The Douglas Lloyd Kahn Collection in the History of Photography and Film was formed at Fairleigh Dickinson University Library Florham Campus in 1991 in memory of Doug Kahn, who was passionate about these great photo-technical image-making arts. The Kahn collection is a special, non-circulating collection of print materials, some rare, gifted by Kahn family members and friends, and friends of the FDU Library.
Pioneers in the chiefly long-20th-century photographic and film-making arts, are represented in the Kahn collection as is the work of those original artists who so strongly influenced their development until today. The Kahn collection now comprises some 3,639 titles. Items from the Kahn collection may be examined in person by appointment only.
Shown here is but a small sampling of titles from the Douglas Lloyd Kahn Collection in the History of Photography and Film.
Apollo's Muse by
This fascinating view of lunar imagery explores visual representations of the moon from the dawn of photography to the present Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, Apollo's Muse honors the rich history of photographic representations of the moon, from rarely seen early daguerreotypes to contemporary video art. Engaging and accessible, the book explores how photographers captured this celestial body--and how the images have in turn inspired artists, writers, and scientists. The book's wide-ranging focus includes extraordinary reproductions of the first successful series of lunar daguerreotypes by the American photographer John Adams Whipple, along with film stills from Voyage dans la Lune (1902) by Georges Méliès; American "paper moon" studio portraits; images from the Apollo mission; and works by contemporary artists, including Vija Celmins, Roy Lichtenstein, Aleksandra Mir, Vik Muniz, Nam June Paik, and Robert Rauschenberg. Related prints, drawings, paintings, and astronomical instruments explore artists' fascination with the moon, as an object of both art and science. A foreword by actor Tom Hanks, star of the award-winning 1995 film Apollo 13, outlines the importance of lunar images to art and cinema, reinforcing the universal fascination with representations of the cosmos.
Camera Historica by
Antoine de Baecque proposes a new historiography of cinema, exploring film as a visual archive of the twentieth century, as well as history's imprint on the cinematic image. Whether portraying events that occurred in the past or stories unfolding before their eyes, certain twentieth-century filmmakers used a particular mise-en-scène to give form to history, becoming in the process historians themselves. Historical events, in turn, irrupted into cinema. This double movement, which de Baecque terms the "cinematographic form of history," disrupts the very material of film, much like historical events disturb the narrative of human progress. De Baecque defines, locates, and interprets cinematographic forms in seven distinct bodies of cinema: 1950s modern cinema and its conjuring of the morbid trauma of war; French New Wave and its style, which became the negative imprint of the malaise felt by young contemporaries of the Algerian War; post-Communist Russian films, or the "de-modern" works of catastroika; contemporary Hollywood films that attach themselves to the master fiction of 9/11; the characteristic mise en forme of filmmaker Sacha Guitry, who, in Si Versailles m'était conté (1954), filmed French history from inside its chateau; the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who evoked history through his own museum memory of the twentieth century; and the achievements of Peter Watkins, the British filmmaker who reported on history like a war correspondent. De Baecque's introduction clearly lays out his theoretical framework, a profoundly brilliant conceptualization of the many ways cinema and history relate.
Carrie Mae Weems by
The work of contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) hits hard with a powerful mix of lived life and social commentary. Since the late 1970s, her photographs, films, and installations have become known for presenting realistic and authentic images of African Americans while confronting themes of race, gender, and class. This book, the first major survey of Weems's career, traces the artist's commitment to addressing issues of social justice through her artwork. Her early photographs, which focused on African American women and families, have since led to work that examines more general aspects of the African diaspora, from the legacy of slavery to the perpetuation of debilitating stereotypes. Increasingly, she has broadened her view to include global struggles for equality and justice. This beautifully illustrated book highlights over 200 of Weems's most important works. Accompanying essays by leading scholars explore Weems's interest in folklore, her focus on the spoken and written word, the performative aspect of her constructed tableaux, and her expressions of black beauty.
