Series: Photofile

The perfect primer on American street photographer Bruce Gilden, best known for his candid close-up photographs of people on the streets of New York City. Bruce Gilden was born in 1946 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. After taking photography classes at the School of Visual Arts, he embarked on his first major project: recording tourists and pleasure-seekers visiting...

Born in Stockholm in 1944, Anders Petersen studied photography under Christer Strömholm from 1966 to 1968. He is perhaps best known for his book Café Lehmitz, which was first published in 1978 and is now recognised as one of the classics of post-war European photography. In Café Lehmitz, Petersen captured a time and place now long gone—a bar on Hamburg's...

André Kertész is one of four new titles published in Autumn 2007 in Thames & Hudson's acclaimed 'Photofile' series. Each book in this series brings together the best work of the world's greatest photographers, presented in an attractive format and offered at an easily affordable price. Handsome and collectable, these books are printed to the highest standards. Each volume contains...

August Sander (1876-1964) was a documentary photographer whose greatest project lasted his entire working life. His series of portrait studies of the German people spanned three eras - the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany - and every social class, combining to form a fascinating social mirror of the country over a tumultuous period in its history. Working...

No photographer is more closely associated with a city than Brassaï (1899-1984) is with Paris. From the moment he moved there in 1924, he devoted his life and art to immortalising his adopted city—capturing the street life by day, the cafés and the Seine by night. His most famous portraits and cityscapes, collected in this fascinating book, form a unique...

Don McCullin is one of the greatest photographers of conflict in our time. His career has encompassed the last fifty years—a relentlessly photographed era steeped in conflict. His photographs reveal the bleak underbelly of northern England, wars in Cyprus, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia and Beirut, riots in Derry, and famine and disease in Bangladesh. All are photographed with unswerving compassion. With...

A compact survey of the photographer Frank Horvat, best known for his fashion photography published between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s. Frank Horvat (1928-2020) changed the course of fashion photography forever. The Italian-born photographer made his debut as a photojournalist in France, where he continued to live and work for the rest of his life. It was here he...

One of the most famous artists of the 20th century, a dadaist and pioneer of Surrealism, Man Ray (1890-1976) became involved with photography in 1914. He was soon experimenting with different processes—solarization, negative images, multiple exposures—and in 1921 he created the rayograph by exposing objects placed onto photosensitive material. This volume collects together the best of his experimental work as...

A member of Magnum, Marc Riboud has travelled the world, from Europe to the Middle East and from Vietnam to the United States. Repelled by violence, indifferent to the pursuit of 'events', yet irresistibly drawn by the desire to see, he is a reporter under the spell of life itself. Whether covering the Cultural Revolution or the Soviet Union before...

The perfect primer on American photographer Mary Ellen Mark, best known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture and advertising photography. The work of Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) bears witness to her fascination with the human condition and her gift for connecting intimately with her subjects. Skilled at blending into unusual or insular environments, she travelled all over the world and...

A member of the celebrated Magnum agency, Richard Kalvar has spent more than four decades building up a diverse body of work that is characterised by a finely honed sense of observation. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1944, he has travelled all over the world, capturing fleeting details and moments of absurdity. His images suggest glimpses into untold stories,...

The perfect primer on acclaimed French artist Sophie Calle. Sophie Calle is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Her work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints and frequently depicts human vulnerability, examining identity and intimacy. She is renowned for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives, which she has...

Best known for her work documenting the political upheaval in Central America during the 1970s and 80s, American photographer Susan Meiselas has been at the forefront of ethical debates around documentary photography for most of her career. Through close engagement with subjects such as war and exploitation, she has interrogated her own relationship to what she's photographing, the circulation and...

William Klein (born 1928) has always moved against the current. A painter, filmmaker, graphic designer, and fashion photographer, Klein grew up in New York but has been based in Paris since 1948. His shots are often intense and immediate, disrupting the established order of things and capturing fragmented snatches of distortion and movement. Although best known for his images of...

Women began working as photographers in the second half of the 19th century, a time when the rules of the medium had not yet been codified, and experimentation was the order of the day. Some opened their own studios, patenting their own equipment and carving out a place for themselves in this new artistic field, while others were obliged to...

Women have been pioneering photographers since the earliest days of the art form. This expertly curated set of three volumes in the renowned Photofile series brings together 190 women photographers from all over the world, working in all styles and genres. From the imaginative experiments of the 19th century to the thriving art movements of the 20th century and on...

New in the Photofile series, a mini-monograph on Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert. Born in Antwerp in 1941, Harry Gruyaert was a pioneer of European colour photography in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, he created TV Shots, a series of images created by turning the dial on a television set at random and photographing the screen. Later he travelled the...

The perfect primer on the surrealist writer and photographer Claude Cahun. Claude Cahun (1894–1954), the chosen name of the artist born Lucy Schwob, was best known in her lifetime as a writer but built up a remarkable body of photographic work that only came to prominence after her death. Politically active and involved with a wide circle of artists and...

An illuminating introduction to little-known photographer Issei Suda, who captured the soul of Japan old and new. The work of Issei Suda (1940-2019) is distinct in contemporary avant-garde Japanese photography for its celebration of the beauty of the everyday. His black and white pictures reflect on apparent banality of urban life, capturing 'the little surprises usually ignored in our world':...

A compact survey of photographer Paolo Roversi's romantic, intense and ethereal fashion images and portraits. Born in Ravenna, Italy, in 1947, Paolo Roversi discovered photography at the age of seventeen on a family holiday. A chance meeting with photographer Peter Knapp led him to move to Paris in the early 1970s, where he first encountered the world of fashion. His...

