Wednesday, September 27, 2017

photography

Mark your calendars for these exciting October programs:

Sunday 10/1, 2pm – An Afternoon with the Author
Drop by this afternoon and meet Amy McDonald, local teacher and author of Determined to Survive, a memoir that details the experiences of Holocaust survivor Max Steinmetz.  Mr. Steinmetz is a Romanian-born Auschwitz survivor who relocated to Alabama in 1955.

Thursday 10/5, 10am – A Morning with the Author
Drop by this morning for a fun, casual coloring event with author and illustrator Laura Murray.  Laura’s coloring book, Amazing Alabama: A Coloring Book Journey Through Our 67 Counties will be published soon by NewSouth Books.

Friday 10/6, 6-9pm – Western Wine & Food Festival at the Birmingham Zoo, tickets available online, at the library, and at Western Supermarkets locations 

Thursday 10/12, 6:30pm – UAB Neuroscience CafĂ© explores the science of sleep

Friday 10/13, 10am-noon – Yoga with Marie Blair

Friday 10/13, 5-10pm – Ages 18 and up Nightmare on Oak Street Dinner Double Feature and Terror-ium building, RSVP to Holley at hwesley@bham.lib.al.us or 205-445-1117 for this free event.  Bring your own glass container, plants and decorations provided, supplies limited.

Saturday 10/14, 7pm – Birmingham Arts Music Alliance presents l’ Ao artiste ordinaire, a collaborative partnership between composer-performers Melissa Grey and David Morneau.

Tuesday 10/17, 6:30pm – Documentaries After Dark presents Top Secret Rosies, a film about a group of female mathematicians who helped win WWII and usher in the modern computer age.

Tuesday 10/24, 10am – Community Conversation on Aging: Alzheimer’s and Dementia care

Tuesday 10/31, 6:30pm – GRG rolls around again!  October’s topic is memoirs and, as it’s Halloween, costumes are optional!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  Well, we met this week to talk all things photography so there were plenty of pictures and WAY more than a thousand words!

Image result for the way we looked catherine noren
Published in 1983, this book discusses the importance of family photographs as a means of understanding the passage of time, establishing ties with ancestors, and varying ways of recording important events in family life. Includes suggestions for collecting photographs and putting together an album. Obviously, some information is outdated but the ideas behind it are solid!

Image result for reflections in a looking glass morton cohen
Published on the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Reflections in a Looking Glass presents Carroll's remarkable photography. Richly illustrated, this important book presents seldom-seen works-most of them formal portraits and staged scenes that combine Carroll's famous childlike sense of play with the Victorian propriety that characterized his age.

Also included in Reflections are selected drawings by Lewis Carroll and by John Tenniel, who illustrated the original Alice books. The central text by Morton N. Cohen, the world's leading authority on Lewis Carroll, provides an in-depth account of Carroll's experimentation in the new medium of photography. His hobby opened the door to many of his "child friends" as well as to leading artistic and literary figures of the day, all of whom came to Carroll's studio to sit for their portraits.

Excerpts from Carroll's diaries combine with Cohen's annotated captions to make this book an invaluable resource. The book also includes a Preface by Mark Haworth-Booth, curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Afterword is by Roy Flukinger, curator of photographs at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, the source collection for much of the material in this extraordinary book. 

GENERAL DISCUSSION:
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Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin
Part love story, part literary mystery, Melanie Benjamin’s spellbinding historical novel leads readers on an unforgettable journey down the rabbit hole, to tell the story of a woman whose own life became the stuff of legend. Her name is Alice Liddell Hargreaves, but to the world she’ll always be known simply as “Alice,” the girl who followed the White Rabbit into a wonderland of Mad Hatters, Queens of Hearts, and Cheshire Cats. Now, nearing her eighty-first birthday, she looks back on a life of intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. First as a young woman, then as a wife, mother, and widow, she’ll experience adventures the likes of which not even her fictional counterpart could have imagined. Yet from glittering balls and royal romances to a world plunged into war, she’ll always be the same determined, undaunted Alice who, at ten years old, urged a shy, stuttering Oxford professor to write down one of his fanciful stories, thus changing her life forever.

