An in-depth look at the influential Photo League, whose blend of aesthetics and social activism advanced modern photography Artists in the Photo League, active from 1936 to 1951, were known for capturing sharply revealing, compelling moments from everyday life. Their focus centered on New York City and its vibrant streets--a newsboy at work, a brass band on a bustling corner, a crowded beach at Coney Island. Though beautiful, the images harbor strong social commentary on issues of class, child labor, and opportunity. The Radical Camera explores the fascinating blend of aesthetics and social activism at the heart of the Photo League, tracing the group's left-leaning roots and idealism to the worker-photography movement in Europe. Influenced by mentors Lewis Hine, Berenice Abbott, and Paul Strand, artists in the Photo League worked within a unique complex comprising a school, a darkroom, a gallery, and a salon, in which photography was discussed as both a means for social change and an art form. The influence of the Photo League artists on modern photography was enormous, ushering in the New York School. Presenting 150 works of the members of the Photo League alongside complementary essays that offer new interpretations of the League's work, ideas, and pedagogy, this beautifully illustrated book features artists including Margaret Bourke-White, Sid Grossman, Morris Engel, Lisette Model, Ruth Orkin, Walter Rosenblum, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, and Weegee, among many others. Published in association with The Jewish Museum, New York, and Columbus Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: The Jewish Museum, New York (11/06/11-03/25/12) Columbus Museum of Art (04/19/12-09/09/12) Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (10/11/12-01/21/13) Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach (03/15/13-06/16/13)

Elton John's truly remarkable collection of international modernist photography stems from personal passion: since 1991, he has amassed more than two thousand photographs, which include key figures from Europe and America alongside many of the foremost photographers from Japan, Eastern Europe and Latin America. This book draws together the finest works from 1920 to 1950, a period that is widely considered to be photography's 'coming of age', a time of great experimentation and innovation when artists pushed the boundaries of the medium. New Vision refers to the term coined by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in the mid 1920s to describe the way photography could be used to see the world through a modern lens. As new technology developed, it allowed the freedom both to experiment and to record, leading to new developments such as photograms, typographics and the bird's- and worm's eye views. This period also encompassed key avant-garde movements of the 20th century in which photography played a central role - dada, surrealism, the Bauhaus and Russian constructivism.0With over 150 illustrations, an interview with Elton John exploring the motivations behind his collecting, and essays looking at the photographs within the history of modernism and an exploration of the impact of technical innovations on the form, New Vision will introduce a new audience to this unique body of work and provide an indispensable resource to those who are already fans of the period.0Exhibition: Tate Gallery, London, UK (10.11.2015 - 07.05.2017).

Through brilliant portraits of real persons who created the myths and realities of the 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Murray Kempton brings that turbulent decade to life. Himself a child of the time, Kempton examines with the insight and imagination of a novelist the men and women who embraced, grappled with, and in many cases were destroyed by the myth of revolution. What he calls the “ruins and monuments of the Thirties” include Paul Robeson, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers, the Hollywood Ten, the rebel women Elizabeth Bentley and Mary Heaton Vorse, and the labor leaders Walter Reuther and Joe Curran.

A photojournalist documents a young woman’s journey as joins a New Jersey convent to become a nun. The sudden revelation of a powerful religious calling was an entirely unexpected event in the life of a college student named Lauren. But when it became clear to her that she had a spiritual vocation, she made the exceptional decision to dedicate her life to God. Drawing upon many visits to the cloistered religious community of Dominican nuns in Summit, New Jersey, photographer Toni Greaves has created a luminous body of work that follows the transformative journey by which Lauren became Sister Maria Teresa of the Sacred Heart. These meditative photographs capture the radical joy of a life dedicated unequivocally to love. “Toni Greaves’s luminous images marry the quotidian with the divine in all sorts of ways: a young novice dribbles a basketball in full habit; a jar of Vick’s VapoRub nestles a bottle of holy water; a group portrait of all 19 sisters, whose ages range from 25 to 90, includes Sabina, the golden retriever, splayed flat on the floor.” —New York Times

"Victor Burgin is one of the most influential artists and writers working today. He came to prominence as a key figure in the Conceptual Art of the late 1960s. After turning to photography in his artistic practice he produced a series of groundbreaking theoretical essays that drew on semiotics, psychoanalysis and feminism in order to think through the ideological role of photographs in the production of beliefs and values, and in the understanding of memory, history, subjectivity and space. In the last decade or so, Burgin has worked with computer-generated imagery and the virtual camera. But rather than accepting a radical divide between so-called 'analogue' and 'digital' realms, Burgin has emphasised the continuity of the virtual camera, the various physical cameras in use today, and the painted images of Quattrocento painting - all of which have their essence in the perspectival system of representation. Further to this, Burgin argues that no image is merely an optical experience - all images are essentially psychological events and thus virtual also. Inseparable from language, they form the psychical spaces of fantasy and projection, recognition and misrecognition. Whether on pages, walls or screens, in galleries or online, single views, or swarms of picture fragments, images are the making and unmaking of our sense of self, and the world around us. This collection brings together for the first time Victor Burgin's writings related specifcally to the camera, following the shifts and nuances in his thinking over nearly five decades. Moreover, it allows us to chart the evolution of what the camera was and is, and how its affects are to be understood."--Publisher's website

During the 1970s, London-based photographers joined together to form collectives which engaged with local and international political protest in cities across the UK. This book is a survey of the radical community photography that these collectives produced. The photographers derived inspiration from counterculture while finding new ways to produce, publish and exhibit their work. They wanted to do things in their own way, to create their own magazines and exhibition networks, and to take their politicised photographic and textual commentary on the re-imagination of British cities in the post-war period into community centres, laundrettes, Working Men's Clubs, polytechnics, nurseries - anywhere that would have them. The laminated panel exhibitions were sufficiently robust, when packed into a laundry box, to withstand circulation round the country on British Rail's Red Star parcel network. Through archival research, interviews and newly discovered photographic and ephemeral material, this tells the story of the Hackney Flashers Collective, Exit Photography Group, Half Moon Photography Workshop, producers of Camerawork magazine, and the community darkrooms, North Paddington Community Darkroom and Blackfriars Photography Project. It reveals how they created a 'history from below', positioning themselves outside of established mainstream media, and aiming to make the invisible visible by bringing the disenfranchised and marginalised into the political debate.