Last month I saw Izu's original platinum prints at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the richness and subtlety of the gray tones in the photographs nearly brought me to tears. On my return home, I bought the book from Amazon as a Christmas present to myself.

Izu is a special photographer and this is a special book. The reproductions are superb; this is the highest-quality photography book I own (I am a photographer).

If "Sacred Places" is out-of-stock, it is worth seeking out. Along with David Heald's "Architecture of Silence" (which I also own--available from Amazon), it will form the basis of the "mini-library" I am assembling for the little meditation corner of my photo studio. It's hard not to get hyberbolic about these two books, but they are not only art but also true touchstones of the spirit.

Izu currently is on exhibit at the Freer Museum in DC. In one photo an ancient Budhist temple is illuminated despite being surrounded by the shadow of the mountains it is nested within. I marvelled aloud at this incredible, seemingly impossible shot and another patron walked up as said, "The man has patience."
I bought the book at the gift shop. Five years ago I bought a book of Izu's Angar Wat shots. He's phenomenal. I don't know if Adams would grin or sweat. The platinum process is exquisite. His composure travels into the mystic.

In 1906 photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis held the last showings of his large-format, large-scale platinum exhibition prints at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel and at Boston's St Botolph Club. He had gotten banker John Pierpont Morgan to agree to help pay for a complete photographic record of Native American life. So he sold his larger exhibition prints to Dr Charles Goddard Weld, who then gave the 108 photographs to what is now the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Massachusetts. My sculptress mother and artist sister had already shared with me Curtis's pictorialist photography: so in my opinion THE MASTER PRINTS from these last two exhibitions are excellent examples of how the artist-photographer used chiaroscuro effects, close-ups and soft-focus lenses for dramatic and focused lighting, dark backgrounds for adding or subtracting details, and romantic poses to bring out strong personality and sweeping landscape. The book has helpful, to-the-point, well-written foreword, appreciation, afterword, and notes: I find it interesting that the prints might have been made with just an old German lens and a heavy-to-carry 14x17 view plate camera and that all the head and shoulder shots were taken in a tent lined with maroon-colored material and under lighting controlled by a skylight opening on one side. And I particularly like the prints that give a sense of place, such as the clearly photographed nature in "The Mojave water carrier," "Out of the forest depth" and "Taos water carriers"; a sense of family, such as "Hava Supai home," "Inuit hut and family," and Yakutat Indian seal hunter's hut"; a sense of community, such as Acoma and Walpi street scenes, "Apache camp" and "Apache village," "Blackfoot encampment," "Census hogan," "Estufa of San Ildefonso," "Mishongnovi," and [Tlinkit] "Council house"; and a sense of daily activity, such as "Threshing wheat," "Winnowing wheat," "Washing wheat," "Drying wheat," and "Hopi girls grinding peke bread meal." So the book's collection of photographic artistry works especially well with Shannon Lowry's NATIVES OF THE FAR NORTH, THE PLAINS INDIAN PHOTOGRAPHS, and THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN: THE COMPLETE PORTFOLIOS.

This book principally consits of photographs. The text mostly introduces the photographers and sets the scene (so to speek) for the photos.

The photos themselves are astonishing. They are all taken between 1850 and 1912, when China was still living like it had done for the past 3 thousand years, in all it's high culture and barbarity.

There are photos of gorgeously attired couples in dragon robes, all formally seated like ancestor portraits. There are also city-scapes and photos of remote temples and the Summer palace before it was burnt by the invading armies of the west. There are scenes of executions which hide NOTHING and scenes from the imperial court and pictures of heart-breaking poverty.

This book is an eye-opener. I've never seen a collection of photos like this anywhere else. I highly reccomend this book to anybody interested in Imperial China, Costume or social history

This little known book was one of the few that passed the stringent criteria we have for recommending the top selection on India.

The British public was made aware of India's scenery long before the invention of photography. With the advent of camera, there was a deep interest in capturing the romance, glory and mysticism of the India. Western artists, photographers and adventurers made an attempt to understand and record the mysterious and exotic India. Many books were published during this time, which were a huge hit with public. By 1850s, photographic societies were established in Bombay, Bengal and Madras, and the East India Company was subsidizing photographers.
This book is a collection of some of the most rare and extraordinary photographs of British India taken between 1855 and 1911, including the first photographs of the Himalayas, ancient archaeological wonders, the pageantry of British colonial troops, Indian landscapes, and ruling native princes. These have been gathered from collections throughout the world and many have never been seen outside the archives from which they were gathered. We at Recipedelights.com consider this an outstanding book that is a "must-buy" for Collectors.

