comprise an exhaustive survey of early photographers in North America and Central America, excluding the eastern United States and eastern Canada.

This work is distinguished by the large number of entries, by the appealing narratives that cover both professional and private lives of the subjects, and by the painstaking documentation. It will be an essential reference work for historians, libraries, and museums, as well as for collectors of and dealers in early American photography.

In addition to photographers, the book includes photographic printers, retouchers, and colorists, and manufacturers and sellers of photographic apparatus and stock. Because creators of moving panoramas and optical amusements such as dioramas and magic lantern performances often fashioned their works after photographs, the people behind those exhibitions are also discussed.

768 pages, 250 illustrations, Forthcoming: Available in September,
ISBN 0804740577 cloth

hardcover price: $150
Standford University Press

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