Colin Westerbeck

The impact of our industrialized culture on nature - including the exploitation of natural resources, global warming, and climate change - is one of the most crucial and urgent issues of our times. Environmental centers have developed within several scientific disciplines with a common global interest - trying to secure the future of our existence in the world as we know it. The book Broken sets out to investigate environmental change and explore our relation to nature. It also follows in the photographic tradition of raising awareness and supporting policymakers, politicians, researchers, environmentalists, and activists. Featuring texts by seminal environmental photographers and theorists, the book Broken re-evaluates early environmental photography and investigates new ways of experiencing and visualizing landscapes in an interdisciplinary context.

Truth in Black-and-White Authenticity, honesty, and character: Donald Graham’s portraits are not simply photographic recordings. Looking at them is like looking at human beings themselves, brought forth by the photographer with his virtuoso technique and sensibilities. These brilliant, strongly contrasting black-and-white photos are evidence of attitude, rather than studied gestures. Eyes and faces are not model-like masks; instead, they express the unique nature of those portrayed. Inevitably, viewers fi nd themselves in a dialogue with the images. You wonder about the stories behind these faces; though unfamiliar, they are nevertheless an emotional experience. This magnifi cent volume of pictures is the fi rst extensive publication of Graham’s haunting work. Reproduced in an elaborate triplex process, the printed photographs also possess great brilliance. On paper they seem almost tangible, fully revealing this outstanding oeuvre.

The first definitive monograph of color photographs by American street photographer Vivian Maier. Photographer Vivian Maier’s allure endures even though many details of her life continue to remain a mystery. Her story—the secretive nanny-photographer who became a pioneer photographer—has only been pieced together from the thousands of images she made and the handful of facts that have surfaced about her life. Vivian Maier: The Color Work is the largest and most highly curated published collection of Maier’s full-color photographs to date. With a foreword by world-renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz and text by curator Colin Westerbeck, this definitive volume sheds light on the nature of Maier’s color images, examining them within the context of her black-and-white work as well as the images of street photographers with whom she clearly had kinship, like Eugene Atget and Lee Friedlander. With more than 150 color photographs, most of which have never been published in book form, this collection of images deepens our understanding of Maier, as its immediacy demonstrates how keen she was to record and present her interpretation of the world around her.

In this book, the authors explore and discuss the development of one of the most interesting and dynamic of photographic genres. Hailed as a landmark work when it was first published in 1994, Bystander is widely regarded by street photographers as the ‘bible’ of street photography. It covers an incredible array of talent, from the unknowns of the late 19th century to the acknowledged masters of the 20th, such as Atget, Stieglitz, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Frank, Arbus, Winogrand and Levitt to name just a few. In this new and fully revised edition, the story of street photography is brought up to date with a re-evaluation of some historical material, the inclusion of more contemporary photographers and a discussion of the ongoing rise of digital photography.

Writer, curator and teacher Colin Westerbeck's criterion in choosing the 100 photographs gathered in this volume was to seek out underappreciated work by great photographers and great work by underappreciated photographers. The 100 prints have all been drawn from the many thousands in the inventory of the Howard Greenberg Gallery. Westerbeck was particularly drawn to Greenberg's wide-ranging taste in both American and European photography of the 20th century. The publication he proposed to Greenberg is called "A Democracy of Imagery" because all of the works should be considered created equal. Each was selected for its individuality-indeed, its idiosyncrasy-rather than its similarity to, or compatibility with, other images. Accordingly, in this spirit, works are discussed individually and not collectively.