The histories of these communities have formed the backbone of Cuba, and yet they are rarely depicted in photographic representations of the country. Sharum began researching Campesino communities in late 2015 and his resulting black and white photographs depict the intertwined relationship of people and the land they depend on.

Nobody photographs libraries, those splendid and intimate cathedrals of knowledge, as beautifully as Candida Hoefer. Her photographs are sober and restrained - the atmosphere is disturbed by neither visitors nor users, especially as she forgoes any staging of the locations. The emptiness is imbued with substance by a subtle attention to colour, and the prevailing silence instilled with a metaphysical quality that gives voice to the objects, over and above the eloquence of the furnishings or the pathos of the architecture. This sumptuous volume contains Hoefer's famously ascetic images of the British Library in London, the Escorial in Spain, the Whitney Museum and the Pierpoint Library in New York, the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, the Villa Medici in Rome and the Hamburg University Library, among others. Umberto Eco introduces the collection with a witty reflection on the role of libraries in all our lives. Almost completely devoid of people, as is Hoefer's trademark, these pictures radiate a comforting serenity that is exceptional in contemporary photography.

'I have seen landscapes which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.' - C.S. Lewis The magnificent mountains of Mourne have long inspired artists and writers. Here, author and photographer Gareth McCormack shares his passion, knowledge and stunning pictures of these sweeping peaks, including the great Slieve Donard, Slieve Bearnagh and Slieve Binnian, with its otherworldly granite tors. He travels further into Mourne Country, to the towns of Newcastle by the sea, Dundrum and Kilkeel, and the estates of Tollymore, Rostrevor and Castlewellan, and finds monuments that bear witness to lives long ago, from pre-historic dolmens to smugglers' routes, Norman castles to traditional stone walls.

An accessible monograph on the work of David Seymour (1911-56), the Polish-born American photojournalist, who used his camera to record the political upheavals and social change of the 1930s. Known by his pseudonym, Chim, Seymour was a practitioner of concerned photography and his images provide an eloquent testimony to the strength and vulnerability of humankind. He became known for his sensitive documentation of war and its devastating effects on its victims, especially children, and his documentation of the Spanish Civil War established him as one of history's finest photojournalists

Sour-Puss: The Opera is the result of a 5-year collaboration between artist duo Diogo Duarte and Jessica Mitchell who also work in mental health. Consisting of photographs, drawings and texts, the 'Sour-Puss' of the title is a composite character sometimes based on real-life Mitchell and real-life Duarte and their life experiences. Duarte and Mitchell were colleagues turned and then friends. The birth of 'Sour-Puss' was a gradual one emerging through conversations and arguments where they uncovered similarities in worldview, their feelings relating to themselves and a mutual dislike for 'positive thinking'. 'The composite character bearing both biographical and fictional traits was created to expose the hypocrisies and inconsistencies within normative power structures. 'Sour-Puss' has no desire to 'accept' or 'assimilate' mainstream versions of gender and sexuality. 'Sour-Puss' is in the truest sense of the word, queer'. 'She is neither passive nor an object nor a limp body for my eyes to feast on. Even though my gaze, when I frame the photograph, is irrevocably mine and not Jessica's, conceptually it's not just my gaze, it's ours. That is fundamentally what makes this collaboration unique. The story of the woman in the photographs and her drawings, but also her narrative, arose out of many hours of conversing with Jessica about pain and repression, but also about happiness and freedom'. - Diogo Duarte 'The series has led to some honest and challenging conversations. It has shocked me just how surprised some people are that anyone would take pictures of a woman who looks like me ... I think middle-aged women terrify people --we are uncategorisable, we are harbingers of the 'doom' facing us all and we are cut loose, at least potentially, from many of the roles society likes to impose on women. Somehow 'Sour-Puss' embodies this--that I might do anything--and, in fact, I plan to'. - Jessica Mitchell 'Melancholia and a sense of isolation or alienation, feeling fundamentally wrong or at odds with the world, are the backing track to the work. Questions are raised concerning sexuality and gender, age and beauty, body image, and even the idea of redemption or reconciliation and how it can be possible--or if it can be possible-- to live within the context of one's own 'insanities, ' accepting these as part of whom one is. Acceptance of oneself--the good, the bad and the ugly, or, as Mitchell says: 'loving oneself, and screwing up, and loving one's self again--accepting all the imperfections'. - From the essay by Anna McNay

