Volume 27, Number 20 · December 18, 1980
The Gentle Slope of Castalia
By Clive James
RECENT BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Photography and Society
by Gisèle Freund
David R. Godine, 248 pp., $15.00
Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography
by Janet Malcolm
David R. Godine, 165 pp., $13.95
The Eloquent Light
photographs by Ansel Adams, text by Nancy Newhall
Aperture, 200 pp., $60.00 after December 31
Yosemite and the Range of Light
photographs by Ansel Adams, introduction by Paul Brooks
New York Graphic Society, distributed by Little-Brown, 144 pp., $75.00
Time in New England
photographs by Paul Strand, text selected and edited by Nancy Newhall
Aperture, 256 pp., $40.00 after December 31
Brett Weston: Photographs from Five Decades
photographs by Brett Weston, text by R.H. Cravens
Aperture, 168 pp., $50.00 after December 31
Water's Edge
photographs by Harry Callahan, introductory poem by A.R. Ammons
Calloway Editions, distributed by Viking Press, 52 pp., $50.00
Harry Callahan: Color
photographs and text by Harry Callahan, edited by Robert Tow, by Ricker Winsor
Matrix Publications, Providence, Rhode Island, 144 pp., $85.00
Sudek
photographs by Josef Sudek, text by Sonja Bullaty
Clarkson Potter, 176 pp., limited edition $45.00
Lotte Jacobi
photographs by Lotte Jacobi, edited by Kelly Wise, introduction by James Fasanelli
Addison House, 187 pp., $35.00
Moholy-Nagy: Photographs and Photograms
by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, text by Andreas Haus, translated by Frederic Samson
Pantheon, 240 pp., $35.00
Beaton
photographs by Cecil Beaton, edited with a text by James Danziger
Viking, 256 pp., $30.00
Allure
by Diana Vreeland, by Chris Hemphill
Doubleday, 224 pp., $30.00
Eye for Elegance Company
photographs by George Hoyningen-Huene
International Center of Photography, New York, and Congreve Publishing, 64 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers, 1925-1940
by John Kobal
Knopf, 304 pp., $35.00
Mrs. David Bailey
photographs by David Bailey
Rizzoli, 120 pp., $19.95
Special Collection 24 Photo Lithos
by Helmut Newton
Congreve Publishing Company, 50 pp., $35.00
Sleepless Nights
photographs by Helmut Newton, introduction by Philippe Garner
Congreve Publishing Company, 152 pp., $27.50
Women on Women: Twelve Photographic Portfolios
with an introduction by Katherine Hollabird
A & W Publishers, 164 pp., $22.50
42nd Street Studio
photographs by Joyce Baronio, introduction by Linda Nochlin
Pyxidium Press, Box 462 Old Chelsea Station, New York City 10011, 96 pp., $40.00
The Best of Photojournalism, 5: People, Places, and Events of 1979
with an introduction by Tom Brokaw
University of Missouri Press, 256 pp., $24.95
In China
photographs by Eve Arnold
Knopf, 204 pp., $30.00
Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II
edited by Robert H. Allhouse
Dial, 216 pp., $35.00
Across the Rhine
text by Franklin M. Davis Jr.. the editors of Time-Life Books
Time-Life, 208 pp., $12.95
Private Pictures
photographs by Daniel Angeli, by Jean-Paul Dousset, introduction by Anthony Burgess
Viking, 96 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition
photographs by Dorothea Lange, text by Karin B. Ohrn
Louisiana State University Press, 290 pp., $27.50
Dialogue with Photography
edited by Paul Hill, edited by Thomas Cooper
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 428 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Photography in the Twentieth Century
by Peter Tausk
Focal Press, 10 East 40th Street, New York City 10016, 344 pp., $24.95
Fox-Talbot and the Invention of Photography
by Gail Buckland
David R. Godine, 216 pp., $50.00
The very first book illustrated with photographs, William Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (1844), carried as an epigraph a quotation from Virgil. Talbot, who was a learned classicist as well as a chemist clever enough to invent photography, enlisted Virgil's aid in declaring how sweet it was to cross a mountain ridge unblemished by the wheel-ruts of previous visitors, and thence descend the gentle slope to Castalia—a rural paradise complete with well-tended olive groves. The gentle slope turned out to be a precipice and Castalia is buried miles deep under photographs. A subsidiary avalanche, composed of books about photographs, is even now descending. In this brief survey I have selected with some rigor from the recent output, which has filled my office and chased me downstairs into the kitchen.
Review, 6623 words
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