"I would hope that I am one of a kind." -Rodney Smith Mystery and manners, romance and fun-the sophisticated compositions and stylish characters in the extraordinary pictures of fashion photographer Rodney Smith (1947-2016) exist in a timeless world of his imagination. Born in New York City, Smith started out as a photo-essayist, turned to portrait photography, and found his niche, and greatest success, in fashion photography. Inspired by W. Eugene Smith, taught by Walker Evans, and devoted to the techniques of Ansel Adams, Smith was driven by the dual ideals of technical mastery and pure beauty. This lavish volume features nearly two hundred reproductions of Smith's images-many that have never before been published-and weaves together a biocritical essay by Getty Museum curator Paul Martineau and a technical assessment of Smith's production by the Center for Creative Photography's chief curator, Rebecca Senf. It maps Smith's creative trajectory-including his introduction to photography, early personal projects, teaching, commissioned pieces, and career in fashion-and provides insight into his personal life and character, contextualizing his work and creative tendencies within his privileged but lonely upbringing and his complex emotional and psychological makeup. Rodney Smith is the definitive record of the life's work and worldview of a truly original artist.

An artist of singular originality and vision, award-winning landscape photographer Mark Klett has built a profound and dynamic career that captures the space and history of the American West while evoking notions of time, perception, and cultural memory. His practice is grounded in both artistic inquiry and the evolution of photographic technologies, reflecting a constellation of ideas that blend science with poetry. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Klett has advanced a new notion of landscape photography that reframes our sense of what pictures of the land mean. Seeing Time is the first retrospective of Klett's career. It presents selected photographs from thirteen different projects, some never before seen. The book showcases work from individual and collaborative projects alongside texts by distinguished curators who examine the ideas behind Klett's practice, its historical context, and his collaborative processes. From his rephotographic surveys, which pair conceptual art with questions about how lands change through human intervention, to the series of portraits with his eldest daughter on their shared birthday, the images presented here combine to form a body of work at once expansive and richly personal.

An unprecedented and eye-opening examination of the early career of one of America's most celebrated photographers One of the most influential photographers of his generation, Ansel Adams (1902-1984) is famous for his dramatic photographs of the American West. Although many of Adams's images are now iconic, his early work has remained largely unknown. In this first monograph dedicated to the beginnings of Adams's career, Rebecca A. Senf argues that these early photographs are crucial to understanding Adams's artistic development and offer new insights into many aspects of the artist's mature oeuvre. Drawing on copious archival research, Senf traces the first three decades of Adams's photographic practice-beginning with an amateur album made during his childhood and culminating with his Guggenheim-supported National Parks photography of the 1940s. Highlighting the artist's persistence in forging a career path and his remarkable ability to learn from experience as he sharpened his image-making skills, this beautifully illustrated volume also looks at the significance of the artist's environmentalism, including his involvement with the Sierra Club. Published in association with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona

Using landscape photography to reflect on broader notions of culture, the passage of time, and the construction of perception, photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe spent five years exploring the Grand Canyon for their most recent project, "Reconstructing the View". The team's landscape photographs are based on the practice of rephotography, in which they identify sites of historic photographs and make new photographs of those precise locations. Klett and Wolfe referenced a wealth of images of the canyon, ranging from historical photographs and drawings by William Bell and William Henry Holmes, to well-known artworks by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, and from souvenir postcards to contemporary digital images drawn from Flickr. The pair then employed digital postproduction methods to bring the original images into dialogue with their own. The result is this stunning volume, illustrated with a wealth of full-color illustrations that attest to the role photographers - both anonymous and great - have played in picturing American places. Rebecca Senf's compelling essay traces the photographers' process and methodology, conveying the complexity of their collaboration. Stephen J. Pyne provides a conceptual framework for understanding the history of the canyon, offering an overview of its discovery by Europeans and its subsequent treatment in writing, photography, and graphic arts.

America. Located about 150 miles (241 kilometers) west of Las Vegas near the border of California and Nevada, it straddles an area of about 3,000 square miles (770 square kilometers). A land of extremes and contrasts, it includes Telescope Peak that towers over the valley at 11,049 feet elevation (3,367 meters) and an oasis that provides habitat for the endangered Devils Hole Pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis). Designated a national monument in 1933 and expanded into a national park in 1994, its rugged yet otherworldly beautiful landscape now attracts more than 1,000,000 visitors per year. Attracted by the distinctive topography and light of Death Valley, Stephen Strom, a renowned professor of astrophysics, began regularly traveling there some thirty-five years ago. His acute eye for abstract, almost pointillist compositions not only reveals the patterns and effects of geologic forces over millennia, but it also takes in the vast, colorful sweep of land and sky as well as the land's myriad details-volcanic cinder cones and sand dunes, dry lakes and salt pans, colorful badlands and canyons, and pine-studded mountains-that give the area its distinctive and varied character. Strom's photographs are complemented by Alison Hawthorne Deming's original sequence of poems, written for this book, that are as luminous and detailed as the images themselves. And Rebecca A. Senf's perceptive essay situates Strom's work within the canon of those photographers who have inspired and mentored him, including Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Keith McElroy, Eliot Porter, Frederic Sommer, and Max Yavno. Death Valley: Painted Light is a book unlike any other about a landscape whose topographic relief and sheer beauty are unforgettable.