Pictorials category: 9720 books

Some twenty miles south of Rochester lies what was historically the "crossroads of western New York." Lima and its neighbors in the Genesee Valley are unique in many ways. An excellent network of trails had been developed by the Iroquois long before the area attracted its first permanent settler in 1788....

Since the 1850s, the soothing countryside hamlets of Sonoma County have beckoned settlers of every stripe-farmers, homesteaders, businesspeople, and commuters. Sebastopol has always been among the county's loveliest towns, retaining its small-town feel even as its population has steadily grown. This...

Isaac Cavin, of Ligonier, Pennsylvania, traveled to Indiana in 1830. He returned home and married Elizabeth Marker in 1834, and they traveled together to northern Indiana. In May 1835, he planned a new town and named it Ligonier. He built his home a few miles north of town and lived there for 52 years....

Below the surface of bustling National City lies the story of olive and citrus orchards, grand Victorian homes, great wealth, and the coming of the first railroad. Founded in 1868 by Frank Kimball, National City is credited with multiple distinguished firsts. On the county level, the San Diego County...

Picturesque Rio Vista was first named Los Brazos del Rio (The Arms of the River) for its proximity to the confluence of the Sacramento River, Steamboat Slough, and Cache Slough. The river was once its reason for being, and the town�s huge wharf welcomed steamers like the New World and Eclipse that...

The town of Cotati, once the Coast Miwok village of Kot'ati, was by 1850 a 17,000-acre diamond-shaped ranch set in the center of Sonoma County's golden fields. Dr. Thomas Stokes Page and his heirs ran that ranch until the 1890s, when they laid out a town and a distinctive hexagonal plaza with streets...

Morgan Hill lies at the foot of stately El Toro Mountain in southern Santa Clara Valley. Martin Murphy Sr. settled here in 1845, and only a generation later the Murphy family had managed to acquire 70,000 acres. Martin�s son Daniel owned over a million acres in the western United States when his only...

Witness in Our Time traces the recent history of social documentary photography in the words of twenty-nine of the genre's best photographers, editors, and curators, showing how the profession remains vital, innovative, and committed to social change. The second edition includes a new section of interviews...

Working at the end of the nineteenth century, photographer Henry Peach Robinson was best known for his zealous, and highly adept, use of combination printing -- creating a single image from multiple negatives. He was also an accomplished writer and this short book from 1888 remains one of his most endearing....

As anyone who has wielded a camera knows, photography has a unique relationship to chance. It also represents a struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration with a mechanical process. Robin Kelsey reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography in order to create art for a modern world.

A series of 100 intimate portraits photographs of talented photographers from North-America and Europe.Those portraits are accompanied by comments about how they see and make photographs.For each portrait, I have tried to capture the eyes, the intensity of the look, the depth that awakens our curiosity. To...

Before publishing his pioneering book How the Other Half Lives—a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York’s tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city’s population—Jacob Riis (1849-1914) spent his first years in the United States as an immigrant and itinerant laborer,...

Hungarian-born Stefan Lorant's work as a visual and literary editor allowed him to pioneer and develop the genré of picture-based journalism at a period that saw the emergence of modern mass communications. Lorant became a guiding force on an international scale, disseminating his ideas and political...