End of a century... In the late 1990s as a graduate from art school I began making pictures for my beloved Sleazenation magazine and in particular for the infamous listing pages to the rear of the magazine that were called "Savoir Vivre" (loosely translated as to know how to live!) The images were made in B&W and were immensely candid and full of characters that seems to be everywhere at that time. The images on the pages were essentially describing to those that liked to go clubbing what they actually looked like, what those in the provinces who desired the decadent lifestyle of the urban cool could eventually look like and for the international reader in the fashion capitals of Paris, Milan and Rome it kept them wondering what on earth was going on. London was at the epicentre of a cultural boom. Small clubs, parties and discos where a plenty in venues from North to South and I was in a minicab and night bus taking in 3-4 of an evening. My weekends were a write off and I slept most of Monday trying to recover...Here are the spoils for while my young son was sleeping I was involved in capturing a period in time that was filled with love, lust and messy authenticity, carefree and devoid of today's global, big tech cynicism. Nothing here was perceived or played out. It was done with wide eyed hope and wonder and I'm not sure we can ever return to this place or at least not for a good while. As my world as a photographer has expanded throughout the capitals of Europe and across the Atlantic shooting campaigns and fashion editorials for V magazine, POP and Vogue Hommes I can look at these pictures with perhaps some greater objectivity. My son, now in his early 20s sits beside me and discusses those times and how they differ from today as he negotiates the beginning of his creative journey. These pictures aren't about Teds, Skinheads, Northern Soul, Acid House or Jungle and Garage, they're not about Nu Metal or South London blackout clubs...but they are all here alongside high street carpet clubs because here in the UK we know how to throw a party, we work hard and play hard, grace under pressure, street style into high fashion To quote Ray Davies I ask, 'Where have all the good times gone'? I remain friends with many of the characters that were my colleagues at sleazenation at that time. Steve Beale and Justin Quirk were the irreverent editorial team eventually cherry picked by Emap and Conde Naste to become significant editors and creatives respectively. The Photo editor who gave me my break out of art school was Steve Lazarides who went on a few years later to represent and champion a graffiti artist called Banksy, The Magazines firebrand designer was for a while Scott King who immediately won awards for his controversial front covers and designs. I clearly remember meeting Wolfgang Tillmans at one of his exhibition openings in Herald Street in what must have been 1999. He raved about the pictures we had been making for the magazine and enjoyed the overall subversive sentiment. I was enthused and still am to this day. I'd suggest many of these collaborators to work alongside one another to help articulate and visualise this group of pictures into a book. Most of the images have never been seen before and I believe an international audience would be hungry for the authenticity found in an era that perhaps should have known better. I'm glad we didn't .

W.R. Trivett (1884-1966), a farmer born in Watauga County, North Carolina, was also a self-taught professional photographer who left behind an invaluable collection of over 400 glass plate negatives taken between 1907 and the late 1940s in the Beech Mountain community of neighboring Avery County. Along with the photographs (over 90 of which are reproduced herein), a collection of Trivett's personal papers survive, revealing very enlightening information about his life in the mountains. This work--the fourth in McFarland's continuing series of Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies--carefully examines Trivett's life and photographs, comparing his work to that of contemporary outside photographers who often produced stereotypical images of mountain people. Through Trivett's images we can, by contrast, see the everyday reality for most people in rural Appalachia.

