Pirkle Jones: California Photographs, 1935-1982 by Pirkle Jones and Tim B. Wride
Hardcover: 144 pages
Publisher: Aperture (November 1, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0893819492
ISBN-13: 978-0893819491
Product Dimensions: 12.4 x 10.4 x 0.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 3 pounds

Product Description

For almost sixty years Pirkle Jones has chronicled the people, politics, and landscape of Northern California-a “promised land” which has long held sway in the American cultural imagination. Within the confines of that locale, he has unearthed a universe of beauty and meaning, photographing everything from flea-market finds to some of the most important American social movements of the second half of the twentieth century. Operating primarily within a social-documentary framework, Jones has made images characterized by sensitivity and acute observation.

With uncanny prescience, a sense of urgency, and a sympathetic eye, Jones often plays the dual roles of artist and witness, combining portraiture, landscapes, and architectural photographs to create thorough documents of social structure and upheaval. Among the photo-essays included in Pirkle Jones: California Photographs are a compassionate and controversial piece on the Black Panther Party in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jones’s portraits of the Sausalito houseboat community known as Gate 5, and a notable 1956 photo-essay done in collaboration with Dorothea Lange photographing the destruction and dislocation of the Berryessa Valley before it was flooded on completion of the Monticello Dam. Produced as a single issue of Aperture magazine in 1960 under the name “Death of a Valley”, this essay remains a powerful testament to the price of progress.

The book also includes Jones’s work from the last few decades, in which he shifted his focus to an extended series of elegant, contemplative landscapes. A biographical essay by curator Tim B. Wride frames Jones and his work within the context of photographic history, the people he collaborated with-including Ansel Adams as well as Lange-and the great scope of Californian life.

Retail Fictions – The Commercial Photography of Ralph Bartholomew, Jr.  by Tim B. Wride
Paperback: 148 pages
Publisher: Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Language: English
ISBN-10:  0875871836
ISBN-13: 9780875871837

Product Description

The Commercial Photography of Ralph Bartholomew, Jr. presents the images of but one among thousands of commercial photographers producing advertising and editorial images during the second quarter of this century. With each assignment, they expanded the visual vocabulary of commercial imagemaking. What set Bartholomew apart from his contemporaries, however, was the arresting appeal of his images and the scope of his influence. He successfully combined emerging techologies with stereotypical ideas of identity and popular culture putting both into the service of commerce. The resulting images not only reflected the attitudes and conduct of the time, but helped to form them. Additionally, as a result of the prestige of the agencies he serviced, the high-profile companies whose products he glamorized, and the gargantuan circulation and broad demographics of the periodicals in which his images were disseminated, Bartholomew exerted powerful economic as well as cultural influences. His impact must be measured not only by the advertising revenue and sales generated at the time, but also by the degree to which his photographs spawned similar images, as well as the residual appeal they project and the multiple layers of meanings and associations they have accumulated in the present, far from the original circumstances of their making and reception. As fewer and fewer surfaces and publications are free of ubiquitous, seemingly innocuous, commercial images, and, as debates intensify vis-à-vis the appropriate nature and uses of commercial images, and a tolerable means by which they are acheived, it is timely, perhaps, to be reminded of the power of which those images are capable

Retrospective by Thomas Schirmbock, Tim B. Wride, and Douglas Isaac Busch
Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Edition Braus; Bilingual edition (December 30, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 3899041704
ISBN-13: 978-3899041705
Product Dimensions: 12 x 9.7 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds

Product Description

The process of making a photograph can be described as the visual reduction of the experience of a three-dimensional environment into an intellectual and aesthetic two-dimensional abstraction. At the risk of further oversimplification yet using similar terms, the process of building an architectural structure might be conversely stated as the extrapolation of an intellectual and aesthetic abstraction into a three-dimensional environment. While manipulative definitions such as these might convey a seemingly logical though obverse connection between the two practices, it is unusual—even rare—to have both sensibilities co-exist in the creative practice of a single individual.

Douglas I. Busch makes photographs. Douglas I. Busch also designs and constructs buildings. With his photographs he distills his experience of a place, a moment, and an environment as an exquisitely crafted, visually compelling, psychologically charged two-dimensional representation. In his structures, he translates the intellectual and aesthetic understanding of space, materials, and engineering into an exquisitely crafted, visually compelling, psychologically available three-dimensional environment. To attempt to confront one aspect of Busch’s creative output without an understanding of the other is to fail to fully explore either activity.  The interrelationship of the two activities, the impact of one on the other, and the common sensibility that is brought to bear on them both is crucial to a full comprehension of the arena and manner in which his images function.

