Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window comes to mind when looking at Gail Albert Halaban's book of photographers of city dwellers peering into their neighbours' windows, Out My Window. The photographs are views across streets, alleyways and airshafts, peering through windows to reveal intimate portraits. These beautiful voyeuristic pictures capture both the intimacy and remoteness of living in proximity to so many strangers. Out My Window can be seen as an exploration of the contradictory impulses of metropolitan life: the desire to connect and the desire to be left alone.

Italian Views is a continuation of Gail Albert Halaban's series Out My Window, featuring intimate domestic portraits against the cinematic backdrop of the city. In this new chapter, the artist shifts her focus from Paris to Italy--steadying her gaze through the windows of others in communities throughout Florence, Milan, Venice, Palermo, Naples, Lucca, and Rome. Albert Halaban works with local residents to stage and collaborate on each portrait, and through her lens, the viewer is welcomed into the private lives of ordinary Italian people. Her photographs explore the conventions and tensions of urban lifestyles, feelings of isolation in the city, and the intimacies of home and daily life. Paired with the photographs are short vignettes by Albert Halaban, imagining what the neighbors might see of her subjects on a daily basis, and Francine Prose contributes a meditative essay discussing the curious thrill of being a viewer. This invitation to envision the lives of neighbors through windows renders the characters and settings of Italy personal and mysterious.

The vibrant street life and people of New York City's Lower East Side and Upper West Side in the 1950s and 1960s are presented in this book of black-and-white photographs by Jonathan Brand. A census taker and later an advertising copywriter, Brand chronicled life as he encountered it on his walks through the city.The book offers 104 striking images of New Yorkers engaged in everyday pursuits, from the Bowery to Riverside Park, juice stands and barbershops to Theatre in the Streets.With an introduction by Julia Dolan, The Minor White Curator of Photography at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, this is the first book from a photographer who developed his art alongside many of the best-known in his discipline. Brand's photographs capture the energy, odd juxtapositions and intimate moments of life in mid-century New York City.

From the creator/editor of Who Shot Rock & Roll (“I loved this book” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times. “Whatever Gail Buckland writes, I want to read”), a book that brings together the work of 165 extraordinary photographers, most of their images heralded, most of their names unknown; photographs that capture the essence of athletes’ mastery of mind/body/soul against the odds, doing the impossible, seeming to defy the laws of gravity, the laws of physics, and showing what human will, discipline, drive, and desire look like when suspended in time. The first book to show the range, cultural importance, and aesthetics of sports photography, much of it legendary, all of it powerful. Here, in more than 280 spectacular images—more than 130 in full color—are great action photographs; portraits of athletes, famous and unknown; athletes off the field and behind the scenes; athletes practicing, working out, the daily relentless effort of training and achieving physical perfection. Buckland writes that sports photographers have always been central to the technical advancement of photography, that they have designed longer lenses, faster shutters, motor drives, underwater casings, and remote controls, allowing us to see what we could never see—and hold on to—with the naked eye. Here are photographs by such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Danny Lyon, Walker Evans, Annie Leibovitz, and 160 more, names not necessarily known to the public but whose photographic work is considered iconic . . . Here are photographs of Willie Mays . . . Carl Lewis . . . Ian Botham . . . Kobe Bryant . . . Magic Johnson . . . Muhammad Ali . . . Serena Williams . . . Bobby Orr . . . Stirling Moss . . . Jesse Owens . . . Mark Spitz . . . Roger Federer . . . Jackie Robinson. Here is the work of the great sports photographers Neil Leifer, Walter Iooss Jr., Bob Martin, Al Bello, Robert Riger, and Heinz Kleutmeier of Sports Illustrated, who was the first to put a camera at the bottom of an Olympic swimming pool and photograph swimmers from below . . . Here are pictures by Charles Hoff, the New York Daily News photographer of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, whose images of the 1936 Berlin Olympics still inspire shock and awe . . . and those of Ernst Haas, whose innovative color pictures of bullfighting of the 1950s remain poetic evocations of a bloody sport . . . To make the selections for Who Shot Sports, Buckland, a former curator of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and Benjamin Menschel Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cooper Union, has drawn upon the work of more than fifty archives, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to Sports Illustrated, Condé Nast, Getty Images, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, L’Équipe, The New York Times, and the archives of the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne. Here are classic and unknown sports images that capture the uncapturable, that allow us to experience “kinetic beauty,” and that give us the essence and meaning—the transcendent power—of sports.

