Photography & Photographs Books

The paintings, murals, and graphics of Ben Shahn (1898-1969) have made him one of the most heralded American artists of the twentieth century, but during the 1930s he was also among the America's premier photographers. Much of his photographic work was...

Showcasing American music and music making during the Great Depression, Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration photography program. With an appreciation for the amateur and the...

Opening Chicagoscapes places the reader amid the breathtaking grandeur and warm humanity of one of the world's great cities, a metropolis both lavish with its pleasures and as hard as weathered steel, a prairie-bound Oz that demands commitment from those...

The Calumet Region: An American Place presents a series of black and white images by an insightful observer of Northwest Indiana's industrial/residential landscape. A professional architectural photographer, established fine artist, educator, and...

This intellectual history chronicles the processes of compromise and negotiation between high and low art, federal and local interests, and the Progressive Era and New Deal. Victoria Grieve examines how intellectual trends in the early twentieth century...

An in-depth analysis of photography during the Japanese American incarceration during World War IIWhen the American government began impounding Japanese American citizens after Pearl Harbor, photography became a battleground. The control of the means of...

The Illinois River flows through the heart of Illinois, beginning in the northeast of the state at the confluence of the Kankakee River and the Des Plaines River in Grundy County and extending 270 miles to the southwest, where it joins the Mississippi...

Sound and statuary have had a complicated relationship in Western aesthetic thought since antiquity. Taking as its focus the sounding statue - a type of anthropocentric statue that invites the viewer to imagine any sounds the statue might make - Sculpted...

Sound and statuary have had a complicated relationship in Western aesthetic thought since antiquity. Taking as its focus the sounding statue - a type of anthropocentric statue that invites the viewer to imagine any sounds the statue might make - Sculpted...

What does the study of iconography entail for scholars active today? How does it intersect with the broad array of methodological and theoretical approaches now at the disposal of art historians? Do we still dare to use the term “iconography”...

Alexander Gardner is best known for his innovative photographic history of the Civil War; what is less known is the extent to which he was involved in the international worker’s rights movement. Tying Gardner’s photographic storytelling to...

The United States possesses extraordinary holdings of seventeenth-century Flemish paintings. In this pioneering and richly illustrated volume, twelve scholars and museum curators reveal the origins of these collections by examining the American approach...

A critical analysis of the art and career of African American painter Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998). Examines Jones’s engagement with African and Afrodiasporic themes as well as the challenges she faced as a black woman artist. 

A critical analysis of the art and career of African American painter Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998). Examines Jones’s engagement with African and Afrodiasporic themes as well as the challenges she faced as a black woman artist. 

During the nineteenth century, Albrecht Dürer’s art, piety, and personal character were held up as models to inspire contemporary artists and—it was hoped—to return Germany to international artistic eminence. In this book, Jeffrey...

Examines a series of powerful artifacts traditionally associated with King Solomon, largely via extra-canonical textual sources--Solomon’s ring, bottles to contain evil forces, the so-called Solomon’s knot, a shamir, and a flying carpet--and...

Decorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna's “female Secession created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist...

Titian, one of the most successful painters of the Italian Renaissance, was credited by his contemporaries with painting a miracle-working image, the San Rocco Christ Carrying the Cross. Taking this unusual circumstance as a point of departure,...

In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a “contraband guide, a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during...

Why does a society seek out images of violence? What can the consumption of violent imagery teach us about the history of violence and the ways it has been represented and understood? This book addresses these questions within the context of the...

Explores how certain educated northern Europeans in the first half of the sixteenth century increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and inclusive of mutual contradiction. Examines how early modern writers grappled with the problem of cultural,...

Investigates the origins of Maya veneration of the Virgin Mary and the processes of religious transformation during the first two hundred years of Spanish colonization in Yucatán.

“The Spanish Element in Our Nationality” delves beneath the traditional “English-only” narrative of U.S. history, using Spain’s participation in a series of international exhibitions to illuminate more fully the close and...

Examines seventeenth-century sculpture in Rome. Focuses on questions of historical context and criticism, including the interaction of theory and practice, the creative roles of sculptors and patrons, the relationship of sculpture to antique models and...

