WATERSTONES BEST BOOKS OF 2022 - SPORT 'This book is a work of art about football's works of art... Loved it.' - Kevin Day, broadcaster 'A beautiful showcase of such a distinctive part of the game's culture... impossible not to get lost in the book' - Miguel Delaney, The Independent 'Gorgeous to behold... Unmissable' - Danny Kelly, TalkSPORT radio presenter 'I absolutely love this book' - Jules Breach, football presenter On high-rise buildings, street corners and stadium walls in countries around the world, eye-catching murals pay tribute to footballing greats. From Messi and Ronaldo to Rapinoe and Cruyff, these striking displays are remarkable testaments to the awe and affection fans feel for these football legends and cult heroes. Join renowned football writer and broadcaster Andy Brassell as he explores this fascinating phenomenon. Offering a fresh, highly visual perspective on the global game, Football Murals is the first book to celebrate these towering works of art. Beckenbauer and Cruyff, Rooney and Ronaldinho, Totti and Salah, Zlatan and Zidane - being honoured with a mural cements a player's place in a club's heritage and links them to the heart of the community. This richly illustrated book showcases the most impressive examples, explores their inspirational qualities and examines what they say about these icons and their sport. Written and curated by respected football writer Andy Brassell, this ground-breaking book features more than 100 murals from around the world, capturing the scale, grandeur and wit of this powerful and popular art form. Through a series of short essays and extended captions, Andy shares the players' stories, discusses the cultural politics and explains just why these men and women have been immortalised in mural form. Covering such diverse topics as Home Town Glory, Football Fame and The Cult of the Coach, Football Murals addresses the issues important to fans worldwide. It spans Marcus Rashford's inspirational mural in a Manchester suburb, the George Best tribute on the East Belfast estate where he was born, the 15-foot depiction of Megan Rapinoe in St Paul, Minnesota, and the Naples 'shrine' to Diego Maradona.

We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference offers an unparalleled firsthand account of the influential photographer and curator Sunil Gupta's writing and critical inquiry since the 1970s. Newspaper articles, speeches, and essays show Gupta's crucial role at the center of grassroots queer and postcolonial organizing throughout an artistic career lived between Canada, the UK, and India. In his pieces about homosexuality in Indian cities, the AIDS crisis, the Black Arts Movement, or key figures including Joy Gregory and Robert Mapplethorpe, Gupta foregrounds the power of cultural activism in the politically fraught contexts of London and Delhi, and illuminates the essential connections between queer migration and self-discovery. Continually questioning given forms of identity, Gupta offers artists and curators multiple strategies of resistance, carving out space for new ways of imagining what it might mean to live, love, and create.

Over forty million people a year travel to Vegas, more than to Mecca. It is a global celebrity, an improbable oasis, a place offering bank-breaking fortunes and instant gratification, 24/7, with no moral debits. Award-winning writer Timothy O'Grady lived in Vegas for two years. He finally began to understand it when he talked to people who had grown up there, the children of the card dealers and cocktail shakers, the jugglers and the dancers - young people who had been bearing witness to this strange city all their lives. One had her student loans and credit card limits stolen by her father. Another fled a sequence of exploiters until she found herself living in the storm drains under the casinos. There is the boy whose father entered him into a drinking contest when he was eight, the casino owner's son, the erudite contortionist turned stripper. Each tells their own tale. In Children of Las Vegas, O'Grady renews his partnership with renowned photographer Steve Pyke. Through short essays, Pyke's portraits and ten witness testimonies, he pierces the city's glittering facade to reveal the darker reality that lies beneath.

"...a captivating book covering a wide spectrum of animal behaviour and species... this is a book to make you re-think the role of the female." -BBC Wildlife In the lion world, only the females hunt - because they do it best! The boss of a hyena pack? An alpha female. Even the lowest-ranking female of the pack is superior to her male counterparts. As for praying mantises? They keep interaction with men to the essentials, eating them right after mating for added nutrition. The first photo book to focus exclusively on the female of the species, Fearless Females is a fascinating account of "feminine" strength throughout the animal kingdom. With some 150 photographs, accompanied by remarkable facts and extraordinary stories, the book reveals the fierce, formidable, and fascinating antics of she lions, elephants, and many other creatures. A refreshing reappraisal of "feminine" behaviour and a long overdue emancipation of nature and wildlife photography. Text in English and German.

"A meticulous and shattering investigation of eight horrific pictures..."-L'Arche In December 1941, on a shore near the Latvian city of Liepaja, Nazi death squads (the Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators murdered in three days more than 2,700 Jews. The majority were women and children, most men having already been shot during the summer. The perpetrators took pictures of the December killings. These pictures are among the rare photographs from the first period of the extermination, during which over 800 000 Jews from the Baltic to the Black Sea were shot to death. By showing the importance of photography in understanding persecution, Nadine Fresco offers a powerful meditation on these images while confronting the essential questions of testimony and guilt. From the forward by Dorota Glowackay: Straddling the boundary between historical inquiry and personal reflection, this extraordinary text unfolds as a series of encounters with eponymic Holocaust photographs. Although only a small number of photographs are reproduced here, Fresco provides evocative descriptions of many well-known images: synagogues and Torah scrolls burning on the night of Kristallnacht; deportations to the ghettos and the camps; and, finally, mass executions in the killing fi elds of Eastern Europe. The unique set of photographs included in On the Death of Jews shows groups of women and children from Liepaja (Liepaja), shortly before they were killed in December 1941 in the dunes of Shkede (Skede) on the Baltic Sea. In the last photograph of the series, we see the victims' bodies tumbling into the pit.