Focusing on one broadly representative figure, Francis Bedford, this study emphasizes how photographs operated to form and transmit cultural ideas and values. The first writing on Bedford since the 1970s, the book examines the work of a man who was one of Victorian England's premier landscape photographers, and also a successful photographic entrepreneur. His fusion of art and commerce illuminates classifications of each field, exemplifies the tensions between them, and demonstrates a reconciliation of two often conflicting sets of issues. This study fills an informational gap, and analyzes the definitions, expectations, and positioning of photography in its seminal decades. The multiple interpretative possibilities arising from Bedford's photographs in particular elucidate the range of discussions and complexity of ideas about culture and nature, the individual and the nation, home and abroad, and the past and the present engaging the mid-Victorian public. Major themes of the book include the intersection of nature and culture, the related practice of nineteenth-century tourism, attitudes toward historical identity, and the formation of a national identity in England and Wales, c. 1856-94.

Focusing on early nineteenth-century England?and on the works and texts of the inventor of paper photography, William Henry Fox Talbot?Singular Images, Failed Copies historicizes the conceptualization of photography in that era as part of a major historical change. Treating photography not merely as a medium or a system of representation but also as an epistemology, Vered Maimon challenges today's prevalent association of the early photograph with the camera obscura. Instead, she points to material, formal, and conceptual differences between those two types of images by considering the philosophical and aesthetic premises linked with early photography. Through this analysis she argues that the emphasis in Talbot's accounts on the removal of the "artist's hand" in favor of "the pencil of nature" did not mark a shift from manual to "mechanical" and more accurate or "objective" systems of representation. In Singular Images, Failed Copies, Maimon shows that the perception of the photographic image in the 1830s and 1840s was in fact symptomatic of a crisis in the epistemological framework that had informed philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic thought for two centuries.

Three decades of fashion brought together in one Collection, worn as originally intended by the Collector herself, and developed over five years by established fashion and portrait photographer Frederic Aranda: this is Electric Fashion. But why is it electric? It is the story of how the Collector, Christine Suppes, blazed an indelible trail into online fashion editorial whilst developing a unique collection in the heart of Silicon Valley. Electric Fashion is essential viewing, punctuated with academic perspective, comprehensive technical references, and archival text from the collection's accompanying website, fashionlines.com. This timeless tome boasts a double vantage point; on the one hand, each garment is photographed in a studio setting to enhance critical academic understanding, whilst on the other, worn by the collector herself at locations around the world to depict the garments as they were originally intended to be worn. The finished product is a 360 degree view of fashion, from historical, cultural, and practical standpoints.

This is a display of her entire oeuvre, with neither a curator nor any apparent order, which seeks to question the art market and its rules. At the same time, this book shows a series made up of pictures taken in New Zealand in which the artist strives to bring depth back to landscape photography by using mirrors and her own devices. Both works are captured in this publication, a book that had become an object of desire even before it materialised, as always happens with the works of one of the most fascinating photographers on today's scene. Every copy is signed and numbered by the artist.

The approach is based on "In Movement: Art for Social Change", an NGO which uses dance, theatre, music, the fine arts, creative writing and the circus arts to create a life space of personal reaffirmation and social integration for Ugandan youths. There they can practice and display their art and receive applause from an audience, the best reaffirmation therapy possible.

A year before 1967's famed Summer of Love, documentary photographer William Gedney set out for San Francisco on a Guggenheim Fellowship to record "aspects of our culture which I believe significant and which I hope will become, in time, part of the visual record of American history." A Time of Youth brings together eighty-seven of the more than two thousand photographs Gedney took in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood between October 1966 and January 1967. In these photographs Gedney documents the restless and intertwined lives of the disenchanted youth who flocked to what became the epicenter of 1960s counterculture. Gedney lived among these young people in their communal homes, where he captured the intimate and varied contours of everyday life: solitude and companionship, joyous celebration and somber quiet, cramped rooms and spacious parks, recreation and contemplation. In these images Gedney presents a portrait of a San Francisco counterculture that complicates popular depictions of late 1960s youth as carefree flower children. The book also includes facsimiles of handwritten descriptions of the scenes Gedney photographed, his thoughts on organizing the book, and other ephemera.