CHIM - Children of War by
CHIM is an unprecedented collection of haunting social portraits shot for the newly formed UNICEF in post-World War II. By focusing on children, Magnum co-founder Chim's photos made many people aware of war's most vulnerable victims, thereby promoting the cause of peace. The images - many shown in this monograph for the first time - reveal Chim's unique capacity for engaging with his subjects, creating a style of photography that has influenced Magnum's photographers and generations of artists.
Cindy Sherman by
Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clich s. Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp. In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.
Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem by
By the mid-1940s, Gordon Parks was a successful photographer and Ralph Ellison began work on his acclaimed novel Invisible Man (1952). It is relatively unknown, however, that the two men were friends and that their common vision of racial injustice inspired collaboration on two important projects, in 1948 and 1952. Parks and Ellison first joined forces on an essay titled "Harlem Is Nowhere" for '48: The Magazine of the Year. Conceived while Ellison was already writing Invisible Man, this illustrated essay was centered on Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic-the first non-segregated psychiatric clinic in New York City-as a case study for the social and economic conditions of the neighborhood. He chose Parks to create the accompanying photographs and during the winter months of 1948, the two roamed the streets of Harlem. In 1952 they worked together again on "A Man Becomes Invisible" for the August 25 issue of Life magazine, which promoted Ellison's newly released novel. This is the first publication on Parks' and Ellison's collaboration on these two projects, one of which was lost while the other was published only in reduced form. The catalogue provides an in-depth look at the artists' shared vision of black life in America, with Harlem as its nerve center.
Malevich and Film by
Russian painter Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), unlike other prominent Soviet artists, has not been much considered in discussions of the contributions of the avant-garde to photography and film. Yet a close examination of theoretical and practical aspects of Malevich's oeuvre not only places him fully in the Soviet post-abstract discourse on these media but also, Margarita Tupitsyn argues in this analysis, alters the accepted view of his post-Suprematist period. Exploring Malevich's involvement with film, Tupitsyn draws on little-known writings about cinema by the artist himself, and many photographs and documents. Malevich's influence on 20th-century art extends far more widely than has been claimed for him before, the author concludes.
The New Woman International by
"In The New Woman International, editors Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco have gathered a group of intellectually stimulating and provocative essays that present the emergence, both tentative and triumphant, of this new global icon and her increasingly multicultural image. Written largely by historians of art and film, these essays emphasize visual analysis of the photographic and film media that carried the new woman's influential message." ---Norma Broude, American University "The New Woman International focuses on the New Woman not simply as an image to be analyzed but also as a producer of images and text. This groundbreaking anthology represents a theoretically sophisticated set of essays that thoroughly examine the phenomenon of the New Woman in previously unexplored ways." ---Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, CUNY Images of flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, and trampky---all embodiments of the dashing New Woman---symbolized an expanded public role for women from the suffragist era through the dawn of 1960s feminism. Chronicling nearly a century of global challenges to gender norms, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s is the first book to examine modern femininity's ongoing relationship with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' most influential new media: photography and film. This volume examines the ways in which novel ideas about women's roles in society and politics were disseminated through these technological media, and it probes the significance of radical changes in female fashion, appearance, and sexual identity. Additionally, these original essays explore the manner in which New Women artists used photography and film to respond creatively to gendered stereotypes and to reconceive of ways of being a woman in a rapidly modernizing world. The New Woman International brings together different generations of scholars and curators who are experts in gender, photography, literature, mass media, and film to analyze the New Woman from her inception in the later nineteenth century through her full development in the interwar period, and the expansion of her forms in subsequent decades. Arranged both chronologically and thematically, these essays show how controversial female ideals figured in discourses including those on gender norms, race, technology, sexuality, female agency, science, media representation, modernism, commercial culture, internationalism, colonialism, and transnational modernity. In exploring these topics through images that range from montages to newspapers' halftone prints to film stills, this book investigates the terms of gendered representation