Filled with dreamlike and eerie images, this first book of photographs from the director David Lynch offers a window into the iconic filmmaker's creative vision. Anyone familiar with David Lynch's cinematic achievement will identify similarities between this series of photographs and his most powerful films. Dark and beautiful, mystical and enigmatic, these photos reveal Lynch's unique style. The exterior and interior black and white shots of factories in Berlin, Poland, New York, England, and other locations are filled with Lynchian characteristics: labyrinthine passages, decaying walls, industrial waste, and detritus. Devoid of nature, the dying, manmade structures are actually being overtaken by nature's innate power. They are haunting cathedrals of a bygone industrial era--the perfect setting for a David Lynch film, and a revealing addition to his unique and fascinating oeuvre.

Jenny Lewis is a photographer from East London who has spent the last five years taking portraits of mothers within the first 24-hours of giving birth. Lewis states she is documenting the quiet moment just after giving birth when the female identity of motherhood is being established'. In addition to featuring the portraits of 40 women the book includes an introduction by art and photography critic Lucy Davies as well as a number of personal quotes gathered from interviews about the first day of life and early motherhood.'

A celebration of the timeless act of reading - as seen through the lens of one of the world's most beloved photographers Young or old, rich or poor, engaged in the sacred or the secular, people everywhere read. This homage to the beauty and seductiveness of reading brings together a collection of photographs taken by Steve McCurry over his nearly four decades of travel and is introduced by award-winning writer, Paul Theroux. McCurry's mesmerizing images of the universal human act of reading are an acknowledgement of - and a tribute to - the overwhelming power of the written word.

"Michael Levin's photographs have gained international attention. The American fine art magazine Focus declared that "Michael Levin's captivating images are soulful and evocative; he is truly one of the rising stars in the world of photography". He has won numerous prestigious awards including 'Photographer of the Year' at the 2006/07 International Photography Awards in New York and 'Fine Art Photographer of the Year' at the 2007 Prix de la Photographie in Paris." "Using long exposures, Levin pulls his world taut, so that what remains in the landscape feels essential and revealed. There is a deceptive simplicity in his images as if these places need only to be found to be realised. Places that are simple and totemic. It is Levin's pure sensibility which arranges this view, which finds these small moments and gives them weight and value and timelessness. He is particularly adept at capturing the smooth skin of light, the way it rolls over a place in the course of minutes rendering his subjects with their own private beauty. Levin illuminates these common places with new intent, making images which are both transfixing and transformative."--BOOK JACKET.

Hauntingly beautiful photographs of dogs in cars As a child, photographer Martin Usborne was once left in a car. This was not for long, but he wondered if anyone would come back. Around the same age he fell in love with dogs - they could not speak, just as he felt he was silent in that car. Thirty years later the two experiences came together in this cinematic and darkly humorous project that looks at the way humans are able to silence the animals they love best. No dogs were harmed in the making of this project.

The definitive monograph of Glen E. Friedman, a pioneer of skate, punk, and hip-hop photography, including much never-before-published work. Glen E. Friedman is best known for his work capturing and promoting rebellion in his portraits of artists such as Fugazi, Black Flag, Ice-T, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, The Misfits, Bad Brains, Beastie Boys, Run-D.M.C., and Public Enemy, as well as classic skateboarding originators such as Tony Alva, Jay Adams, Alan "Ollie" Gelfand, Duane Peters, and Stacy Peralta, and a very young Tony Hawk. Designed in association with celebrated street and graphic artist Shepard Fairey, this monograph captures the most important and influential underground heroes of skateboarding, punk, and hip-hop cultures. My Rules is an unprecedented window into the three most significant countercultures of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and Friedman’s photographs define those important movements that he helped shape. A remarkable chronicle and a primer about the origins of radical street cultures, My Rules is also a statement of artistic inspiration for those influenced by these countercultures.