In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South-from South Carolina to Arkansas-to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in You Have Seen Their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded by more than three years. Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.

Containing 30 essays that embody the history of photography, this collection includes contributions from Niepce, Daguerre, Fox, Talbot, Poe, Emerson, Hine, Stieglitz, and Weston, among others.

Drawn from the International Center of Photography's archives, this book highlights the incomparable style and fascinating career of Weegee, one of New York City's quintessential press photographers. For a decade between 1935 and 1946, Weegee made a name for himself snapping crime scenes, victims, and perpetrators. Armed with a Speed Graphic camera and a police-band radio, Weegee often beat the cops to the story, determined to sell his pictures to the sensation-hungry tabloids. His stark black-and-white photos were often lurid and unsettling. Yet, as this beautifully produced volume shows, they were also brimming with humanity. Designed as a series of "dossiers," this book follows Weegee's transformation from a freelancer to a photo-detective. It explores his relationship with the tabloid press and gangster culture and reveals his intimate knowledge of New York's darkest corners. It provides readers with a rich historical experience--a New York City "noir" shot through the lens of one of its most iconoclastic figures.

Between 1935 and 1943, a group of photographers under the direction of Roy Emerson Stryker set out to photograph the United States for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information. Photographs taken by this celebrated group, whose ranks included Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee and Walker Evans, have since become icons of the 1930s and 1940s. In recent years, however, their work has been reproduced with little discussion of the particular circumstances surrounding its creation. "Documenting America" takes a fresh look at these remarkable photographs. The book opens with two incisive essays by Lawrence Levine and Alan Trachtenberg that examine issues central to photography and American culture. While Levine explains how the pictures portray the complexity of life in the period, balancing scenes of Depression hard times with images of the pleasures of life, Trachtenberg analyzes the way in which viewers read photographs and the role of the government picture file that stands between the creation of the photographs and their use. Both essayists raise important questions about Stryker's grand ambition of a photographic record of America, about the 'ways of seeing' that have grown up around the most famous of these photographs, and about the whole enterprise of documentary photography and the conventions of realism. The images themselves are presented in series selected from groups of pictures created by single photographers. A documentary photographer often makes dozens of exposures to portray different elements of the subject, experiment with camera angles, and cover the stages of an event or steps of a process. By studying these pictures in series, we come closer to the photographer working in the field. We see a tenant farming community in Gee's Bend, Georgia, the activities of the Salvation Army in San Francisco, and the hubbub and commotion that filled Chicago's Union Railway Station in 1943. Texts accompanying each of the book's fifteen series describe the circumstances that gave rise to the creation of the pictures and discuss the relation between government policy and the subjects of the photographs. The nearly three hundred images included vividly portray America in the last bitter years of the Great Depression and the first years of the Second World War.

Winner of the Charles C. Eldredge Prize

In this book, Alan Trachtenberg reinterprets some of America's most significant photographs, presenting them not as static images but rather as rich cultural texts suffused with meaning and historical content. Reading American Photographs is lavishly illustrated with the work of such luminaries as Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Walker Evans--pictures that document the American experience from 1839 to 1938. In an outstanding analysis, Trachtenberg eloquently articulates how the art of photography has both followed and shaped the course of American history, and how images captured decades ago provocatively illuminate the present.

Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.

Jacob Riis s pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title from Rabelais s Pantagruel: One half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of that Country. An anatomy of New York City s slums in the 1880s, it vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of the other half, who might well have inhabited another country. The book pricked the conscience of its readers and raised the tenement into a symbol of intransigent social difference. As Alan Trachtenberg makes clear in his introduction, it is a book that still speaks powerfully to us today of social injustice.

Except for the modernization of spelling and punctuation, the John Harvard Library edition of "How the Other Half Lives" reproduces the text of the first published book version of November 1890. For this edition, prints have been made from Riis s original photographs now in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Endnotes aid the contemporary reader.

