Colin Ford Bücher

Book by Ford, Colin, Harrison, Brian

Dorothy Bohm is widely considered one of the doyennes of British photography. To date, however, there has not been a major retrospective of her career and oeuvre, which span six decades (from the 1940s to the present day) and several continents. This situation is to be changed by an exhibition of some 250 of her photographs at Manchester Art Gallery in 2010. The accompanying book, the most detailed and comprehensive to date, is also the first publication of its kind. Lavishly illustrated with numerous full-page reproductions of the photographs displayed at the exhibition, as well as others not exhibited, the book contains three substantial essays, which cover Bohm's life, her work within the history of photography and visual culture, and her status as a female photographer. The work concludes with an extensive and easy-to-use index of thumbnail reproductions of her work.

In <i>Portraits</i> people from every walk of life and every level of society pause before the lenses of photography's pioneers, and the results account for some of the most familiar and most memorable images in the history of photography. Cecil Beaton's portrait of Marlon Brando, Gisèle Freund's Virginia Woolf, Brassaï's Picasso and Bachrach's Katharine Hepburn — these glittering portraits pair artist and subject of equal renown. Yet in many cases an unidentified portrait, such as Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother', captures precisely the look or feel of a particular time or society. There are also the fascinating examples of early photographic portraiture: Napoleon Sarony's 1882 photograph of Oscar Wilde, or Mathew Brady's portrait of General Robert E. Lee taken just after the Civil War. Colin Ford, formerly keeper of film and photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and first keeper of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, contributes an authoritative introduction. From Julia Margaret Cameron to Irving Penn, from Nadar to Karsh, from Lartigue to Diane Arbus, <i>Portraits</i> is a striking and illuminating record of the people and societies it portrays.