Examines seventeenth-century sculpture in Rome. Focuses on questions of historical context and criticism, including the interaction of theory and practice, the creative roles of sculptors and patrons, the relationship of sculpture to antique models and...

Analyzes the emergence and development of art history as a discipline in Austria-Hungary. Focuses on the ways in which ideas about art and its history became intertwined with political and social identity, and on the cultural politics that shaped the...

Analyzes the emergence and development of art history as a discipline in Austria-Hungary. Focuses on the ways in which ideas about art and its history became intertwined with political and social identity, and on the cultural politics that shaped the...

This latest volume of the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts explores the role of design and decorative arts in the making of modern Turkey, from the late Ottoman Empire to the middle of the twentieth century.As in many countries outside of...

Examines the creation in 1483 of the first illustrated travelogue, Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Journey to the Holy Land), by Bernhard von Breydenbach and his artist, Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht. Focuses on the early use of the print medium to influence...

An analytical history of the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, and Early Abbasid mosaics in the Holy Land from the second century B.C.E to eighth century C.E.

An interpretive study of the pictorial program of the Ottonian Bernward Gospels. Examines how the manuscript conditioned contemporary and future viewers to remember early medieval Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim.

This Mexico-themed issue of The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts opens up new perspectives in the field of twentieth-century Mexican art and visual culture. It brings together research on a wide array of understudied developments in...

This important new study reevaluates British art writing and the rise of formalism in the visual arts from 1900 to 1939. Taking Roger Fry as his starting point, Sam Rose rethinks how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement's...

Introduces and interprets the complex history of German chinoiserie in the long eighteenth century, focusing on its emergence in literature and the arts.

In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated...

Examines case studies of popular culture as pessimistic rhetorical artifacts, and how non-traditional modes of argumentation can work rhetorically to overcome biases against pessimistic messaging.

Politically and militarily powerful, early modern Scandinavia played an essential role in the development of Central European culture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In this volume, Kristoffer Neville shows how the cultural ambitions of...

As part of the feminist movement of the 1970s, female artists began consciously using their works to challenge social conceptions and the legal definitions of rape and incest and to shift the dominant narrative of violence against women. In this dynamic...

This volume makes accessible for the first time in English Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1787). One of the most important documents of early German Romanticism, the Confessions from the Heart of an...

A history of the Spanish Gothic cathedral of Toledo. Balances architectural history with close scrutiny of the cathedral's liturgy and cults, the sculpture on its portals and choir enclosure, its royal tombs, and its diverse treasury and textiles.

A history of the Spanish Gothic cathedral of Toledo. Balances architectural history with close scrutiny of the cathedral's liturgy and cults, the sculpture on its portals and choir enclosure, its royal tombs, and its diverse treasury and textiles.

Raphael's Ostrich begins with a little-studied aspect of Raphael's painting—the ostrich, which appears as an attribute of Justice, painted in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican. Una Roman D'Elia traces the cultural and artistic history of the ostrich...

Examines the twentieth-century French publishing project on Romanesque art and architecture by Éditions Zodiaque from the abbey of La Pierre-qui-Vire.

Investigates the major paintings and sculpture produced for the church of Ognissanti (All Saints) in Florence between about 1300 and 1500 under the artistic patronage of the religious order of the Humiliati.

Winner of the 2016 Book Award, post-1800 category, from the Historians of British Art.How do photographs compel belief and endow knowledge? To understand the impact of photography in a given era, we must study the adjacent forms of visual persuasion with...

Examines how photographic trickery in the 1850s and 1860s participated in the fashioning of the modern subject. Integrates images of the Victorian period into a new and expansive interpretive framework by locating specific mechanisms of photographic...

The provincial North Macedonian town of Veles placed itself on the world map as an epicentre for fake news production during the US presidential election of 2016. Tech-savvy local youth created hundreds of clickbait websites posing as American political...

John Davies began photographing both the rural and urban landscape in the 1970s and this book brings together his early images alongside new contemporary works evisiting the same landscapes - mapping both equilibrium and change. These pairs of images are...