For three years in hot weather and cold, Lydia Panas invited families to stand before her lens. She was curious to see what would happen. In these pictures of family relationships, it is the details that matter most. Panas found that with the camera, she was free to watch and capture those unclear feelings that exist between people. These family portraits draw a fascinating connection between the relationship between models, photographer and the camera. Each beautiful portrait is enriched with the shared history between family and friends.

Sleeping Beauty is award-winning artist Lydia Panas' much-praised series of mesmerizing color portraits of reclining women and girls. Sleeping Beauty embodies Panas' complex relationship with portraiture. In an interesting reversal of roles, the artist's gaze and the models' are intertwined, incorporating the viewer as participant in an often uncomfortable connection. Critics and curators have praised the work for Panas' artistic and technical mastery, and all have noted and examined the powerfully affecting gaze of her subjects. Panas' work is rooted in experience, what she sees, and how she understands people, relationships and power dynamics. In Sleeping Beauty, her subjects lie down, a metaphor for the position girls and women have been placed in historically. Yet, her subjects look out with self-awareness. Through Panas' lens, their inescapable gaze signals a knowledge that they have been to some extent duped, one might say-and a sense that they are working it out. The girls and women look in a way that implies a lack of complicity. The serial depictions and variations explore how difficult it feels to be a girl and a woman, subject to another's dominance. Viewers of the "Sleeping Beauty" portraits have aptly commented on the deeply compelling nature of the series-one viewer noting that it is "both difficult to approach and difficult to walk away from" and another describing the work as "unlike anything else I have seen before" and "causing me to wish to avert my eyes and yet I cannot do so. It is astonishingly memorable." Sleeping Beauty is a photography monograph for collectors of beautiful art and illustrated books; for anyone interested in portraiture and in representations of women and girls in visual culture; and for admirers of books and work by Panas. Her first monograph, The Mark of Abel (Kehrer, 2012), was hailed as one of the best books of the year. Lydia Panas' work is held in prestigious public collections and has been frequently exhibited in galleries and museums around the world.

Zen Camera is an unprecedented photography practice that guides you to the creativity at your fingertips, calling for nothing more than your vision and any camera, even the one embedded in your phone. David Ulrich draws on the principles of Zen practice as well as forty years of teaching photography to offer six profound lessons for developing your self-expression. Doing for photography what The Artist’s Way and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain did for their respective crafts, Zen Camera encourages you to build a visual journaling practice called your Daily Record in which photography can become a path of self-discovery. Beautifully illustrated with 83 photographs, its insights into the nature of seeing, art, and personal growth allow you to create photographs that are beautiful, meaningful, and uniquely your own. You’ll ultimately learn to change the way you interact with technology—transforming it into a way to uncover your innate power of attention and mindfulness, to see creatively, and to live authentically.

British photographer Tariq Zaidi presents a fashion subculture of Kinshasa & Brazzaville: La Sape, Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes. Its followers are known as 'Sapeurs' ('Sapeuses' for women). Most have ordinary day jobs as taxi-drivers, tailors and gardeners, but as soon as they clock off they transform themselves into debonair dandies. Sashaying through the streets they are treated like rock stars - turning heads, bringing 'joie de vivre' to their communities and defying their circumstances.

Discover your voice, cultivate mindful awareness, and inspire creative growth with photography

In The Mindful Photographer, teacher, author, and photographer David Ulrich follows up on the success of his previous book, Zen Camera, by offering photographers, smartphone camera users, and other cultural creatives 55 short (1-5 pages) essays on topics related to photography, mindfulness, personal growth, creativity, and cultivating personal and social awareness. Whether you’re seeking to become a better photographer, find your voice, enhance your ability to “see” the world around you, realize your full potential, or refine your personal expression, The Mindful Photographer can help you. You will learn to:

