A biography of a New Orleans photographer of worldwide acclaim

Called "Edgar Allan Poe with a camera", Clarence John Laughlin (1905-1984) reveals New Orleans at its most brooding and mysterious in 69 never-before-published images. Compiled by the Historic New Orleans Collection, this volume brings together an eerie gallery of French Quarter facades, funerary sculpture, and other details that summon up the Acadian gothic described by six distinguished writers. 69 illustrations.

Many photographers have been intrigued with the baffling distortions--both subtle and disquieting--that can occur when the camera "captures" the real world. Not always intentional, some images dazzle with impossible juxtapositions or disorienting spatial orders, while others confound the viewer's belief in the documentary promise of photography. Drawn from the highly respected collection of Allan Chasanoff, the photographs in this intriguing volume confront viewers with the challenge of doubt and confusion in so-called "straight" pictures. Featured are perceptually provocative images by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Clarence John Laughlin, Imogen Cunningham, and Lee Friedlander, among others. The book's essays raise awareness of the interpretive nature of the lens and the interpolative nature of the medium. Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery Exhibition Schedule: Yale University Art Gallery (October 7, 2008 - January 4, 2009)

In an evocative sequel to the acclaimed "New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence, " Sexton returns with an in-depth visual journey through the hidden mansions--some inhabited, many now long abandoned--of Louisiana's River Road. 200+ color photos.

One of the finest architectural photographers in America, Robert W. Tebbs produced the first photographic survey of Louisiana's plantations in 1926. From those images, now housed in the Louisiana State Museum, and not widely available until now, 119 plates showcasing fifty-two homes are featured here. Richard Anthony Lewis explores Tebbs's life and career, situating his work along the line of plantation imagery from nineteenth-century woodcuts and paintings to later twentieth-century photographs by John Clarence Laughlin, among others. Providing the family lineage and construction history of each home, Lewis discusses photographic techniques Tebbs used in his alternating panoramic and detail views. A precise documentarian, Tebbs also reveals a poetic sensibility in the plantation photos. His frequent emphasis on aspects of decay, neglect, incompleteness, and loss lends a wistful aura to many of the images -- an effect compounded by the fact that many of the homes no longer exist. This noticeable vacillation between objectivity and sentiment, Lewis shows, suggests unfamiliarity and even discomfort with the legacy of slavery. Poised on the brink of social and political reforms, Louisiana in the mid-1920s had made significant strides away from the slave-based agricultural economy that the plantation house often symbolized. Tebbs's Louisiana plantation photographs capture a literal and cultural past, reflecting a burgeoning national awareness of historic preservation and presenting plantations to us anew. Select plantations included: Ashland/Belle Helene, Avery Island, Belle Chasse, Belmont, Butler-Greenwood, L'Hermitage, Oak Alley, Parlange, René Beauregard House, Rosedown, Seven Oaks, Shadows-on-the-Teche, The Shades, and Waverly.

Until recent catastrophic events, little attention was paid to the landscape and ecology of the American Gulf Coast. Acclaimed photographer Richard Sexton's evocative black-and-white images capture this often-overlooked terrainthrowing into haunting relief the marshes, forests, and bayous from the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle. Sexton focuses on the intersection between human culture and natural phenomena, creating a body of work attuned to the passage of time, loss, and renewal. Essays by museum directors J. Richard Gruber and John Lawrence place the images in the context of southern photography, while horticulturist Randy Harelson illuminates the environmental challenges unique to the region. Terra Incognita is the first book to so strikingly illustrate the vulnerability, resilience, and splendor of America's third coast.

Renowned photographer A. J. Meek takes the novitiate on an inspired visual journey with eighty-eight color photographs of the interiors of churches and synagogues located in south Louisiana, mostly along the lower Mississippi River valley. Tourists may crowd the famous European cathedrals such as Notre Dame in Paris and Westminster Abbey in London. Yet the splendors of local churches in America all too often remain cloistered and unheralded. Meek's beautiful photographs correct this oversight for Louisiana, a state that features a great many beautiful and long-standing holy places. Often incorporating long exposures and select framing, the images in the first section of Sacred Light encompass altars, chancels, and sanctuaries. The second section contains photographs of statues representing deities, angels, madonnas, and saints, often seen with intense color derived from stained-glass windows or artificial light. Light itself is the subject of the third and last section. In several photographs, light is transformed by a window into a kaleidoscope of color on a wooden pew or pulpit chair. Other times the light seems to radiate a living presence of its own. Additionally, the book includes an essay by Louisiana State University art historian and liturgical space consultant, Marchita B. Mauck. Sacred Light also contains photographs of some of the church and synagogue restoration projects after Hurricane Katrina. Meek relates that the now-famous storm of August 2005 was the shadow he was looking for that defines blessed light. He places emphasis on restoration, not destruction, as a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.

Since the invention of photography almost 175 years ago, the medium has proven itself understandably adept at capturing what is there to be photographed: the solid, the concrete, that which can be seen. Another tradition exists, however; a parallel tradition in which photographers and artists have attempted to depict via photographic means that which is not so easily photographed: dreams, ghosts, god, thought, time. The Unphotographable explores this parallel tradition, and is published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, presenting photographs by anonymous amateurs alongside those of artists such as Diane Arbus, Bruce Conner, Liz Deschenes, Adam Fuss, Man Ray, Christian Marclay, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Alfred Stieglitz and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Jules-Bernard Luys and Émile David are represented by a photograph taken toward the end of the nineteenth century, of fluidic emission from the fingers of two hands; Richard Misrach captures a sandstorm in California in 1976; and Conner is represented by "Angel Light," one of the Angels series of dramatic, life-sized photograms he created in 1973-75, and which explore the disjunction between vision and phenomenological experience. Since opening in 1979, Fraenkel Gallery has presented close to 300 exhibitions exploring photography and its interrelations with the other arts, and The Unphotographable is one of its most ambitious projects to date. The catalogue is edited with an essay by Jeffrey Fraenkel, and includes 50 images in color.

The author seeks to discern the distinctive character of photography as an art, asking why similar images affect us differently and how our reaction to a photograph of a painting is different to the response to the painting. She demonstrates "perceived realism" and the transformation of images.