'The Lost Work' refers to Walker Evans's own private collection of his B/W images - 'the prints that he chose to keep in his own print boxes for posterity'. He was probably the greatest documentary artist America has ever known. It presents the faces and lives of Americans in the late 1930s and then to the mid 1970s.

From the introduction, we can see how a photographer had struggled for his lifetime for acquiring support, and eventually his works could 'enter' museum or collectors' hand during the end of his life. Behind the images, you may have a deeper insight of this photographer. From his life, it seems very contradictory between his character and his images.

The printing of this book is excellent.

This handsome book will appeal to Atget fans and photography collectors. It presents ninety nine photographs printed posthumously by the American artist Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) from the negatives made by the French photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927). It also reprints one of Abbott's 1928 portraits of Atget and her long-out-of-print 1964 essay "The World of Atget." Finally, it includes a quasi-scholarly essay by Clark Worswick, who is a collector and curator of photography.

Atget fanatics will find this publication worth owning for two reasons. First, it includes several images that have not previously appeared in print. (Worswick claims that the book includes 39 previously unpublished works, although I quickly found at least two of these "previously unpublished" works reproduced elsewhere.) Perhaps the only truly novel image among these previously unpublished photographs is an image that Atget copied from an unidentified book, of a female nude standing with her back to the camera, leaning awkwardly against a wall. The book from which he appropriated the image left a ghost of illegible text, suggesting that the nude might have originally appeared in some academic text, perhaps a book about medicine or anthropology. The fact that both Atget (a heterosexual seller of documents to artists), and Abbott (a lesbian art photographer), found this image worth owning demonstrates how easily individual photographs can serve various professional and personal purposes: as scientific evidence, as models for artists and, perhaps, as pornography. However, for the most part, Atget fans will find little that is unfamiliar in these "previously unpublished" images. The rest simply expand the repertoire of themes already familiar in Atget's work, including parks with their statuary, trees and plants; alleys, streets and river scenes (both with and without street workers, merchants and shop fronts); and farmers working the fields.

The second reason that Atget fans might want to own this book is Worswick's essay. It is the first one devoted to an in-depth discussion of Abbott and Atget. Worswick writes with great skill, weaving together the biographies of these two photographers, whose lives intersected only briefly in the late 1920s, but whose critical acclaim has become forever intertwined. The text is engaging and at times catty, judgmental and illuminating, with threads that flow seamlessly between two continents and through the better part of a century. Perhaps Worswick's most important contribution to the already extensive literature on Atget is his account of the events of 1968 (as told to him by Peter Bunnell), when Abbott, after forty years of patiently preserving and enthusiastically promoting Atget's collection, sold it for a paltry sum to the Museum of Modern Art.

Regrettably, though, Worswick's research was far from thorough, leaving more than mere scraps for later scholars. The scope of this project clearly reflects his financial interest in this collection. Apparently he sees himself as a modern incarnation of Abbott-as-Don-Quixote, tilting at the aesthetic and financial neglect that the Abbott/Atget prints have long received. Not surprisingly, his essay emphasizes Abbott's long devotion to Atget's work despite the critical and financial neglect of others. But, as a result, his essay neglects or glosses over other interesting topics, including the differences between Atget and Abbott's work, which Abbott herself spelled out explicitly in a letter to Ansel Adams in 1940. Obviously, Worswick did not bother to visit Abbott's archives, now in private hands (though accessible to scholars), where this letter to Adams is preserved. Among the other relevant materials that he would have found there are several lists of Atget negatives that Abbott printed in the early 1930s for the Julien Levy Gallery, as well as the name of the woman who ended up with 1/8th of the proceeds from the Museum of Modern Art sale for lending Abbott the money to acquire the Atget collection in the first place. Surely, Worswick would have found this information worth reporting.

In addition, Worswick neglected several important secondary sources of information about Abbott and Atget. Amazon.com customers might also want to investigate Abigail Solomon-Godeau's essay, "Canon Fodder: Authoring Eugene Atget," in Photography at the Dock (1991), Bonnie Yochelson's essay for Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (1997), and Peter Barr's chapter on Abbott and Atget in his 1997 Ph.D. dissertation "Becoming Documentary: Berenice Abbott's Photographs 1925-1939."