“Born in 1944 in Paris, Boltanski is undoubtedly one of the most interesting French artists on the current scene. A man of many interests, he produces short films, composes real or fictional dossiers about his life, reconstructs an accident in which he dies, which has never happened to him, and files ‘moments’ of his life in biscuit tins.

“His relationship with photography is fundamental: he collects photographic portraits and, since the mid-eighties, the contents of his works have been pervaded by the awareness of the memory of the tragic events of European history during the Second World War.

“This volume presents an exhaustive survey of Boltanski’s artistic career from his early years and also records the research that led him to the creation of his most recent installations at Villa delle Rose in Bologna.”

The PRC library, which is currently in storage, includes a copy of this book.

Published by Clarkson Potter, 1988

Man Ray is the quintessential modernist figure—painter, sculptor, object maker and collagist; filmmaker and printmaker; poet, essayist and philosopher—and the most enigmatic of the Dada-Surrealists who transformed the Paris art world during the ferment of the 1920s and beyond.

This book, the first full-length biography by an American writer, is an unprecedented view of the artist, from his birth in Philadelphia in 1890 to his death in Paris in 1976.

As a child, Man Ray was already adept at building, fixing, even inventing; by the time he was 14, he was consumed by a passion for art. Later, while an art student in New York City, he came under the influence of Alfred Steiglitz and Robert Henri, mounting his first one-man exhibition at the age of 25.

In 1921, following the example of his close friend Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray moved to Paris. That year, he created his renowned Gift, a whimsical, angry flatiron adorned with carpet tacks, and his groundbreaking rayographs, dreamlike images that Man Ray called “cameraless photographs.”

Over the span of his 50 year career, Man Ray came to know and photograph virtually every important figure in the arts on both sides of the Atlantic, from James Joyce, Coco Chanel, and Gertrude Stein to Paul Eluard, Jean Cocteau, and Max Ernst. His stormy love affairs were with some of the most fascinating women of his day…

The PRC library, which is currently in storage, includes a copy of this book.

In response to the worsening plight of the homeless comes this moving collection of black-and-white photographs taken by homeless children in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1989 by photographer Jim Hubbard, Shooting Back, Inc., is an education and media center that brings together volunteer photographers and homeless and other at-risk children. This vital program gives the children the basic skills needed to convey their vision of the world through the medium of photography.

The astounding photographs and accompanying comments by children in this book will inform those concerned about the consequences of poverty and homelessness, while inspiring everyone with their testament to the endurance and innate creativity of the human spirit.

The PRC library, which is currently in storage, includes a copy of this book.

Approximately 1.4 million people live in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas.

In many of these favelas, the city’s housing authority Secretaria Municipal de Habitação, in short SMH, has  been systematically evicting people in an effort to reshape the urban landscape in anticipation of the World Cup in 2014 and the 2016 Olympic Games. Families are removed from their homes—often with little notice and with use of force—and homes are demolished immediately after.

In my work, I have long been drawn to examine the fabric of different communities, as well as the intricate bonds an individual forms with a community and how these bonds manifest themselves in their interactions with others. When I began my work on OLYMPIC FAVELA, I became especially interested in these aspects surrounding community: One’s ties to his or her environment, mobility in relation to wealth and class, forms of communication and the influence of individual, familial and collective memory—and how these elements are subject to a state of constant flux.

In autumn of 2012, I set out to portray the people directly and indirectly affected by the SMH’s policies of systematic removal, with the help of a number of residents who had begun to organize their communities to resist the evictions. I returned to the city early in the summer of 2013 to continue this work, shortly before widespread protests erupted against the government’s spending in preparation for the World Cup and the Olympics. With my guide Café, an aspiring filmmaker from Rio, I met residents in 13 of the city’s favelas—communities both welcoming and with an omnipresent hue of danger—who shared their stories with us…

The PRC library, which is currently in storage, includes a copy of this book.

Only a New York taxi driver would dare to drive and take pictures at the same time. David Bradford has been shooting for ten years and using his windshield as a second lens to photograph the metropolis.

Day and night, through rain and snow, his canary yellow taxi rolls on through the energy fields of the city that never sleeps: New York City. Through the eye of his camera Bradford observes people from all corners of the world living their lives in the shadow of skyscrapers that rise up like mountains.

The rain-blurred lights of Broadway, the lofty grandeur of the Empire State Building floating by, the Avenues teeming with life. For Bradford, driving a taxi and taking photos have become a unified aesthetic whole. He can’t enjoy the one without the other anymore, and so he always has his camera at hand to document those fleeting moments of gesticulating, running, watching and sleeping people gliding by in the light of the big city.

Drive-By Shootings presents a black & yellow look at the stories and artistic aspects behind an obsessive hunt for images.

Published May 2000 by Konemann

The PRC library, which is currently in storage, includes a copy of this book.

By Sam Stephenson
In 1957, W. Eugene Smith, a 38-year-old magazine photographer, left his comfortable world to move into a dilapidated loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City. Smith was trying to complete the most ambitious project of his life, a massive photo-essay on the city of Pittsburgh.

821 Sixth Avenue was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them—and countless fascinating, underground characters. As his ambitions broke down for his quixotic Pittsburgh opus, Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists. He turned his documentary impulses away from Pittsburgh and toward his offbeat new surroundings.

From 1957 to 1965, Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at his loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career, photographing the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley. He recorded, as well, legends such as pianists Eddie Costa and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart.

Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were the likes of Doris Duke, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Salvador Dali, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors, marijuana dealers, and others.

Sam Stephenson discovered Smith’s jazz loft photographs and tapes and spent seven years cataloging, archiving, selecting and editing Smith’s material for this book, as well as writing its introduction and the text interwoven throughout.

Published November 2009 by Knopf

The PRC library, which is currently in storage, includes a copy of this book.