The New Topographics: A Book List of Recommended Reading

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  Dia Art Foundation Bernd & Hilla Becher: Pennsylvania Coal Mine Tipples . . . . [see book details]

  Photographs by Hilla Becher, Bernd Becher. Hardcover, 10.25 x 11.5 / 136 pgs / 99 duotone. Publication Date: 6/2/1991 List Price: US $45.00

  Aperture Robert Adams: Along Some Rivers Photographs and Conversations Robert Adams, one of America's foremost living photographers, has spent decades considering and documenting the landscape of the American West and the ways it has been altered, disturbed, or destroyed by the hand of man. A professor of English before turning to photography, Adams is also a skilled writer and acute thinker on aesthetic questions. Aperture's previous bestselling collections of his essays, Beauty in Photography and Why People Photograph, assembled his thoughts on a range of subjects, including writing, teaching, photography's place in the arts and a host of fellow photographers. Along Some Rivers collects Adams's correspondence and conversations--some of which have never been published before--with writers and curators including William McEwan, Constance Sullivan and Thomas Weski. In so doing, it provides another point of entry, offering a portrait of the artist in debate and elucidating his thoughts on a number of his now legendary projects, including Cottonwoods and What We . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Richard B. Woodward. Hardcover, 5.5 x 8.25 in. / 96 pgs / 28 duotone. Publication Date: 5/1/2006 List Price: US $24.95

  Fraenkel Gallery/Matthew Marks Gallery Robert Adams: Turning Back A Photographic Journal of Re-Exploration Turning Back: A Photographic Journal of Re-Exploration is published to coincide with the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The narrative begins at the Pacific Ocean and moves eastward through what was formerly one of the world's great rain forests. Photographs at the center of the book report on the forest's destruction. Elsewhere they trace a search for hope. Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark reported finding in the American Northwest a vast forest of ancient evergreens. In Turning Back Robert Adams looks again at the region's trees, discovering evidence both of America's failure and of a continuing promise. President Jefferson's primary charge to Lewis and Clark was to prepare the way for American commerce. Today, historians still speculate about why, upon his return, Lewis lapsed into depression and apparently committed suicide. Going east,” Adams suggests, was more difficult than going west.” So what is the future? Turning Back . . . . [see book details]

  Photographs by Robert Adams. Clothbound, 9.75 x 11.75 in. / 234 pgs / 164 tritone. Publication Date: 5/15/2005 List Price: US $65.00

  Aperture Robert Adams: The New West Originally published in 1974, Robert Adams’ The New West signaled a paradigm shift in the photographic representation of American landscapes. Foregoing photography’s traditional role of romanticizing the Western landscape, Adams focused instead on the construction of tract and mobile homes, subdivisions, shopping centers and urban sprawl in the suburbs of Colorado Springs and the Denver area. Adams transmuted these zones with his minimalist vision of their austerity; as he has noted, no place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.” Objective and direct, Adams’ photographs, rendered in his signature middle-gray scale, unsentimentally depict a despoiled landscape washed in the intense Colorado sunlight. Today The New West stands alongside Walker Evans’ American Photographs, Robert Frank’s The Americans and Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places in the pantheon of landmark projects on American culture and society. This second reissue of the classic publication has been . . . . [see book details]

  Foreword by John Szarkowski. Hardback, 10 x 9 in. / 136 pgs / 56 duotone. Publication Date: 5/1/2008 List Price: US $45.00

  Aperture Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places The Complete Works Published by Aperture in 1982 and long unavailable, Stephen Shore's legendary Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Among the first artists to take color beyond advertising and fashion photography, Shore's large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents a definitive collection of the original series, much of it never before published or exhibited. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated version of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore's images retain precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which the objects before his lens assume both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. In contrast to Shore's signature landscapes with which Un-common Places is often associated, this expanded survey reveals equally remarkable collections of interiors and . . . . [see book details]

  Essay by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen. Interview by Lynne Tillman. Hbk, 12.75 x 10.5 in. / 188 pgs / 162 color / 7 b&w. Publication Date: 6/15/2005 List Price: US $55.00

  Aperture/Yale University Art Gallery Robert Adams: Summer Nights, Walking In this exquisitely produced book, the influential American photographer Robert Adams revisits the classic collection of nocturnal landscapes that he began making in the mid-1970s near his former home in Longmont, Colorado. Originally published by Aperture in 1985 as Summer Nights, this new edition has been carefully reedited and resequenced by the photographer, who has added 39 previously unpublished images. Illuminated by moonlight and streetlamp, the houses, roads, sidewalks and fields in Summer Nights, Walking retain the wonder and stillness of the original edition, while adopting the artist's intention of a dreamy fluidity, befitting his nighttime perambulations. The extraordinary care taken with the new reproductions also registers Adams' attention to the subtleties of the night, and conveys his appeal to look again at places we might have dismissed as uninteresting. Adams observes, "What attracted me to the subjects at a new hour was the discovery then of a neglected peace." . . . . [see book details]

  Clth, 8.75 x 8.5 in. / 84 pgs / 70 tritone. Publication Date: 10/31/2009 List Price: US $50.00