Any examination of the history of the photographic portrait uncovers two very different traditions, shaped by the place where they were made - in the street or in the studio. Both are essentially urban. The street has been the place where small and easily concealed cameras allowed photographers to capture subjects unaware or at least in informal settings. In contrast, the studio offered both photographer and subjects the opportunity to present carefully composed images to the world, making use of all the elaborate staging and technical tricks at their disposal. Both these practices have since been subverted, with celebrities becoming used to posing in the street and the studio being used for informal and intimate shots. For the first time this book examines the contrasts and tensions between these two traditions, revealing much about the history of photography itself and providing fascinating insights into the changing face of societies across the globe.The book will include many of the greatest names in the history of photography. Among those who have famously photographed in the street, it will feature work by Atget, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Araki, Boris Mikhailov and Wolfgang Tillmans. Studio-based photographers include Carlo Ponti, Edward Steichen, Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Annie Leibovitz, Jurgen Teller, and Rineke Dijkstra. Essays by leading critics examine the history of street and studio photography and how the images these photographers have produced has conditioned the way we see both the modern city and ourselves.

Between 2006 and 2020, French photographer and artist Bruno Serralongue conducted a prolonged engagement with the community of refugees on their last stop in a long journey to reach England. The resulting photographs, which formed the basis for an exhibition at Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 2019, are published here for the first time. Serralongue captured disparate moments in the lives of the exiles, their attempts to reach England and their provisional camps which were dismantled by the French government in 2020. Serralongue’s images employ a suspended temporality that contradicts the sensationalised images broadcast by the mass media, recalling the visual traditions of history painting more than photojournalism. The slowness of his photography, a characteristic of working with a view camera, requires both a distance from, and a proximity with, the subjects photographed, achievable only due to a relationship of trust built with the inhabitants of the ‘Jungle’.

The volume documents Bellum, the new artistic project by Carlo Valsecchi (Brescia, 1965). The 44 large-scale photographs in this series tell the story of the ancestral conflict between man and nature and man and man; nature used as a defence from others, and nature as something to defend ourselves from. The Alps are a symbol of all this, as nature at its most extreme, yet also the site of the last war of position. The project therefore explores the territories and fortifications of northeast Italy connected to World War I, one of the last times when human fate and experience were directly linked to the laws, conditions and control of nature. In three years of work, Valsecchi roamed these mountains with his view camera from winter until spring, and captured its harsh reality, in a form that is often abstract, intimately aesthetic, and absolute. The images in Bellum are sudden glimpses, portals of light and composition that hover in an endless time between loneliness, isolation and waiting. The catalogue features essays by Florian Ebner, chief curator of the Cabinet of Photography at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Yehuda Emmanuel Safran, art and architecture critic and professor at the Pratt Institute in New York. Text in English, German and Italian.