Busch’s photographic sensibility and sensitivity are in part a product of an extremely fertile and experimental moment in the conceptual trajectory of photography as art in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. He is the beneficiary of the expansion of institutional and educational support for photography that began to take hold in the 1960s and asserted itself throughout the next decade. During this period, previous strictures that delimited the parameters of that which constituted photography as art began to be questioned and rejected. Educational institutions initiated graduate programs in photography that necessarily created new teaching opportunities for the increasing numbers of artists using photography. As a student in the1970s Busch was present at the beginnings of a burgeoning academic discourse and mentoring process that would transform the photographic landscape in the United States.

Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution by Tim B. Wride, Cristina M. Vives, and Wim Wenders
Hardcover: 159 pages
Publisher: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Merrell (May 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1858941342
ISBN-13: 978-1858941349
Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.7 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds

Product Description

Photography in the Cuba of Fidel Castro has been and remains a thriving means of artistic expression. Building on a rich photographic tradition, three generations of photographers working in the aftermath of the military revolution have compiled through their images a legacy of a people, a country and also of the revolution itself. Their images elucidate the shifting social, political, and personal concerns that have fueled the artistic expression of artists using photography over the past 40 years in Cuba.

Revolutionary Tides provides a look at the vitality of Cuban photographic tradition since Castro’s overthrow of the Battista regime. The epic pictures taken during the early years of the revolution act as the benchmark against which all pictures from Cuba have been measured. Acknowledging these iconic forerunner images, Revolutionary Tides presents examples of subsequent Cuban photography from the images of the 1960s and 70s that celebrate the common man, through the experimental reclamations of personal histories done during the 1980s and 90s, to intensely individualized contemporary conceptual investigations. Revolutionary Tides provides not only a fuller understanding of the evolution of Cuban imagemaking but the trajectory and character of the revolution that spawned it.

Donald Blumberg by Tim B. Wride
Hardcover: 63 pages
Publisher: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0875871879
ISBN-13: 978-0875871875

Product Description

Donald Blumberg has been exploring photography and the manner in which photographs function as social documents, formal remnants, and aesthetic conceptual statements for close to 40 years. His work as an artist has always been fully integrated into his family life, his career as a teacher, and his political convictions; each providing a situational and contextual framework within which to explore the myriad permutations of the process and products of photography. Earning degrees from Cornell University (1959) and the University of Colorado (1961), Blumberg began teaching through Mobilization for Youth, a New York-based federally funded anti-poverty program, Brooklyn College, and City College of New York before his tenure at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1965-1981). A visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then at California State University in San Jose, Blumberg moved permanently to Southern California as the Chairman of the Fine Arts Department and then Director of the Photography Program at Otis Art Institute (1981-1990). Blumberg’s work is included in the most prestigious international private and public collections including The Metropolitan and MOMA in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the Library of Congress, and LACMA.

A consummate technician, Blumberg is an artist whose signature style rests not in his selections of subject matter or in the manner in which those subjects are portrayed, but in the manner in which his images address issues of the photographic. Landscape, urbanscape, figurative, or abstraction; black-and-white, color, or mixed media; single image, montage, or collage; intimate, large-format, or mural-sized; all have been employed by the artist to address his photographic concerns. Donald Blumberg traces the recurring concerns of the artist’s visual, formal, and conceptual investigations against the backdrop of personal and social history. Works from across the artist’s broad career coalesces into groups that depict his concentrated studies of time, space, surface, and the picturesque in photography.