GENERAL DISCUSSION:
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Many people do not know that Leonard Nimoy was a talented photographer. View a selection of his work here.

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During the 1830s, in an atmosphere of intense scientific inquiry fostered by the industrial revolution, two quite different men―one in France, one in England―developed their own dramatically different photographic processes in total ignorance of each other's work. These two lone geniuses―Henry Fox Talbot in the seclusion of his English country estate at Lacock Abbey and Louis Daguerre in the heart of post-revolutionary Paris―through diligence, disappointment and sheer hard work overcame extraordinary odds to achieve the one thing man had for centuries been trying to do―to solve the ancient puzzle of how to capture the light and in so doing make nature 'paint its own portrait'. With the creation of their two radically different processes―the Daguerreotype and the Talbotype―these two giants of early photography changed the world and how we see it. 

Drawing on a wide range of original, contemporary sources and featuring plates in colour, sepia and black and white, many of them rare or previously unseen, Capturing the Light by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport charts an extraordinary tale of genius, rivalry and human resourcefulness in the quest to produce the world's first photograph.

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At Work by Annie Leibovitz
The celebrated photographer Annie Leibovitz, author of the New York Times bestselling book A Photographer's Life, provides the stories, and technical description, of how some of her most famous images came to be. Starting in 1974, with her coverage of Nixon's resignation, and culminating with her controversial portraits of Queen Elizabeth II early in 2007, Leibovitz explains what professional photographers do and how they do it. The photographer in this instance is the most highly paid and prolific person in the business. Approximately 90 images are discussed in detail -- the circumstances under which they were taken, with specific technical information (what camera, what settings, what lighting, where the images appeared). The Rolling Stones' tour in 1975, the famous nude session with John Lennon and Yoko Ono hours before Lennon was killed, the American Express and Gap campaigns, Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk, Demi Moore pregnant and naked on the cover of Vanity Fair, and coverage of the couture collections in Paris with Puff Daddy and Kate Moss are among the subjects of this original and informative work. The photos and stories are arranged chronologically, moving from film to digital. Leibovitz's fans and lovers of great photography will find her stories of how one learns to see -- and then how to photograph -- inspiring.

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Group f.64 is perhaps the most famous movement in the history of photography, counting among its members Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston. Revolutionary in their day, Group f.64 was one of the first modern art movements equally defined by women. From the San Francisco Bay Area, its influence extended internationally, contributing significantly to the recognition of photography as a fine art.

The group-first identified as such in a 1932 exhibition-was comprised of strongly individualist artists, brought together by a common philosophy, and held together in a tangle of dynamic relationships. They shared a conviction that photography must emphasize its unique capabilities-those that distinguished it from other arts-in order to establish the medium's identity. Their name, f.64, they took from a very small lens aperture used with their large format cameras, a pinprick that allowed them to capture the greatest possible depth of field in their lustrous, sharply detailed prints. In today's digital world, these “straight” photography champions are increasingly revered.

Mary Alinder is uniquely positioned to write this first group biography. A former assistant to Ansel Adams, she knew most of the artists featured. Just as importantly, she understands the art. Featuring fifty photographs by and of its members, Group f.64 details a transformative period in art with narrative flair.

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Before Elvis There Was Nothing by Patrick Higgins (not available in JCLC)
Memorable quotes, funny stories, serious tributes, and revealing comments from people as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, Imelda Marcos, and Richard Nixon combine with photographs presented in chronological order of Elvis's life.

GENERAL DISCUSSION:
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Bellocq’s Ophelia: Poems by Natasha Trethewey (not available in JCLC)
In the early 1900s, E.J. Bellocq photographed prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans. His remarkable, candid photos inspired Natasha Trethewey to imagine the life of Ophelia, the subject of Bellocq's Ophelia, her stunning second collection of poems. With elegant precision, Ophelia tells of her life on display: her white father whose approval she earns by standing very still; the brothel Madame who tells her to act like a statue while the gentlemen callers choose; and finally the camera, which not only captures her body, but also offers a glimpse into her soul.