This beautiful book explains the basics of composition and using your camera, but quickly moves on to show you how to try many different flower photography techniques, both indoors and out. Through clear step-by-step guides and stunning examples, it shows you how to capture the smallest flower portrait through to broad garden landscapes. There are ideas on how to develop a creative eye using available light, colour and background. The most important rules of flower photography are explained, and also how to break them. It shows how to use a light box in your home for flower portrait photography and still life and explains how to edit your photos and take them to another level. As well as practical advice it provides inspiration through a monthly photo gallery giving ideas of botanical subjects to capture throughout the year.

Focusing on the later work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), Claire Raymond takes up the question of the disintegrative condition of the art she produced in the last year of her life. Departing from the techniques of her earlier compositions, Woodman worked in the diazotype process for many of these late pieces, most importantly the monumental Blueprint for a Temple. Raymond shows that through her use of diazotype, a medium that breaks down when exposed to light, Woodman created art that is both supremely evocative aesthetically and inherently unstable physically. Woodman, Raymond contends, was imaginatively responding to the end of the durable image, a historical reality acknowledged in the way her work plays the ephemeral and evanescent against the monumental and enduring. Raymond focuses on the theoretical and the curatorial issues surrounding Woodman's diazotypes, a thematic and practical distress that haunts much of her later art, especially the artist's book and photo series Some Disordered Interior Geometries and Portrait of a Reputation. Rather than conceiving of Woodman herself as fragile, an artist chronicling and seeming to yearn for her own disappearance, Raymond juxtaposes Woodman's career-spanning documentation of her own image against other post-war witnesses of trauma - an artist standing in the museum ruins where she emerges most distinctly as a figure of postmodernity.

In a brand-new approach, this book presents photography in all its principal forms of experience, to portray the unique characteristics of this accessible and universally appealing medium. Arranged chronologically, legendary photographs are discussed alongside photobooks that represent a significant contribution towards photography, as well as important exhibitions that marked a shift in outlook, values and approach. In art history, particular works are usually cited as examples of specific styles; here photographs are given as indicative of art movements, which often developed precisely because of these examples. Among the works included are many that have had a profound impact across the globe, so circumventing or at least weakening the usual European-American emphasis. This guide is an inclusive and diverse account of the contributions of photographers from around the world from the birth of photography to the present day. Featuring stunning reproductions throughout with short essays and key references on each work by the widely respected photography academic and specialist David Bate, this title is set to become one of the definitive references on the subject and will appeal not only to readers seeking an introduction, but also to those more familiar with the medium. With 110 illustrations in colour

This book explores hybrid memoirs, combining text and images, authored by photographers. It contextualizes this sub-category of life writing from a historical perspective within the overall context of life writing, before taking a structural and cognitive approach to the text/image relationship. While autobiographers use photographs primarily for their illustrative or referential function, photographers have a much more complex interaction with pictures in their autobiographical accounts. This book explores how the visual aspect of a memoir may drastically alter the reader's response to the work, but also how, in other cases, the visual parts seem disconnected from the text or underused.

A new edition of John Berger and Jean Mohr's classic investigation into the nature of photography and what makes it so different from other art forms 'One of the world's most influential art critics ... Berger sees clearly with fresh surprise yet profound understanding' Washington Times In one of the most eloquent accounts of photography ever devised, the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr set out to understand the fundamental nature of photography and how it makes its impact. Asking a range of questions - What is a photograph? What do photographs mean? How can they be used? - they give their answers in terms of a photograph as 'a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photography are often contradictory'. From these beginnings they develop a theory of photography that has at its centre the form's essential ambiguity, arguing that photography is totally unlike a film and has nothing to do with reportage. Rather, it constitutes 'another way of telling'. The unique combination of critic and photographer results in a work that moves beyond the landmarks established by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag to establish a new theory of photography. This unique combination of words and pictures includes 230 photographs by Jean Mohr.

Think you know photography? Quiz yourself and friends with this deck of cards packed with fascinating facts and mind-blowing trivia all about photography history, famous shooters, and technical equipment and knowledge. Each card features a variety of questions of varying difficulty and subjects. Whether played as a game with others or as a personal challenge, players will learn more than they ever thought possible about photography. The Photography Trivia Deck makes the perfect gift for any camera enthusiast.

This book expounds fruitful ways of analysing matters of ecology, environments, nature, and the non-human world in a broad spectrum of material in French. Scholars from Canada, France, Great Britain, Spain, and the United States examine the work of writers and thinkers including Michel de Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Arthur Rimbaud, Marguerite Yourcenar, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres, Michel Houellebecq, and Eric Chevillard. The diverse approaches in the volume signal a common desire to bring together form and content, politics and aesthetics, theory and practice, under the aegis of the environmental humanities.