Lauded by photographers, artists, and critics for his influence on the contemporary generation of art photographers, James Welling has created beautiful and uncompromising photographs for over thirty-five years. Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture, and traditional photography, Welling is first and foremost a photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. James Welling: Monograph will provide the most thorough presentation of the artist's work to date, as well as offer an indispensible resource for those interested in this artist's remarkable, foundational practice. Since the mid-1970s, Welling's work has fluidly explored a mercurial set of issues and ideas: the tenets of realism and transparency, abstraction and representation, optics and description, personal and cultural memory, and the material and chemical nature of photography. To date, the artist has been the subject of numerous catalogs addressing his more than twenty-five different bodies of work-Welling's "substantive investigation of the spectrum of abstract to figurative," as one curator has described it. Yet no book has appeared with the ambition of linking these bodies of work together by examining the primary threads that run through them all. That is, until now. Sumptuously produced, James Welling: Monograph, presents a large selection of recent series, from 2000 through to the present, comingled with important early and iconic works made in the preceding decades. Chief curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum, James Crump, working closely with the artist, contributes an extensive introductory essay, and the volume will also include text contributions by Mark Godfrey, Thomas Seelig, and an interview with Eva Respini, associate curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA.

Robert Polidori is known for his large format photographs of habitats and rooms saturated with the traces of human intervention. In EYE and I, he turns the lens around to reveal the portraits of people he has encountered in his work of over thirty years photographing around the world, particularly in the Middle East and India. These instantaneous portraits of mutual recognition reveal the photographed subject and the photographer intersecting with each other in a fleeting gaze of mutual regard. Robert Polidori was born in Montreal in 1951 and lives in New York City. His work has been the subject of exhibitions in New York, London, Brazil, Montreal, among other places. He received the World Press Photo Award in 1997, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography in 1999 and 2000, and Communication Arts awards in 2007 and 2008. In 2006, Polidori's series of photographs of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His bestselling books Havana (2003), Zones of Exclusion-Pripyat and Chernobyl (2003), After the Flood (2006), Parcours Museologique Revisite (2009) and Some Points in Between... Up Till Now (2010) are published by Steidl.

In October of 1966, a coal waste tip slipped down the mountainside above the Welsh village of Aberfan and buried its school, killing 116 children. Within hours, the worldwide news media descended upon the village, stripping away any sense of deserved privacy and rendering "the village that lost its children" a perennial destination for disaster tourism. Shimon Attie's sensitive portrayal of Aberfan today takes the form of a five-channel high definition video installation and a body of still photographs in which the villagers "perform" being themselves, in terms of their social or occupational roles. Thus, Attie subsumes the story of the disaster below a contemporary art historical narrative that helps normalize how the village is represented. This volume presents both photographs and video stills. It comes with a DVD featuring the award winning BBC documentary "An American in Aberfan," as well as a short film representing the installation.

A new-born baby is carefully checked over at a hospital in Jaipur, a small girl grins from a bench on Rome's Piazza Navona and energetic boys jostle in front of the camera in Havana - over his long career and on his many travels Steve McCurry has taken an incredible selection of photographs of children, each one managing to hint at an epic story. Stories and Dreams brings a unique selection of these images together for the first time. With an introduction from Ziauddin Yousafzai, father of Malala, this is a colourful portrayal of the challenges, hopes and adventures of children from across the world.

This work examines the cultural impact of photography in Argentina following the end of the country's military dictatorship in the early 1980s. The interpretive study surveys nine modern photographers in Argentina - Marcelo Brodsky, Gabriel Valansi, Eduardo Gil, Gaby Messina, Adriana Lestido, Gabriel Diaz, Marcos Lopez, Silivio Fabrykant and Gabriela Liffschitz - and covers the major themes in each of their works. The author details each photographer's cultural and artistic contributions and provides a listing of the websites where their works can be viewed.