GENERAL DISCUSSION:
Image result for light a journal of photography and poetry
We are a brand new independent, reader-supported, quarterly journal of fine art photography and poetry on our way to our very first year of publication.  We are proud to announce that our Inaugural issue, and all of our future issues will be available in both print and online editions.

Image result for it's a zoo out there rachael hale
It’s a Zoo Out There by Rachael Hale 
A wonderful menagerie of animal portraits by celebrated photographer Rachael Hale. Puppies and tigers and pigs...oh my! Get ready for more oohs and aahs. It's a Zoo Out There is the next adorable installment of Rachael Hale's bestselling book series. This collection of Hale's finest photographs of enchanting and magnificent creatures both large and small, domestic and exotic, is beautifully presented in this over-sized volume. Hale's special rapport with animals has allowed her to capture the true essence of her subjects.

Image result for one edward mapplethorpe cover
One: Sons & Daughters by Edward Mapplethorpe
A baby's first year is filled with an endless stream of new experiences, contributing profoundly to their physical, mental, and emotional development. Typically at the age of one-year an infant has the motor skills and ability to sit on their own for the first time and their uninhibited gaze provides a window into a distinct personality that will endure throughout their lifetime. It is these individual natures that photographer Edward Mapplethorpe expertly captures. 

The culmination of a twenty-year project by one of today's top-commissioned and internationally-recognized photographers of baby portraits, ONE features a series of 60 photographs that catch the fleeting, yet universal, moment of life when a child reaches one year of age. There is something remarkable in the innocent faces of the children portrayed in this book that serves to underscore our common humanity.

The luxuriously printed duo-tone photographs in ONE are accompanied by essays from esteemed contemporary authors Adam Gopnik, Susan Orlean, Francine Prose, and Andrew Solomon. Patti Smith contributes an original poem while Dr. Samantha Boardman writes the introduction. Contributions from such diverse luminaries emphasize the widespread appeal such innocent, unguarded beauty has for so many people.

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William Wegman / Fashion Photographs (not available in JCLC)
Published to accompany a major travelling exhibition, this book presents a collection of eerily anthropomorphic photographs by William Wegman. They feature clothes by Helmut Lang, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, Issey Miyake and others being modeled by dogs.

Image result for food photography lara ferroni
Top blogger and pro photographer Lara Ferroni serves up a one-stop guide to food-photography success! Packed with her tried-and-true secrets, this comprehensive guide details everything you need to know about sourcing and styling food, drinks, and props. Ferroni profiles several of the industry's top professional food photographers, and includes detailed case studies of their most successful shots--complete with lighting diagrams and equipment setups. This diverse collection of stunning images images and easy-to-follow shooting instructions perfectly encompasses the field of modern food photography, covering everything from blog and editorial photography to corporate advertising and publicity shots.

Image result for faces of the twentieth century book cover mark edward harris
Presented here are signature images by twenty of this century's greatest photographers, interviews with the author, and his portrait of each photographer. The result combines the photographers' visions with their words, broadening understanding of their personalities and work and providing an international portrait of the twentieth century.

GENERAL DISCUSSION:
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Get out! Run! We must leave this place! They are going to destroy this whole place! Go, children, run first! Go now!
These were the final shouts nine year-old Kim Phuc heard before her world dissolved into flames―before napalm bombs fell from the sky, burning away her clothing and searing deep into her skin. It’s a moment forever captured, an iconic image that has come to define the horror and violence of the Vietnam War. Kim was left for dead in a morgue; no one expected her to survive the attack. Napalm meant fire, and fire meant death.

Against all odds, Kim lived―but her journey toward healing was only beginning. When the napalm bombs dropped, everything Kim knew and relied on exploded along with them: her home, her country’s freedom, her childhood innocence and happiness. The coming years would be marked by excruciating treatments for her burns and unrelenting physical pain throughout her body, which were constant reminders of that terrible day. Kim survived the pain of her body ablaze, but how could she possibly survive the pain of her devastated soul?

Fire Road is the true story of how she found the answer in a God who suffered Himself; a Savior who truly understood and cared about the depths of her pain. Fire Road is a story of horror and hope, a harrowing tale of a life changed in an instant―and the power and resilience that can only be found in the power of God’s mercy and love.