World Photography Day

Today is World Photography Day—an international celebration and recognition of photography’s history, art, craft, and science. Join in the festivities by checking out some of our new, upcoming, and recent titles on photography.

Cover of A Time of Youth: San Francisco, 1966-1967 by William Gedney and edited by Lisa McCarty. Cover features horizontal black and white picture of a group of young boys standing together. Title in white above picture. Subtitle and author name below title and separated by dot. Editor and contributor name below picture in white.

A Time of Youth by William Gedney brings together 89 of the more than 200 photographs he took in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood between October 1966 and January 1967, documenting the restless and intertwined lives of the disenchanted youth who flocked to what became the epicenter of 1960s counterculture. Edited by Lisa McCarty, the book also features an essay by Philip Gefter.

Nicole Erin Morse’s new book Selfie Aesthetics blends trans studies and visual culture by examining how women feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore how selfies produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers in ways that envision trans feminist futures.

Cover of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam byThy Phu. Cover features a historical color photo of a woman in a bathing suit with a camera, two men looking on and 2 in the background, on a beach.

Warring Visions by Thy Phu explores photographs produced by dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to understandings of how war is waged, experienced, and resolved.

Showing how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures, Bakirathi Mani examines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic viewers, artists, and photographic representations of immigrant subjects in Unseeing Empire.

Cover of Wake Up, This is Joburg. The entire cover is a photograph of a Black woman on a street. She stands next to a red traffic light and behind her are a skyscraper and other people. The title is in bright yellow on top of the photo and in the upper left corner is the text Photographs by Mark Lewis, Words by Tanya Zack.

In the forthcoming title Wake Up, This is Joburg, writer Tanya Zack and photographer Mark Lewis offer a stunning portrait of Johannesburg and personal stories of its residents, showing how its urban transformation occurs not in a series of dramatic, wide-scale changes but in the everyday lives, actions, and dreams of individuals.

Allison Moore’s recent book Embodying Relation examines the tensions between the local and the global in the art photography movement that blossomed in Bamko, Mali, in the 1990s, showing contemporary Malian photography to be a rich example of Western notions of art meeting traditional cultural precepts to forge new artistic forms, practices, and communities.

Showing how photography both reflected and actively contributed to social and political change, Unfixed by Jennifer Bajorek traces the relationship between photography and decolonial politics in Francophone west Africa in the years immediately leading up to and following the independence from French colonial rule in 1960.

Cover of Journeys through the Russian Empire. Cover features two sepearate images of the Nilov Monastery, which features a Muscovite style of architecture.

Those interested in European studies and architecture may enjoy William Craft Brumfield’s recent book Journeys through the Russian Empire. The lavishly illustrated volume documents Russia’s architectural, artistic, and cultural heritage while juxtaposing the hundreds of full-color images of Russian architecture and landscapes taken by early-twentieth-century photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky with those of contemporary photographer and scholar William Craft Brumfield.

Photographic Returns by Shawn Michelle Smith engages with photography by Sally Mann, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and others to trace how historical moments come to be known photographically and the ways in which the past continues to inhabit, punctuate, and transform the present through the photographic medium.

Sarah Eckhart’s Working Together, which accompanies an exhibition of the photography of Virginia artist Louis Draper and other members of the Kamoinge Workshop, now at the Getty Museum, includes more than 140 photographs by fourteen of the early members of the Workshop.

Also, check out Trans Asia Photography, an open-access journal devoted to the interdisciplinary exploration of historic and contemporary photography from Asia and across the Asian diaspora.

Be sure to learn about our new titles in photography. Sign up for our e-mail newsletters, and get notifications of new titles in your preferred disciplines as well as discounts and other news.