as a process in which women were as much agents as allegories. Inaugurating a new chapter in the scholarship of representation and New Womanhood and spanning North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and the colonial contexts of Africa and the Pacific, this volume reveals the ways in which a feminine ideal circled the globe to be translated into numerous visual languages. With a foreword from the eminent feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, this collection includes contributions by Jan Bardsley, Matthew Biro, Gianna Carotenuto, Melody Davis, Kristine Harris, Karla Huebner, Kristen Lubben, Maria Makela, Elizabeth Otto, Martha H. Patterson, Vanessa Rocco, Clare I. Rogan, Despina Stratigakos, Brett M. Van Hoesen, Kathleen M. Vernon, and Lisa Jaye Young. DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS: a collaborative imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library
Saul Bass by
This is the first book to be published on one of the greatest American designers of the 20th Century, who was as famous for his work in film as for his corporate identity and graphic work. With more than 1,400 illustrations, many of them never published before and written by the leading design historian Pat Kirkham, this is the definitive study that design and film enthusiasts have been eagerly anticipating. Saul Bass (1920-1996) created some of the most compelling images of American post-war visual culture. Having extended the remit of graphic design to include film titles, he went on to transform the genre. His best known works include a series of unforgettable posters and title sequences for films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Otto Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder. He also created some of the most famous logos and corporate identity campaigns of the century, including those for major companies such as AT&T, Quaker Oats, United Airlines and Minolta. His wife and collaborator, Elaine, joined the Bass office in the late 1950s. Together they created an impressive series of award-winning short films, including the Oscar-winning Why Man Creates, as well as an equally impressive series of film titles, ranging from Stanley Kubrick s Spartacus in the early 1960s to Martin Scorsese s Cape Fear and Casino in the 1990s. Designed by Jennifer Bass, Saul Bass's daughter and written by distinguished design historian Pat Kirkham who knew Saul Bass personally, this book is full of images from the Bass archive, providing an in depth account of one of the leading graphic artists of the 20th century.
The Show Starts on the Sidewalk by
Documents the history of the American movie theatre, tracing its evolution and exploring its role in American culture and architecture. The book focuses on the career of S. Charles Lee, who designed more than 300 theatres between 1920-1950, buildings that became prototypes for the whole country.
Tina Modotti by
"Tina Modotti, 1896-1942, was a remarkable woman and an outstanding photographer whose legendary beauty and relationships with famous men have until now eclipsed a life integrally linked to the most important artistic, political and historical developments of our century." "A woman of enormous courage, both in life-threatening situations and her challenging of women's traditional roles, Tina Modotti's life became the stuff of myth and legend. Based on years of painstaking research in Mexico, Europe and the United States, Tina Modotti - Photographer and Revolutionary includes a wealth of new material and is a major step toward demythologizing the life of one of the most fascinating women of an extraordinary era." "In 1913 Tina Modotti left her native Italy for San Francisco, becoming a star of the local Italian theatre before marrying the romantic poet-painter Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey. By 1920, she had embarked on a Hollywood film career and immersed herself in bohemian Los Angeles, beginning an intense relationship with the respected American photographer, Edward Weston." "On a trip to Mexico in 1922 to bury her husband, she met the Mexican muralists and became enthralled with the burgeoning cultural renaissance there. Increasingly dissatisfied with the film world, she persuaded Weston to teach her photography and move with her to Mexico. Her Mexico City homes became renowned gathering places for artists, writers and radicals, where Diego Rivera courted Frida Kahlo and Latin American exiles plotted revolution." "Turning her camera to record Mexico in its most vibrant years, her photographs achieve a striking synthesis of artistic form and social content. Her contact with Mexico's muralists, including a brief affair with Rivera, led to her involvement in radical politics. In 1929, she was framed for the murder of her Cuban lover, gunned down at her side on a Mexico City street. A scapegoat of government repression, she was publicly slandered in a sensational trial before being acquitted." "Expelled from Mexico in 1930, she went to Berlin and then to the Soviet Union, where she abandoned photography for a political activism that brought her into contact with Sergei Eisenstein, Alexandra Kollontai, La Pasionaria, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa. She carried out dangerous Comintern missions in fascist Europe, became an apparatchik in the early years of Stalinism, and played a key role in the Spanish Civil War. Returning to Mexico incognito in 1939, she died three years later, a lonely - and controversial - death."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
