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GROUP F.64

Name: GROUP F.64
Author: Mary Street Alinder
ISBN: 978-1620405550

EDWARD WESTON, ANSEL ADAMS, IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM, AND THE COMMUNITY OF ARTISTS WHO REVOLUTIONIZED AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY

by Mary Street Alinder ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 2014

Alinder's sympathetic history captures the excitement and energy of determined artists who invigorated and redefined the art...

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In the 1930s, daring young artists invented a distinctive style of photography.

At a party in October 1932, a group of California photographers decided to band together for exhibitions, calling themselves f.64, a name, they explained, “derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition” that defined their work. Alinder (Ansel Adams, 1996, etc.), who served as assistant to Adams, one of the most well-known members of f.64 and author of its manifesto, comes to this group biography with personal knowledge of many of her subjects, including Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston and Preston Holder. As collaborator on Adams’ autobiography, she became intimately acquainted with the life and work of many of the other members. Group f.64 arose partly in reaction to Alfred Stieglitz, founder of the Manhattan galleries 291 and An American Place, who “had ruled as the largely unchallenged master of creative photography in America for three decades.” Coveting “the grace of his recognition,” the California group nevertheless believed that a Western aesthetic was far different from the photography heralded in New York and also from the popular genre of pictorialism: romantic, painterly images produced by soft-focus lenses and printed on matte, textured paper. The group’s first major exhibition opened at the respected M.H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, mounted by its intrepid director Lloyd Rollins. Among 64 prints were Adams’ rugged landscapes and Weston’s sensuous rocks, shells and vegetables. Although the exhibition did not attract much notice, it inaugurated for the exhibitors a period of “explosive creativity.” From 1933 to 1940, their work appeared in galleries and museums, making them increasingly visible and earning wide acclaim.

Alinder's sympathetic history captures the excitement and energy of determined artists who invigorated and redefined the art of photography.

Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014

ISBN: 978-1620405550

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.