Ken Burns

Sarah Hermanson Meister

A Photographic History

Our America

Dorothea Lange

Migrant Mother

Roxana Marcoci

Published to accompany the first museum exhibition in the United States of the work of German-born Grete Stern and Argentinean Horacio Coppola, From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires explores the individual accomplishments and parallel developments of two of the foremost practitioners of avantgarde photography in Europe and Latin America. The book traces their artistic development from the early 1930s, when the two met in Berlin at the Bauhaus, through the mid-1950s, by which time they had firmly established the foundations of modern photography in Buenos Aires. While twentieth-century photography has a fair number of important teams, Stern and Coppola are unique in that they managed to share their avant-garde ambition while maintaining their autographic styles and individual practices. The couple effectively imported the lessons of the Bauhaus to Latin America, and revolutionized the practice of art and commercial photography on both sides of the Atlantic by introducing such innovative techniques as photomontage, embodied in Sterns protofeminist works for the womens journal Idilio, and through Coppolas experimental films and groundbreaking images for the photographic survey Buenos Aires 1936. Featuring a selection of newly translated original texts by Stern and Coppola, and essays by curators Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Meister and scholar Jodi Roberts, From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires is the first publication in English to examine the critical intersections that defined the notable careers of these two influential artists.

From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires

How a small photography club gave birth to modernist photography in Brazil Published in conjunction with the first major museum exhibition of Brazilian modernist photography outside of Brazil, Fotoclubismopresents the groundbreaking creative achievements of São Paulo's Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, a group of amateur photographers founded in 1939 that is essentially unknown today to European and North American audiences. The vast majority of FCCB members pursued photography outside of their day jobs as lawyers, businessmen, accountants, journalists, engineers, biologists and bankers, but they were nonetheless quite serious about their artistic ambition. Their radical experimentations with process and form and their determination to distill inventive compositions from everyday life contributed to their esteemed reputation within an active international postwar scene--a status that has been all but forgotten. This richly illustrated publication assembles a robust selection of photographs to introduce the FCCB's photographic experiments to an international audience. Six chapters highlight individual achievements nestled between thematic groupings that suggest the breadth of the club's talent. Curator Sarah Meister's essay situates the FCCB within the broader contemporary art scene in Brazil as well as a dynamic network of photographers around the world, and offers fresh insight into the status of the amateur then and now. This is the first non-Portuguese-language publication to grapple with these photographs that were widely heralded at the time of their creation.

Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography and The Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, 1946-1964

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

"How shall the two-dimensional print in black and white suggest the flux of activity of the metropolis, the interaction of human beings and solid architectural constructions, all impinging upon each other in time?" Picturing New York presents myriad answers to this question posed by photographer Berenice Abbott in the 1930s. Depicting the iconic New York that captivates the world's imagination and the idiosyncratic details that define New Yorkers' sense of home, this anthology of photographs from The Museum of Modern Art's extraordinary collection celebrates the city in all its vitality, ambition, and beauty. Made by artists responding to the city as well as professionals on assignment - including Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman, Alfred Stieglitz, Weegee, and many more - the works reveal the deeply symbiotic relationship between photography and New York. Evocative excerpts from literary works about New York and a lively essay by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, accompany the selection of classic images and lesser-known gems. Both an exploration of the life of the city and a documentation of photography's evolution throughout the twentieth century, Picturing New York celebrates the great and continuing tradition of capturing the grit and glamour of one of America's greatest urban centers.

Photographs from the Museum of Modern Art

Picturing New York

Nicholas Nixon

In August of 1974, the photographer Nicholas Nixon made a group portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi and Laurie the Brown sisters. He did not keep that image, but in 1975 he made another portrait of the four, who then ranged in age from 15 to 25. Working with an 8x10-inch view camera, whose large negatives capture a wealth of detail and a luscious continuity of tone, Nixon did the same in 1976, and this second successful photograph prompted him to suggest to the sisters that they assemble for a portrait every year. The women agreed, and have gathered for an annual portrait ever since. Nicholas Nixon: 40 Years of The Brown Sisters celebrates the fortiethanniversary of the series in 2014, featuring luminous tri-tone reproductions of all forty portraits, and a new afterword by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister, which examines the series public exhibitions, critical reception, and cult following. Like the previous editions of the series, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1999 and 2008 for the twenty-fifth and thirtythird anniversaries of the series, and both out of print, Nicholas Nixon: 40 Years of The Brown Sisters is an important chapter in an ongoing project that we hope will continue for many years more.

Forty Years

The Brown Sisters

Quentin Bajac

This survey explores 60 remarkable photographs from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, all acquired with the support of Robert B. Menschel and meticulously selected for the book by the museum's chief curator of photography, Quentin Bajac. Ranging from the contemporary artist Andreas Gursky to William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the medium's founding figures, these works collectively tell the story of photography from its beginnings, but upend and newly illuminate that story through their arrangement in reverse chronological order. Each image is the subject of a brief, elegant text. The book borrows its title from a work by Carrie Mae Weems, one of the many great photographs that Menschel has contributed to the collection.

Photographs from the Robert B. Menschel Collection

The Shape of Things

Michael Wesely

Since the early 1990s, German photographer Michael Wesely has been inventing and refining techniques for using extremely long camera exposures to take uniquely compelling photographs. Through the use of filters and a very small aperture, yet one that is standard in a professional camera lens, he is able to diminish the amount of light hitting the negative to the point where he can extend the exposure many thousands of times longer than we would ordinarily expect. Some of Wesely's pictures of the rebuilding of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, for example, in a series completed in 1999, were continuously exposed over a period of 26 months. The results of Wesely's explorations are as surprising as they are beautiful. In 2001, as The Museum of Modern Art began to prepare for its ambitious construction and renovation project, a turning point in its history, it recognized in Wesely's work an unequalled opportunity to artistically document that project. In August of that year, then, Wesely set specially designed cameras in long-term installations in and around the museum, choosing his locations for the construction views they provided. Nearly three years later, the images are complete, and their pentimento-like strata of transparencies and overlays render the construction project's evolution in time as a dense and delicate network of forms and colors in space. Open Shutteraccompanies an exhibition organized by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Associate Curator of the museum's Department of Photography. Included in the book are several images of the construction of the new Museum of Modern Art.

Open Shutter

Published in conjunction with the exhibition "Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light," held March 6-August 12, 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Sarah Hermanson Meister

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