Now on the New Book Shelf: Portraiture
Currently on the Cudahy New Book Shelf we have five books that engage in some manner with the theme of portraiture. First is Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters: Thirty-three Years. Beginning in 1975, Nicholas Nixon, married to one of the four Brown sisters, began an annual tradition of photographing the sisters once yearly, with the sisters always standing in the same order. This, then, is a collection that assembles all 33 of the yearly group portraits taken so far, spanning from 1975-2007, marking the passage of time.
Also focused on a single subject is Harry Callahan’s Eleanor. For two decades, from the early 1940s to the early 1960s, the American photographer Callahan photographed his wife Eleanor, and the couple’s longstanding collaboration makes up an intimate visual diary of their relationship and of Callahan’s artistic exploration.
In what could be considered self-portraiture, American Photobooth, by Nakki Goranin tells the comprehensive history of the photobooth, from its invention and technological evolution to the personal, human aspect, represented by a large collection of anonymous photobooth images that Goranin found in flea markets and garbage bins over the years.
Unrecounted unites what W.G. Sebald referred to as his “micropoems” with 33 lithographs by the artist Jan Peter Tripp that portray, with stunning exactness, pairs of eyes. The art and the poems, instead of explaining one another, instead engage in a kind of dialogue.
And finally in The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900, critic Max Kozloff provides a fully illustrated, authoritative commentary on the history of portrait photography, examining the personalities behind and in front of the camera, as well as the relationship between photographer and subject as revealed through a broad range of styles and movements of the genre.