His images of the Sahel famine and his colossal project Workers would be enough to make his reputation and justify all the awards he has received. But there is more. A native of Brazil, trained as an economist, Sebastião Salgado has shown a constant faith in mankind, a solidarity that never waivers or flinches in the face of pain, an...

Whether taking pictures of London streets during the blackout or sleepers in the Underground during the Blitz; coal miners or high society in pre-war Britain; moody, pared-down landscapes or elegant abstracted nudes, Bill Brandt always imbued his photographs with strangeness and mystery, with a Surrealist touch, with rich connotations. Bill Brandt in the Photofile series reproduces about sixty of his...

With the discovery of her archive in a thrift auction house in 2007, Vivian Maier's posthumous trajectory from relative obscurity to one of the great American photographers of the 20th century is a story of a singular consistent talent. From the mid-1950s throughout her adult life, she worked as a nanny between New York and Chicago, and it was during...

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) studied painting before taking up photography in his early twenties. One of the founders of the photography agency Magnum (together with Robert Capa and others), he is best known for the consummate skill with which he captured the most fleeting of scenes. This volume, introduced by Michael Brenson, includes selections from his photographs of France, Spain, America,...

A concise survey of the pioneering work of London-based Ghanaian photographer James Barnor. With a practice spanning six decades and two continents, ranging from street to studio and fashion to documentary, Ghanaian photographer James Barnor (b.1929) is now recognised as a pivotal figure in the history of photography. Moving between Accra and London throughout his life, Barnor's photographic portraits visibly...

Brooklyn-born photographer Helen Levitt (1913–2009) was an assistant to Walker Evans and a friend of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but forged her own path with fierce independence and endless curiosity about the world around her. She is best known for her street photography, capturing children at play on the streets of Depression-era New York and chalk drawings on walls, but she also...

The perfect primer on American photographer Louis Stettner. Brooklyn-born Louis Stettner (1922-2016) first took up a camera as a teenager and went on to establish an extraordinary career that lasted almost eighty years. After photographing life on the streets of New York, he joined the famous Photo League and befriended Sid Grossman and Weegee. In the Second World War, he...

The perfect primer on American photographer, photojournalist and filmmaker Ruth Orkin. Ruth Orkin (1921-85) always dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, and although that ambition was thwarted until later in her career, she quickly found other ways of engaging with the world of images. She was given her first camera at the age of ten and by the age of seventeen,...

An introduction to the work of the celebrated fashion photographer. An experimenter and innovator, Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) produced an extensive body of work including portraits and nudes, celebrity portraiture, and advertising campaigns - but it is his fashion photography for which he is best known. Having fled Paris during World War II, Blumenfeld forged a stellar path in New York,...

Utterly individual, yet impossible to classify, Elliott Erwitt is one of the most remarkable photographers in America today. Sudden coincidences and chance encounters with objects and situations allow him to capture glimpses of the ridiculous or the comical side of everyday events, and his visual jokes become striking and pithy observations about life. Compassionate, humorous, sinister, playful, bitter, bawdy, lyrical...

The perfect primer on renowned Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia. Born in Palermo, Letizia Battaglia (1935-2022) took up journalism as a single mother, but discovered that it was easier to sell articles if she could also supply photographs. She became a news photographer for L'Ora, a Sicilian daily newspaper that took a stand against the Mafia and its political and economic...

Helmut Newton (1920-2004) lived and worked all over the world and was one of the most internationally famous and controversial photographers of the 20th century. His shots at haute couture and the beau monde are instantly recognisable, having appeared in virtually every major magazine in Europe and the United States. From his early work for Vogue to his portraits of...

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was a pioneering figure in 20th-century photography. As well as being the first African-American photographer to join the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and to become a staff photographer for Life magazine, he was also a writer, film director and composer. Although best known for documenting issues such as poverty, race relations and civil rights, Gordon Parks was...

A new edition of this collection of Saul Leiter's distinctive work, featuring twelve new photographs. Saul Leiter was one of those photographers who sought neither fame nor commercial success, despite his talent for imagemaking. Born in Pittsburgh, he spent his entire adult life in New York City's East Village, in an intensely creative environment where ideas from Europe and America...

This addition to the affordable Photofile series brings together the best work of Ernst Haas, one of the world's greatest photographers. One of the early pioneers of colour photography, Haas began his photographic career in the 1940s in Vienna, rising to fame following the publication of his photo essay on returning prisoners of war from Russia. In 1951, Haas decided...

As global tensions rose and the Second World War began, many women photographers found themselves under threat or forced into exile. Others worked as war reporters or documented the aftermath of the conflict, but a great number found new creative energy and an increased engagement with political themes. Photography became a universal language to communicate around the world, and it...

Daido Moriyama first came to prominence in the mid-1960s. If there is one theme that jumps out from his work—one that can be regarded as his essential territory, the wellspring of his photography—it is Tokyo. He also draws inspiration from William Klein's confrontational photographs of New York, Shomei Tomatsu's trenchant social critiques, Andy Warhol's silkscreened multiples of newspaper images, and...

Before the beginning of his exile, Koudelka had already produced two works of great importance. One documented the Prague Spring, while the other, on gypsies, could almost have been an ethnological study had its images not been charged with so much emotion. Unknown in 1970, he has risen to become one of the most powerful photographers of the day. This...