ROBBERT FLICK : TRAJECTORIES. by Robbert Flick; Michael Dear, David L. Ulin, Tim B. Wride.
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Steidl/LACMA; illustrated edition edition (October 2, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 386521018X
ISBN-13: 978-3865210180
Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 9.9 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 5.8 pounds

Product Description

Robbert Flick’s work extends the same visual, philosophical, and theoretically fertile tradition set by the highly influential and iconoclastic Robert Heinecken. But while Heinecken’s emphasis can be said to rely on the manner in which images function within the intersection of popular culture and the fine arts, Flick has characteristically concentrated more intently on the artifactual, conceptual, and receptive properties of photography–specifically landscape photography. The distinctive retinal and conceptual strength of Flick’s work has been evident since his early essay-format images of the 1960s. In his more recent digital work, he extends his participation in the critical discourse established around the interpretation, evaluation, and assessment of visual constructs related to the landscape. And yet, this movement has only become possible through a conceptual transition from a position of creating unique objects to an emphasis on interactivity and multiple access using still and moving images that allow for the work’s insertion into the broader socio-political arena where the application defines the discourse. Trajectories traces the artist’s career from the 1970s to the present, providing the opportunity to examine his visual development while also charting the conceptual and philosophical impact of contemporary culture on landscape, cultural geography, and technology. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 9/12-04 – 1/2005 Edited by Tim B. Wride.

Essays by Michael Dear and David L. Ulin. Clothbound, 11.5 x 11.75 in. / 304 pgs / 225 color

Scene of the Crime: Photographs from the LAPD Archive. by Tim B. Wride James Ellroy, and William J. Bratton.
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (October 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0810950022
ISBN-13: 978-0810950023
Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 8.2 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds

Product Description

Los Angeles in the decades after the Depression was a smoldering powder keg of vice, corruption, violence, and some of the most sensational crimes in American history. The Black Dahlia slaying, the Onion Field murder, film star Thelma Todd’s mysterious death, the killing of Kansas City gangsters “The Two Tonys” by Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratiano: these are but a few of the cases that once riveted the nation’s attention and were captured in striking crime-scene and forensic photographs for the Los Angeles Police Department.
Long forgotten in a warehouse, these recently discovered photographs from the LAPD archive form a powerful visual history of the underbelly of Los Angeles from the 1930s to the 1960s. Although disquieting and often brutal, the images have an atmospheric, eerie beauty that belies their documentary purpose. They are accompanied here by captions from police logs and original newspaper accounts, along with an introduction by James Ellroy, the leading practitioner of the Los Angeles noir genre, and an essay by curator Tim B. Wride discussing the archive’s importance to social history and the history of photography. AUTHOR BIO: William J. Bratton is the 55th chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and has also served as police commissioner for both the Boston and the New York City police departments. James Ellroy’s books include the international best-sellers The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, and American Tabloid. Tim B. Wride is associate curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Reading California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (October 2, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520227670
ISBN-13: 978-0520227675
Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds

Product Description

This companion volume to the exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity,1900-2000 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art offers in-depth, illustrated essays on the making of California culture in the twentieth century. Written by a stellar cast of art historians and scholars in the humanities, the essays look closely at the forces that shaped fine art and material culture in California. The contributors weave their subjects around themes that are central to the milestone exhibition: the California landscape–both the natural and built environments–and the state’s cultural and political relationships with Latin America and Asia. 
These provocative essays cover topics such as counterculture architecture, Watts Towers, border culture, identity and gender issues, the role of schools in California art, auto tourism, Hollywood, music, Beat culture, politics, literature, photography, and much more. Accessibly written and intellectually engaging, these essays sharpen our understanding of California in the twentieth century and bring together many diverse, yet interrelated, aspects of its art and culture.

The Beatles in India by Paul Saltzman, Tim B. Wride, and Donovan Leitch
Super Deluxe Limited Edition: Numbered Limited Edition, limited to 350 copies
105 pages, including 69 pgs. of color illustrations, 12 copper and 5 vellum pgs. & 28 mendhi designs
Full leather, hand bound book
Padded hardcover book 14 1/2×11″
Encased in a 18 1/2×14″ clamshell box
Clamshell box wrapped in Japanese Asahi silk
Limited Edition 11×14″ photographic C-print: The Beatles in Rishikesh-1968 [upper right], museum-quality, limited to 350 ($800 value)
Special Edition DVD with Paul Saltzman
Special Edition CD: Craig Pruess’ Beatles music on sitar

Product Description

In December 1967, 23 year-old Paul Saltzman traveled to India in search of himself. To his great surprise, he found the Beatles in India. Paul spent a magical week at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram. He learned meditation and hung out with John, Paul, George and Ringo. Thirty years later, he found the photos he’d shot and put away in a cardboard box: The Beatles in India.