Fourteen of Walker Evans's evocative photographs of Brooklyn Bridge, most of which have never been published, appear in this edition of Alan Trachenberg's "Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol." In the new afterword Trachenberg explores the history of Hart Crane's "The Bridge," especially the poem's integral relationship with the powerful photography of Evans.
" Brooklyn Bridge] is familiar in so many movies, in so many stage sets and, as Mr. Trachtenberg shows in this brilliant . . . book, it is at least as much a symbol as a reality. . . . Mr. Trachtenberg is always exciting and illuminating."--"Times Literary Supplement
""The book is a skillful and insightful synthesis of materials about Brooklyn Bridge from such diverse fields as history, engineering, literature and art. Essentially it asks the question of why Brooklyn Bridge achieved such great impact on the nineteenth century American imagination and why it has continued to have a significant impact on twentieth century art and literature. In addition to its exploration of the bridge's symbolic significance, which includes perceptive analyses of such particular works as Hart Crane's great poem cycle and the paintings of artists like Joseph Stella, the book also includes a solidly researched account of the conception, planning and construction of the bridge. Trachtenberg's account of the intellectual and cultural sources of the bridge is particularly fascinating in its demonstration of the convergence of many different philosophical and ideological currents of the time around this great engineering enterprise, illustrating as effectively as any discussion I know the complex interplay of ideas and material culture."--John G. Cawelti, University of Chicago
"Alan Trachtenberg's "Brooklyn Bridge" is a fascinating story, the philosophic genesis of the idea in Europe, John Roebling's heroic effort to translate it into masonry and steel, and the meanings that Americans attached to the physical object as an emblem of their aspirations."--Leo Marx, Amherst College, author of "The Machine in the Garden"

New edition of poignant selected images from famed Life photographer W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh project.   In 1955, having just resigned from his high-profile but stormy career with Life Magazine, W. Eugene Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce one hundred photographs for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant’s book commemorating the city’s bicentennial. Smith ended up staying a year, compiling twenty thousand images for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life. But only a fragment of this work was ever seen, despite Smith's lifelong conviction that it was his greatest collection of photographs.   In 2001, Sam Stephenson published for the first time an assemblage of the core images from this project, selections that Smith asserted were the “synthesis of the whole,� presenting not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of postwar America. This new edition, updated with a foreword by the poet Ross Gay, offers a fresh vision of Smith's masterpiece.  

""Lincoln's Smile" demonstrates why Alan Trachtenberg has been the leading scholar in American studies for more than four decades." --Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University  Alan Trachtenberg has always been interested in cultural artifacts that register meanings and feelings that Americans share even when they disagree about them. Some of the most beloved ones--like the famous last photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at the time of his second inaugural--are downright puzzling, and it is their obscure, riddlelike aspects that draw his attention in the scintillating essays of "Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas." With matchless authority, Trachtenberg moves from daguerreotypes to literary texts to subjects as diverse as Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the early works of Lewis Mumford.

In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South--from South Carolina to Arkansas--to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in "You Have Seen Their Faces," a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's "How the Other Half Lives," and James Agee and Walker Evans's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," which it preceded by more than three years.

Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.

This is the first full-length examination of Lewis H. Hine (1874-1940), the intellectual and aesthetic father of social documentary photography. Kate Sampsell-Willmann assesses Hine's output through the lens of his photographs, his political and philosophical ideologies, and his social and aesthetic commitments to the dignity of labor and workers.

Using Hine's images, published articles, and private correspondence, "Lewis Hine as Social Critic" places the artist within the context of the Progressive Era and its associated movements and periodicals, such as the Works Progress Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, the Chicago School of Social Work, and Rex Tugwell's "American Economic Life and the Means of Its Improvement." This intellectual history, heavily illustrated with HIne's photography, compares his career and concerns with other prominent photographers of the day--Jacob Riis, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White.

Through detailed analysis of how Hine's images and texts intersected with concepts of urban history and social democracy, this volume reestablishes the artist's intellectual preeminence in the development of American photography as socially conscious art.

A classic examination of the roots of corporate culture, newly revised and updated for the twenty first century
Alan Trachtenberg presents a balanced analysis of the expansion of capitalist power in the last third of the nineteenth century and the cultural changes it brought in its wake. In America's westward expansion, labor unrest, newly powerful cities, and newly mechanized industries, the ideals and ideas by which Americans lived were reshaped, and American society became more structured, with an entrenched middle class and a powerful business elite. Here, in an updated edition which includes a new introduction and a revised bibliographical essay, is a brilliant, essential work on the origins of America's corporate culture and the formation of the American social fabric after the Civil War.