• Awaken your creative spirit

• Find joy and fulfillment with a camera

• Improve your photography

• Express your deepest vision of the world

• Learn to be more present in the moment

• Deepen your capacity for observation

• Gain insight into your self and others

• Cultivate mindful seeing

• Use your camera as a tool for change

• Enhance your visual literacy

• And much more

You can read this beautiful, richly illustrated book in order, following its inherent structure, or you can dive into the book anywhere that appeals to you, following your own stream of interest. No matter how you read and work through the book—many of the essays contain exercises, working practices, and quotes from well-known photographers—you will learn to deepen your engagement with the world and discover a rich source of creativity within you through the act of taking pictures.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Seek Resonance
Camera Practice
Avoid the Merely Pictorial
Pictures are Not About Pictures
Visual Learning
First Sight; Beginner’s Eye
The Camera in Your Hand
Seeing from the Body
It’s All About Hormones
Attention and Distraction
Keep the French Fries
Becoming Good
Audience
Fitting into the Flow of Time
Catch the Wave, Not the Ripple
Of Time and Light
In Space
Finding Your Mojo
River of Consciousness
Why Selfies?
When to Put the Camera Down
Mindful Sight
Creative Time
Minding the Darkness
Potency of Metaphor
Mapping the Internal Terrain
What Helps?
Analyzing Your Images
Sift, Edit, and Refine
Sequencing
Experiment
Become the Camera
Music of the Spheres
InSeeing
Fifty/Fifty
Creative Mind and Not Knowing
Trust Your Process
Digital Life
Steal Like an Artist
Art is a Lie that Tells the Truth
Use Irony Sparingly
Embrace Paradox
When to be Tender, When to Snarl, When to Shout, and When to Whisper
Sharpness is a Bourgeois Concept
Learn to Love the Questions
The Wisdom of Chance
Awake in the World
The Cruel Radiance of What Is
Hope and Despair
Companions on the Way
Coherence and Presence
Wholeness and Order
Creative Intensity
Sea of Images
The Power of Art

This inaugural volume in the Forgotten Stars of the Musical Theatre series sets Lydia Thompson, queen of burlesque, under the spotlight. The series will attempt to resurrect theatre performers and writers who were famous in their era, yet who have since inexplicably faded from popular memory. Outlandish tales of Lydia's touring burlesque company, the British Blondes, and such lurid episodes as her horsewhipping of a Chicago editor, a romance with a Russian Grand Duke and a lesbian attacker have left her with a reputation as a bawdy burlesquer, but Kurt Gänzl argues she was nothing of the kind. Through this biography, the reader will learn the whole and hitherto untold story of this fascinating, multi-dimensional musical-theatre star.

A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Before there was Reagan the conservative icon, there was Reagan the president: genial, unknowable, faced with doubters, scandals, and the final throes of the Cold War. In this extraordinary novel, Thomas Mallon takes us to the tense, high-stakes months in 1986 when—with the Iran-Contra affair, the AIDS epidemic, and the Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev—Reagan and those around him were shaping history. We see Nancy Reagan—brooding, protective, consulting her astrologist at every turn. We see the young Christopher Hitchens—his incisive, acerbic voice lending a powerful counterpoint to events as they unfold. And we see Reagan himself: apparently warm but in fact distant and mercurial, by turns seeming to know more than he lets on and let on more than he knows. Written with impeccable language and savage wit, Finale is historical fiction of the highest order, brilliantly rendering the human drama behind these famous—and familiar—faces.

England-born, New York-based photographer Alexi Lubomirski has become an established name within the fashion industry, shooting for such publications as Harper's Bazaar, Vogueand GQ, and working with cover stars such as Charlize Theron, Gwyneth Paltrow, Natalie Portman, Jennifer Lopez and Nicole Kidman, to name but a few. It was after shooting Lupita Nyong'o, however, that Lubomirski was struck by the homogeneity of the subjects he'd been hired to shoot professionally. Often when he submitted a list of models he was interested in shooting, responses would range along the lines of "we love her, but...," "her hair is a problem," "she is too dark" or "she is too light to make a statement." In Diverse Beauty, Lubomirski aims to move beyond the underrepresentation of women from a range of ethnicities in fashion media. The volume compiles his photographs of beautiful women of every color, size, age and sexual orientation in a celebration of beauty that adds dimension to the standards so omniscient in Western fashion magazines and advertisements. This handsome volume of cinematic fashion portraiture--featuring such subjects as Lupita Nyong'o, Rashida Jones, Salma Hayek, Demi Lovato, Anja Rubik, Jennifer Lopez, Chanel Iman, Hari Nef, Isabella Rossellini, Tyra Banks and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, among many others--is also a small step in the direction of changing societal norms.

This is a visual autobiography exploring the photographer's central relationships over the course of more than a decade. Through rich, vibrant photographs and revealing writing, Harvey creates totems that mark key moments in her life.

The Long Never is a special-edition book containing 65 artworks by Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948). Composed of photographs from five series--Meteorites, Dioramas, Pre-Photographic Time Recording Devices, Lightning Fields and Seascapes--the sequence of images in this book conjures a natural history of the planet, perhaps even one untouched by humans. The black-and-white photographs are hand-tipped onto the pages of the book, which is wrapped in silk cloth. Celebrated author Jonathan Safran Foer has written an original story for the volume. Foer's text sits on the page underneath each artwork, so the reader must lift up each photograph in order to read the story. The Long Never is limited to an edition of 360 copies. It is housed in a custom-made brushed aluminum slipcase. Each copy contains a colophon with the number of the edition and is signed by Sugimoto.