MoMA Photography Classics Book Collection – Set of 3

The Photographer’s Eye is a 20th-century classic and an indispensable introduction to the visual language of photography. Based on a landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1964, and originally published in 1966, the book has long been out of print. It is now available again to a new generation of photographers and lovers of photography in this duotone printing that closely follows the original.

John Szarkowski’s compact text eloquently complements skillfully selected and sequenced groupings of 172 photographs drawn from the entire history and range of the medium. Celebrated works by such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston are juxtaposed with vernacular documents and even amateur snapshots to analyze the fundamental challenges and opportunities that all photographers have faced. Szarkowski, the legendary curator who worked at the Museum from 1962 to 1991, has published many influential books. But none more radically and succinctly demonstrates why—as U.S. News & World Report put it in 1990—”whether Americans know it or not,” his thinking about photography “has become our thinking about photography.” 156 pp.; 172 illus.

William Eggleston’s Guide

In 1976, William Eggleston’s Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum’s first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren’t some average American’s Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition.

For this second edition of William Eggleston’s Guide, The Museum of Modern Art has made new color separations from the original 35 mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the color will be freshly responsive to the photographer’s intentions. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world. 112 pp.; 48 illus.

Walker Evans: American Photographs (75th Anniversary Edition)

Walker Evans: American Photographs was first published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 in a carefully prepared, deluxe letterpress edition to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Evans that captured scenes of the United States in the early 1930s.

It has been out of print for long periods since 1938, and subsequent editions—two of which altered the design and typography of the book in small but significant ways—are often unavailable outside libraries and rare-book stores. This seventy-fifth-anniversary edition re-creates the original as closely as possible with the aid of new digital printing technology, making the landmark publication available for a new generation.

More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the images of an essential America that we have long accepted as fact, and his work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film, and visual art in other mediums. 208 pp.; 87 illus.