Adam Hans-Christian

Eugene Atget roamed the streets with his bulky large format camera, systematically cataloguing turn-of-the-century Old Paris down to the very smallest details. His skilled, wonderfully atmospheric photos of Paris's parks, buildings, streets, store wi ndows, prostitutes, workers, and even door handles are a joy to behold.

In search of lost time. For over thirty years, photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) traveled the length and breadth of North America, seeking to record in words and images the traditional life of its vanishing indigenous inhabitants. Like a man possessed, he strove to realize his life's work, which culminated in the publication of his encyclopedia "The North American Indian". In the end, this monumental work comprised twenty textual volumes and twenty portfolios with over 2000 illustrations. No other photographer has created a larger oeuvre on this theme, and it is Curtis, more than any other, who has crucially molded our conception of Native Americans. This book shows the photographer's most impressive pictures and vividly details his journey through life, which led him not only into the prairies but also into the film studios of Hollywood.

A fascination for flora: Timeless photos in which plants become sculptures German photography pioneer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) photographed plants so beautifully, and with such originality, that his work transcends the medium itself. Over more than 30 years, he took thousands of photographs, revealing a formally rigorous talent whose precision and dedication bridge the 19th- and 20th-century worlds of image making and bring a distinctly sculptural aspect to a firmly two-dimensional art form. Beautifully but starkly composed against plain cardboard backgrounds, Blossfeldt's images, relying on a northern light for their sense of volume, reveal nothing of the man but everything of themselves. They are still lifes, piercingly final statements on their subject, and have endured owing to their aesthetics and the ongoing fascination of students and photographers. Like their maker, they are quietly and lastingly effective.

English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) is a pioneer in visual studies of human and animal locomotion. In 1872, he famously helped settle a bet for former California governor Leland Stanford by photographing a galloping horse. Muybridge invented a complex system of electric shutter releases that captured freeze frames—proving conclusively, for the first time, that a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground for a fraction of a second. For the next three decades, Muybridge continued his quest to fully catalog many aspects of human and animal movement, shooting hundreds of horses and other animals, —as well as nude or draped subjects engaged in various activities such as running, walking, boxing, fencing, and descending a staircase (the latter study inspired Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1912 painting). This book traces the life and work of Muybridge, from his early thinking about anatomy and movement to his latest photographic experiments. Many plates of Muybridge’s groundbreaking Animal Locomotion (1887) are reproduced here. In addition, Muybridge’s handmade and extremely rare first illustrated album, The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881), is reproduced in large part. A detailed chronology by British researcher Stephen Herbert throws new light on one of the most important pioneers of photography. The author: Hans Christian Adam studied psychology, art history and communication in Göttingen and Vienna. As a specialist in historical images, he has published numerous articles and books, including titles on travel and war photography. He is the author of TASCHEN’s Edward Sheriff Curtis: The North American Indian, Karl Blossfeldt, Eugène Atget: Paris and Berlin, Portrait of a City.